I don't purport to know everything you need to know about online marketing. We have somebody who's a colleague of ours, who we greatly respect his expertise. His name is Steven Pierce, and he's in the Detroit area, and he's agreed to let me do like a marketing Rorschach, where I am your advocate, and I pose to him...
Questions that I think you either would ask if you knew to ask them or you would like to ask or that are relevant and he's going to try to answer them very concisely and very actionably meaning he'll give you not just an answer that's confusing or theoretical but an answer that is actionable. And Stephen I'm talking to them but you're listening and at the same time the key to all this is the vast majority of people in this room probably 95% are business owners with conventional businesses, professional practices. They are not online marketers.
There are, however, two or three or four people here who are affirmatively pure online marketers, plural, and there are one or two who are on the precipice who want to go out and become online marketers. So first of all, I didn't do him justice. He's done nine million things. He's very, very, very, very knowledgeable. He is one of the most articulate and clear thinking online marketing experts I have met.
I have seen him cut to the chase in some very complex issues and he's able to explain them in terms that anybody can easily understand and it's a very great privilege and we're very gracious. I mean gracious, we're very glad that he was gracious enough to consent. He was one of the people we decided at the last minute, I couldn't do you justice and he picked up the slack.
So Steven, thank you and welcome. Well, thank you Jay and hello to everybody. I'm looking forward to having some fun with you. Okay. So here's we're going to do it and I'm going to ask you questions and not to minimize your flow, but we've had some experts by phone and they tried to do an organized.
process and they got tangential and I think if you will respect the fact that I will never purposely step on you but I'll keep you so focused in behalf of these people that by the time we're done with an hour an hour and a half you'll probably give them two days worth of knowledge and for which they'll be forever appreciative and I'll get them all to sign a letter of thanks and we'll send it to you and we'll we'll do something really nice for Alicia we'll do some really cool things okay okay okay so let's let's start We have all these traditional business owners here, most of who are very lax, light, and suboptimal in how they use the power of the internet, online marketing. What would you tell everybody in this room who is a traditional offline marketer that they need to do right away to commandeer the various... The various benefits that the internet can add to their business and go through like if you can, like a hierarchy and maybe some things that they should be doing right now, if you don't mind.
Okay, first thing I would look at is what are all the areas in the business that can be leveraged internationally that doesn't have to keep the scope. of a local base because many companies that are offline will just have a local focus. So what are some of the knowledge you have that can be packaged for other people to use? What are some of the processes you have? What are some of the assets that you have?
Good morning. I really like your comment about the landing page, but I'm curious. I occasionally visit a website that has an upfront page that has lots of fancy graphics, and fortunately they typically have a button you can push to skip the intro. And I'm curious whether you think it's really worth the investment to have all those graphics up front before you get to really where you have the meat of what you're trying to provide. Did you hear it, Stephen?
Can you summarize it for me? Yeah, what he's saying is he is questioning. He goes to certain websites that have all these high-tech graphics in there, movement and all kinds of things.
And you've got to go through it before you get to the real offering. And he's asking your opinion of whether you believe it's important. important, necessary, relevant, or positive to even have a lot of graphics when you hit the web page? Well, graphics are important because we're highly visual. So I guess it's the kind of graphics.
I think having a bunch of stuff like fancy flash and all that is not necessary. Now, remember, a website, you can hit a website that's like a corporate website that has all the standard. stuff on the front however they may have a lot of internal pages that are specific landing pages for specific things that they're directing that traffic to so they may have they may be running pay-per-click campaigns or doing search engine optimization and all that traffic is going to an internal page that is set up specifically for that campaign or that offer, but you're not able to get it from the main page or if you're able to get it from the main page, that's just not the primary means that they're looking for you to get it.
So they have the front of the site set up that looks like a clean corporate site, but they have all these specifically designed internal landing pages that they're running campaigns to. Okay, let's move to the next one. Hi Steve, I'm going to give you a very simple question, which will reveal my ignorance and embarrass me to even ask.
If someone types in keywords on a generic topic, how do you get your website to come up within the first five or ten listings? I think I heard that, Jake. What you said is if somebody types a generic keyword in, weight loss, how do you get your, and I think there's questions, do you even want to get your, she wants to know how you get your website to come up in the first five or ten listings.
And I think the amending is do you even want to. So answer those two questions. Okay, well, one, it's too generic of a word to pay for and too generic of a word to compete for. So trying to compete for that word.
um organically it's going to be near impossible to pay for that word it's not going to be worth it what you need to do is develop a basket of keywords of that low-hanging fruit that you can that you can compete on and get traffic from and now remember getting traffic to your site is not one Aladdin strategy. It's about it's about just like if we use when you invest in stocks You don't just invest in one stock you have a basket of stocks So you have a basket of strategies you have you have a link partners you have affiliates you? Swapping on different content with other people. Maybe you Providing RSS feeds or providing white papers as as a link bait. You're doing some pay-per-click campaigns You have maybe a podcast that's going on.
We have some track backs on other people's blogs You have all these different things that are going on that together synergistically work. See, there's two things you need to think about when you think about your website. You have what are called website assets that build website equity. The website assets are the different things you build up such as your links, such as the articles that are pointing to your site, press releases that are pointing to your site, blogs that are pointing to your site, your presence in the different directories rather than the large generic directories like Yahoo and D-Moz or their vertical directories that are like maybe specific for or attorneys or collectors or crafts and different things like that or podcast directories or RSS directories. So all these different things are assets and the access to your website build up the equity.
The equity is like the link popularity, the PR which is the page ranking Google, the number of visitors that come to the website each day, the number of opt-ins you get each day, the number of sales you get each day, the number of inquiries you get each day. That's the equity. The equity is a direct result.
It's like a lagging indicator. If you want to know how well your internet marketing and online marketing is doing, all you have to do is look at the lagging indicators such as your traffic, your opt-ins, your sales, and your inquiries. So those are the results. They're true. You do the things on the page to boost the conversions.
So the question is, do you split test the page on two visitors a day? What do you think is going to happen? So you kind of have to have this balance between the two.
You always improve the copy on the page, but at the same time, you have to make sure you're sending enough visitors into the page so that while you're improving the copy, you have enough targeted traffic to split test it against. And you do that by taking a multidimensional approach to the traffic that you're generating. So you go for search engines, you go for paid, you go for organic, you go for partners, you go for affiliates, you go for links, you go for blogs.
You do all these things. You can outsource all of that. But together, when it happens, what starts to happen is you don't work this process.
you can't stop the traffic from coming to your site. I can't stop traffic from going to our site. I can take a site down, and the traffic will still go.
They'll just get a page not down. That's the power of the Internet. When you get that visibility, it's what I call the process.
You do what you're supposed to do, and you trust the process. This stuff just starts to take over all by itself. You will not be able to stop the traffic from coming to your site, no matter what.
You will die, and you will still get the traffic coming to your website. Well, hopefully we won't have to test that out, Stephen. I'm going to give you the next question, okay?
Okay. Hi, Stephen. Nice to meet you.
Hey. I purchased a website that has a Google page rank of five. It has about 5,000 unique visitors.
It's called planet-pets.com. And the reason I purchased it was the tremendous amount of traffic that it gets, and there's about ten different ways that I plan to monetize the site. One way that already exists is there is a directory on the site for pet businesses to list their pet business. And what I think I'm finding out is A lot of pet businesses are offline businesses, so they may not be very internet savvy. What's happening is a lot of these pages are ranked highly on Google.
They're in the first, second, or third page of Google for keywords such as pet sitting Delaware. where pet sitting, California, et cetera. And so what I want to do is find a way to directly target those pet businesses, preferably online, to be able to offer the advertising that is really a high value for them. So is there an online way that I can target those pet businesses? Is there an online where you can target the pet businesses who?
pet Pet pet businesses. Okay pet what pet owners? I'm missing it.
Yeah, these would be businesses that offer pet services such as pet sitters pet groomers pet shops Okay, I got so you're targeting you're targeting service companies that provide like pet sitting and all that kind of stuff Right. Okay. So you want to know how to target those companies?
Yes. Oh, that's easy. Do some keyword research You can for example, you can go into Google right now and just type in pet services And it's just going to pull up a whole list of companies that have pet services.
So the course Finding them online is easy. The question is, what do we want to offer them? Why do we want to offer it to them?
What's going to be of value to them in it? Why should they respond to it? Put all that together and then just put together the strategy on how do we want to go about contacting them.
What are they looking for online? How are they going about searching? Where do they go online?
What are the places they congregate? What are their primary sources of information? And let's go into those channels because one thing we have to pay attention to when we're targeting our markets online is what are the channels they're using online?
I think it's a... mistake to assume that email is the only way to reach people. If you think about Cadbury, the company was floundering, and they were just using their same old marketing methods until one day one of them said, listen, let's do a text-and-win contest.
And they printed a text-and-win contest on the back of like 50 million candy bars, and it completely turned the company around because of how many people started to buy the candy bars and enter the text-and-win contest. And they started hitting people in a completely different channel. Who would have thought that SMS and text messaging would have been the thing to turn around?
So the the candy bar company but you know it did so the question is that market what channels are they going to are they going to where these pet grooming services and these pet sitting services and all of these people going how are they searching online and them and long as you have a very strong powerful compelling value-added offer that meets what it is what their priorities are what it is to what can it get done you put that in the channel you'll have success okay let me refine the question a little bit because I've done the keyword research and there aren't a whole lot of pet businesses that are specifically trying to advertise online. So what I'm trying to do is do the equivalent of a mailing list, like a direct mail list offline, but try to find that same kind of mailing list online. Okay. Now are there magazines that service the pet industry?
Are there what? Trey Magazine. Trey Magazine.
Yes, there are. Yes. Okay.
Do those magazines have websites online? Yes. Okay.
Now if you go over to the website, are you able to look at the activity that's going on over there? Do they offer advertising? Do they offer joint ventures? Do they accept articles?
They do offer advertising, classified advertising. Okay. Do they accept articles?
I have to find that out. Okay. Well, that's something you can do.
I would go to Google News Alerts and type in your primary keyword phrases to see what kind of news is coming over and use a press release as bait to see if you can start drawing them in, see if you can draw in industry leaders because you put together something interesting. that's interesting that relates to their industry, a nice report that relates to their industry, and also find out what news is coming over there, kind of give you an idea of what's on their consciousness, what is this industry thinking about right now, and then tying it into that, because when you do that, you kind of tie into their priorities. And remember, we don't want to compete against their priorities.
As long as what it is you're doing can be linked into what they consider to be a priority and you get in the right channel, you're going to have success. So where are they going? How can we get their attention? Tie into some news.
Go to Google News Alerts. Put in your primary keyword phrases. And you'll be surprised. You'll start to get some news alerts as it relates to those phrases in that industry. See, here's the thing.
They're searching online. Trust me, they're not the community or people that have yet to understand the Internet. It's just how are they searching online. Let me give you a good example.
So our... But the term Fibonacci trading gets searched on less than 250 times per month. That would mean in the scope of the tens of thousands of searches for other trading phrases, that is so obscure, people would think it ludicrous to pursue it as a market.
But we understood we had to scale it up market to where people were searching. So how in the world could we take a search phrase that's like less than 200 searches a month and turn it into a million dollar product? That's because we understood that people could get the benefit from it.
But they just didn't know how to search for it. So the people that you're looking for, they're searching online. The question is, how are they searching?
And that's where you have to understand your market. That's where having intimacy of your market comes in, because then you understand their patterns, their thinking, how they're searching, what they're searching for, and why. Steven, we're going to get two more questions, and then we're going to stop.
Okay. Okay, hold one second. Hi, Steven.
You had mentioned, you talked about unique keywords and not being so generic with keywords to get listed on Google, Yahoo, the search engines, pay-per-clicks. My question is, do you have... well do you have any tips or tricks on getting listed in the first page without being the highest bidder on that keyword or is that the only way to get to our I'll bid your competitor. I mean, I'll do your competitors by bidding higher.
Well, you're talking keywords or you're talking organic search? Okay. So, the question is, how can you get in the top ten if you're not going to bid within the top ten categories?
That's an interesting question. Well, here, it depends on how you want to go about doing it. One, you can piggyback the people that are at the top because they have a cost associated with their advertising. And if you decide to partner with them and get visibility.
with them, but you're going to offset some of their advertising costs, and they may be open to that as long as you have a complimentary product and not a directly competing product. How would it execute, Stephen? Well, you contact them. We used to do this a while ago.
You contact them, and you just let them know. I see that you're ranked one, two, three, four, five on Google. I know you're paying within the range of X and X per click, and it gets X, X per click, so it's costing you about X to do it.
What we would like to do is offset some of that cost. We have a product that compliments yours, so what we'd like to do is help you to offset that cost. cost by presenting a certain advertisement on your page and it's probably not gonna let you do it on the landing page but they can let you do it on their thank-you page as long as you fit into their process to the point where it's not a distraction. And you pay them a fraction of what their acquisition cost is.
Right, at a fraction and the thing is you can tell them you can you can tell them I'm willing to pay for them I'm willing to give you an affiliate account and I'm willing to pay for it but the moment you see that you're making more money through the affiliate program let's just drop the cost that I'm paying to get that. Good deal. Thanks, Steven.
We have one more. You have one last question, Steven. Hello, Steve. Hey.
My name is Sam Sykes, and I'm in the mail order business, and I'm trying to find out how can I reach a target market for my product, which is Miracle-Ready Formula. And as far as people would authorize and back... pain and what can you recommend a website I can go to find information on our leads for that so he sells something to the arthritic market Stephen okay well online believe it or not is it's kind of easy to sell but I would give you one quick way to do it is to start typing in phrases go to Google and type in phrases like back pain ebook back pain PDF and the thing to do is just product there's people out there that sell ebooks on back pain and all kinds of body pain that don't have very strong back in you can contact them and become a built-in back-end profit center for them by allowing them to sell people into what your product is it's a great answer.
Stephen, you have done an exemplary job. You came, you conquered, you bedazzled. We appreciate you very much. Thank you for opening your...
Sure, you can give them... Stephen, you can give them your contact information. Uh, what is my contact...
Oh, well, you can go... How about your... We'll give them your home phone number and he likes to stay up late at night. That's good.
Call me at home. Why not, huh? Just don't call me... is on. Wow, let me see.
I have so many different... If you'd rather get, if you'd rather decide and give us something, we can send it out to everybody. Whatever works for you, Stephen.
Yeah, well, I have a website that has some videos on it called stephenlive.com. That's S-T-E-P-H-E-N-L-I-V-E. I believe in supreme harnessing of leverage. I like Gordon because he adds another dimension to it.
But we're going to take you now to fundamental J. Abraham-isms. Those of you who are familiar with me, it might seem trite, but you probably don't do it full on.
Those who have never been exposed will be very intrigued by it. Somebody go to page 146 in your workbook. Waddle, waddle, waddle.
Okay, force multiplier. effect. I don't know how I got to that.
I go before that. I lost force multiplier. Did I hit the button again? I want to do force multiplier just for a minute because I want you to understand the realms of leverage we're talking about.
Yeah, okay, 144, 145. Let me find it. 145. Well, there's actually, so I'll read it, but it's a military term. You know how, you know, well, let's take, and it hasn't had as good of an outcome as it probably should, but you know how in the beginning of the Iraqi war, basically they unleashed five or six different frontal assaults. They did it by air on front, by sea. They dropped bombs.
They did all kinds of things, and it had a very good effect. And then it's lingered, but if you take... If you take the military strategy, it's called force multiplier effect. It's this integrated sequential continuum permeating the target from as many different vantage points and leverage points as possible, not caring which one does the final effect, but knowing that one will.
So I call it the positive Chinese water torture. Well, that's a concept of leverage. You can read the explanation.
force multipliers military term so capability that when added to and deployed by combat force significantly increases the combat potential that force and thus enhances the probability of successful mission accomplishments and it's it's you're talking about significantly enhancing your probability of success significantly increasing the combat potential. Okay, and there's a bigger explanation on the next page, which I'm not going to get into. We're now getting to the power parthenon strategy of geometric business growth, and this is the foundation upon which most of my historic success has been based. Okay. When I'm asked how many different ways there are to grow a business, my answer is only three.
There are three fundamental ways that I use, and there's three advanced ways we'll talk about too, to grow any and every business, profit or non-profit, and they are... increase the number of clients, buyers, increase the size of the transaction or purchase, increase the frequency of purchase or the monetary value each client is worth, the transactional value, the residual value. And those are just a number of ways you can do it. it.
Fifteen ways that I, I mean, there's hundreds, but there's fifteen very general ways I teach. There's eight general ways I teach in the second, and six in the third. We use, what's wrong with this slide? Look in your work.
because you got this there we use a graphic demonstration to show the power of geometry and this is showing optimization and geometry together I'm sorry the slide sucks if you can fix it great can't I don't know what to tell you is it bad over there too it's a little better this is an example of a hypothetical company these are the these are the four categories of leverage reference number of clients or buyers size of the sale frequency of purchase total remember we talked about marginal net worth lifetime value we're taking a hypothetical company that's doing a thousand has a thousand buyers clients spending $100 two times a year they're doing two hundred thousand Okay, what happens if you just increase each of those categories look in your book because this does is visually a headache Just increase can anybody change the positioning because it might be this way throughout on the other things I'm going to do on the screen If you just increase those three categories a mere 10% and we've already demonstrated to you how you could do it But I'll do a little bit of example in a minute You just went from a thousand to eleven hundred clients You just went from a unit of sale of 100 to 1100 just went from two purchases to 2.2 and and there's so many ways to do it and I'll get into some in a minute but the implication is not 10% it's 10 by 10 by 10 is 33 point 1% and that in a lot of businesses that are breaking even have a fixed overhead could be monstrous profit What happens if you increase and we just sort of took arbitrarily I remember what that one is it's that maybe 33 percent maybe okay 30 if you increase the front end 33 percent which isn't very hard because the odds of you using anywhere close to all or the best of all of the client generating approaches, marketing methods available are very low. The odds, if you only got a 25% increase, once you practice the strategy of preeminence, you're probably not gonna let people keep buying less than they should and less combination and less quality and performance capability than they should. If you increase the frequency 50%, and I told you basically most people buy at their own, maybe I didn't say it, most buyers, clients, Buy at their own pace because we don't we don't ethically program them to buy at the frequency that's in their best interest Maybe I use the analogy of the hairdresser It's in the clients best interest to buy an extra four or five times a year for their best interest But it doesn't hurt the hairdresser Well a 33% increase in size of clients a mere quarter increase in the size of the transaction and a 50% increase in the frequency, what does it do?
It increases the revenue 250%. This is the power, the leverage of geometry, and it's profound. I didn't do it, but if you double those numbers... across the board it's like 800% this is how I've been able to engineer or stimulate or influence almost unbelievable growth not because I'm that great but because most people don't take advantage of the power of leverage it's pretty neat isn't it even if you've seen it before it's still neat and if you've seen it before and you've employed one or two of the activities in each area there's a lot more you can do There's three advanced ways to grow a business too. This is what this Phillips Publishing did.
These are on top. Penetrate one new market every year. There's seven or eight ways to do it. Add a new product or service every year.
You can do it through internal development, external acquisition. You can buy it. You can license it.
You can joint venture with it. Purchasing your competitor's business or assets once a year. Just doing that can just monumentally add that to the other three ways.
It's a mind blow. There's 28 universal strategies to build your power parthen and there's more. These are just basic.
Number one, referral systems. 93 ways to do it. Most people don't do any. You just do one.
I mean if right now 20 to 100 percent of your business comes from referrals and you have no referral system, if you put two or three formalized systematized really strategic ones together, you think you might get another 10, 20, 30 percent? And what's that worth since there's almost no embedded cost? It's pretty lucrative. Acquiring clients that are break even up front and make a profit on the back end.
We talked about that and you get it right? What you don't understand is there's lots of different ways to break even. One way is selling the first transaction at cost. The other is using the profit on the back end.
the first transaction to go deeper in advertising or pay more sales commission. The other is use the profit to buy other bonuses or complementary products or services to pack with the transaction. There's lots of options and I'm going fast.
Does this make sense? Next, guaranteeing purchase through risk reversal. If you look at those 502 case studies, you'll see that at least 25% of the success stories documented occurred merely by somebody improving, changing, articulating, more powerfully risk reversal 40% 100% increase just by being able to take the risk in the transaction away from the client to lower the hurdle rate to make it irresistible instead of resistible Host beneficiary.
We're going to get into this so deeply that I don't even want to discuss it right now. But it's very powerful. Advertising.
There's controlled advertising you can do either in joint ventures, on performance-based compensation, pay-per-results, or something called a guaranteed sale. You can turn regular advertising into guaranteed advertising. Go to media and sale. Tell you what.
I have an allowable cost. That's the amount you can afford to pay for a lead or for a purchase. When you start quantifying and measuring, you'll know how many leads of a certain category convert to a sale, won't you?
So you know what a lead's worth to you. When you don't know that, you know what a sale's worth based on the category, the marginal net worth, and the type of buyer, right? So you can say to somebody, I'll tell you what.
I don't want to pay for advertising. I want to pay for results. And they'll say, well, we don't want you to pay for results. We want you to pay for advertising. And you say, I'll split the difference.
I'll give you money up front, but you've got to guarantee me that that will generate a certain minimum number of either leads or buyers. And if it doesn't, you keep running ads for me until it does. You get the best of all worlds.
Just got to front some money. And if you can quantify it and you know the money, you can go out and get investors or a bank to finance it for you. Using direct mail. How many people use direct mail right now? How many don't?
Well, when we did the 93 referral systems, it was going to be the beginning of a series of 50 to 150 strategies in each of these categories. and we looked at direct mail and we found so many different ways to use it. You can use direct mail to get leads for yourself or your telemarketers or field salespeople.
You can use direct mail to penetrate markets you've never been able to reach on your own or it doesn't cost justify visiting. You can use direct mail to set up appointments. You can use direct mail to follow behind an appointment to confirm it.
You can use direct mail to get leads for yourself or your telemarketers or field salespeople. To upsell after a sale you can use direct mail to Introduce new products before you have to inventory them and take advance orders you can use direct mail to keep in touch you can use direct mail for special events to bring in clients to stimulate their bond and also to bring referrals those just a few of the ways you can do it using telemarketing who uses telemarketing here telemarketing is a little tricky and i'm not going to get deep into it today but telemarketing by itself is very awkward if you're calling cold telemarketing to an existing client base that you have a portfolio relationship with they look you as a trusted advisor is very pleasant if you do direct mail or emails calling behind will normally double or triple the yield of the mailing or the email that's just scientific statistical documented fact I'm going fast through all these running special events of information night you can do as I said golf outing special events you know Christmas deals Easter deals things for the kids you can do education you can bring you can do proficiency we had a special events could be done in live and an event that can be done vicariously by teleconference webinar DVD you do all kinds of neat things for people you can get the manufacturers to send their their staff you can we had a dental supply company years and years ago that was competing with lots of other dental supply companies and there was just low margins and so we persuaded them at the market to save you know three cents or three percent on a sale wasn't really the inducement that a dentist wanted he or she were struggling with management issues, personnel issues, turnover issues, stress issues, tax issues, lifestyle issues, health issues, weight issues, investment, wealth creation issues. And we created all kinds of seminars and educational events to teach them that as long as they remained our client.
We got them management consultants, marketing consultants. that we paid a retainer to and they were available by conference call to groups and they were available on an as needed basis and there's lots of ways you can endear yourself to your clients acquiring qualified lists there's so many more qualified lists than most people realize and getting the list owners to either joint venture rent or make their list available is no big deal sometimes other buyers people buy other things i mean if you find the industry you want to reach might look up all the other advertisers that are selling direct. And if they're not competitive, see if they have a buyer list you can use.
Even go to people who've already sold people, or get their, people who are competitors, or get their prospects they didn't convert. We've talked about that. We already talked about USP.
Increasing the perceived value of your product or service through better client education. you know i don't do as much uh private consulting because it doesn't get very far you do a couple ten ten twenty thousand you give somebody it's either it's either a waste or it's a waste if i give them a great idea and it makes some millions of dollars i didn't charge enough i give them a great idea they don't act on it they don't think they they uh paid enough i'm not infallible i'm about an 85 success rate so i don't give them a great idea so i don't do a lot of it but when i do it i get five thousand dollars an hour most marketing consultants get 150 to 200 hundred dollars I get it because I've got a higher perceived value I revere myself and the value and the transactional implication of what my expertise deployed as a catalyst in somebody's business can be worth if you don't reveal yourself you can't command higher value if you don't educate people preemptively they aren't going to respect what you're doing for them what what you do for the means to them it's your responsibility not theirs to perceive Using PR, Ron talked a little bit about it. I don't know, are we going to get, we could get Michael maybe at the end of the day tomorrow?
I'd like, I mean, you should all do PR, you should all get articles, you should all be, have montages of all the credibility. You should send it out to your clients. You should have testimonials. You should have stories on.
You should really know how to do that, because all things being equal, if nobody else is any different, but you've got all this prestige and media exposure. you look to be perceptively a far greater horse to back than your generic competitors don't you and it's fun and it's exciting and and it started it carries on a life of its own when you get enough media awareness and it's a creative function Ron didn't get a chance to meet again you could do three days on any one of these and it wouldn't be doing a disservice delivering higher than expected levels of service and making sure they are recognized and again I told you last night think about people who you love doing business with, but tonight is one of your homework assignments. Think of three companies in your personal or your business life that deliver exceedingly higher service. than you expect and what you can learn from them and write that down communicating frequently with your clients to nurture them more often you contact as long as it's in their best interest and it has information or or ideas of value the more they'll buy the more often they'll buy the longer they'll stay the more they'll refer Increasing sales skills levels of your staff. I can't, you know, of all the people I've ever admired as far as their instant and enduring value, it's consultative sales expertise.
It will normally boost the performance of everybody in your organization. who has client contact not just the salespeople telephone people client services technical service delivery and they can all feed referrals or enhance or upsell or talk about other products and it takes nothing and it produces 20 to 500 percent increase in salespeople almost instantly and it's sustained it's not a diminishing process got to get trained yourself and everybody else acquiring clients break even up front make a profit we talked about that guaranteeing purchase the risk verse we talked about that host beneficiary relations we're going to talk about that every time did I go through it again no it's just more proving your team's selling skills these are different categories of it that apply to all three of those ways to greet your business using point of sale promotions. I was in Australia, there was a couple people from Australia a couple years ago and there was a Kmart and I was walking through it and there was this old lady with this mobile little cart and it had a blue light on it and she had a microphone and she was this traveling blue light special and she would announce, blue light special in the Cote Isle.
and i'd go and watch and sure as heck they'd sell like five or six coats point of purchase things that are impactful at the point of purchase will normally increase sales 7-eleven has all this stuff at the counter point of purchase signage you know buy three get get one free or buy two get one free you know you know buy spend 25 take 50 percent off of any you know blank purchase that stuff really works and incrementally the additional ad are almost pure profit so if you normally get you know three times the margin you only get half it's still all pure profit you wouldn't have gotten packaging complimentary products and services together in the old days than the the computer business started doing that one of the first computers ever out there was it called something Pro what was it called kpro that was their whole key was everyone else was selling a computer they sold a package deal and they owned the market for a while didn't they It's no different today. Package things together. You can get control of all kinds of complementary products and services in quantity very low, particularly if you understand marginal net worth theory and you sell them on the fact they're going to get the back end. You can sometimes get them to give it to you. Remember the guy?
said Blockbuster gave them free certificates because they've analyzed the back end. There's tons of things you can do. We've gotten restaurants to give tons of certificates at a discount because there's two factors. There's breakage and there's upsell.
You give away certificates for lunch for two the odds you know not counting alcoholic beverages and dessert you think people don't have drinks for dinner for sure bring people start coming back a lot of people get them and don't use them so it's it's really there's a lot of cool things you can do here increasing your pricing enhance your margins i mean a lot of people price everything parity there are certain prices that are shopped milk cigarettes but most things aren't in in in we did a years ago one of the first mini-marts in Australia, and they were pricing everything at like 15%. We said, why? Price the milk at 15%, price the milk at 15%.
My belief about most small and medium-sized business owners and professionals is that their business is operated on what I call the diving board theory of revenue generation. And this is a reference graphic model of what I think it looks like, and I call it the diving board because it looks to me like a diving board with the... the revenue being supported by one income generating marketing activity that's predominant. It's somewhere in your book too, but you can see it up here.
And my take is even if it's working for you, if any one of a number of occurrences happen, you could be screwed. We use just as a reference example, it's not necessarily what your business or the most of the businesses in your industry are dependent on, but direct sales. sales is what a lot of people does if you are dependent on direct sales and you're not interacting with your clients and one of your direct sales people learns Jay Abraham methodology and realizes that he or she has control of the real asset and you don't have them sign to a non-compete if you do have a sign to a non-compete it's not enforceable and they want to go down the street they have three options they can start a business they can sell their relationships for a premium upfront to a competitor a lot of things they can do if they stay with you but your competitors start modeling emulating or worse innovating what you do because even though I've told you to get consultative sales training you decide you don't need it or they apply because you get lazy better risk reversal or bonuses or or or strategic preeminence patterns, you could be compromised.
If your business is based on people out in the field and gas prices keep going up and it costs twice as much for... a sale your business at least your profit will be compromised and and and the marketing and the and the uh lifetime value dynamics will totally change point i'm making is it is a very precarious position to be in even if you're very profitable to be dependent on one marketing revenue generating stream and it also limits your growth to linear incremental levels. I like exponential, geometric, safe, well hedged, highly certain future success. If you only added one and this is all graphic and figurative what would happen to the stability your business you begin the process of formalizing more marketing profit centers well I just added joint ventures as a descriptive example but you can see graphically already it's a lot stabler looking isn't it okay what we try to do what would happen to your revenue level and probably if you combined a wide array of marketing together is put some of the most the most universal ones direct sales telemarketing referral systems joint ventures direct mail advertising developing more back-ends endorsements host beneficiaries and their variations of that but and I went to it it pretty fast yesterday, but do you remember when I was when I was showing you the three way to grow business model and showing you how powerful 10%, 10%, 10% was, and how powerful 25% in one category and 40% and 50%, and it was like mind-bogglingly powerful, those three multipliers together produced geometric growth.
Well, what do you think happens if that's 100%, the left side, that direct sales, and you add telemarketing, and that increases it 20%? Yeah. add referral systems and that adds 25% more front-end business not counting the back and you add joint ventures and that's another 30% you add direct mail and that's another 10 15 and advertising and all these you think maybe it's it's geometry on geometry on geometry and it maybe goes through the roof I don't know what what's it called when you go geometric types geometric is there an a mathematical word for that It's exponential, but then it gets even neater. Remember I taught you 93 different referral generating systems. Well, in each of these categories, there are between 25 and 150. different applications, variations, or tactics.
So you literally could have, if you wanted to really be cool and neat, and imagine if you had another Parthenon under each of these. these with not 93 but with five different referral systems and three or four different ways to use telemarketing remember I gave you a few of the ways you could use direct mail last night we use tell my say you still marketing to get leads to follow up leads to penetrate markets you can't use to to invite people to special events to keep in touch to convey updates to follow up behind a sale and up upsell I mean there's like each of these you can have another one like that under that another one like that under that and that is how i have gotten so many companies in my halcyon days of just being a a private discreet business growth expert not teaching it to the masses that is precisely exactly and consistently how i engineered companies going from 300 000 in income to 25 million in a year and a half everyone goes it's unbelievable it's not It's all geometry or it's all mathematics. Does that make sense? And there's no one in this room that can't do that.
And there's no one in this room who's going to do it overnight. But since it took you 5, 10, 20 years to get where you are, if every month you reverse engineer adding one more experiment... Once it works, you systematize it and integrate it into a process, and you keep doing it over the course of a year or two or three.
Do you think maybe you could add a lot of geometric growth to your business? And that doesn't count what happens if you add something like what Gordon is suggesting. I mean, the possibilities are really limited to your vision of yourself, and then I come back to something that I either said or should have said in the first day. I do not believe, which is why I frustrate sometimes people, in one size fits all. I believe that each and every person in this room has the opportunity of formulating what we will call an optimal business and marketing strategy.
And that has to take into account who you are, what you're good at, what you want, what your sense of wealth is. It may not be making a lot of money. It may be freedom.
It may be a sustaining business model. There are a lot of companies that I have known, and Gary North has seen them, that if they would have kept themselves at a $5 or $6 million rate, the owner could have made $1.5 million a year forever. He or she would have had a lot of fun, but they wanted to grow, and they got to $50 or $60 million.
And a lot of times, certain businesses are really nothing more than elongated promotions waiting to implode. And if you accelerate up front, A huge portion of what the market would give to you over five or ten years, two things happen. You saturate very quickly and you blatantly telegraph to all the interlopers, emulators out there.
So you got it. There's nothing wrong with that. I'm just saying you have the right and you probably should take some quality time on the way home or this week or in the next couple of weeks to figure out what your optimal business strategy should be.
Because a lot of people will come to me and say, well, I want to be a $10 million company. And I'll say, why? They're $1 million now. I'll say, do you want it for the stature? Or do you want it just to make $1 million?
Because there's a lot of different ways to configure the profitability or the joint ventures of your business where you can have the profit that $10 million would give you without the yoke of day-to-day responsibility, management, capital investment. You have so many options and choices. And my job is to make you. Clearly aware and to challenge you to get clear on what you want for you and why.
Because if you don't know what you want, you don't know why you want it, and you also don't know how many other faster, easier, safer, less stressful ways you can get it, then you're really, you're stealing from yourself enrichment on whatever basis you denominate it. Does that all make sense? But you have lots of options here.
The point I'm making is you've got a lot of options. In your book, and we're not going to do it now unless we get ahead of ourselves, but as one of your exercises, how many people are staying here tonight? Fill this out. In your book, you've got these blanks.
So list the pillars that your business is currently built on and go blank. And then list the ones you should be adding. And I'm a great believer.
I'm pragmatism 101. Remember I told you deep down I'm very super logical. I would rather start with things that are easy to validate and win with and sustain than I would necessarily that which is the most profitable. No one wants to go for the biggest payoff, but those sometimes are the hardest. They have more nuances, more proficiency requirements, more intricacy, more convergent of all the moon and the stars.
I'd rather start with things that are no-brainer, easy, quick. You mis-execute, they're still going to work. And put those into place so you get some marketing sea legs, you get some reinforcement, you get some windfall income.
And then you build and use that funds and that psychic capital. to go forward. So a lot of people try to go for the big, they try to pole vault when they've never, ever, they haven't done any exercise for a year. I think you're better off just walking briskly around the block a couple times to get your body sort of acclimated, figuratively speaking.
Now I need someone to put my other slides back. Questions, comments? Yes. What were they? We actually, that's what I said this morning, we printed out the entire, not even that, but it's from a three-day, five, three or five thousand dollar program.
We printed the entire PowerPoint for you, which is pretty self-explanatory. A little of it's redundant. It has the three ways and that on it, but we coincidentally had somebody up all night.
On your behalf, printing it, and we've got it right here. We're going to give it to you right now, okay? Anything else?
We try. Yes. Gentleman in the back. Jay, for a moment, could you elaborate on a statement which I thought was pretty profound?
In the strategy of preeminence, if you come out fast and strong with a unique position in a market that's emerging, you could potentially not have the organizational capacity to even occupy the preeminence you've established. That's what you thought you just said that so I'm saying that everything you do you should first Safely test and perfect before I'll give you a really hilarious self self experience personal that will demonstrate the folly of it okay I am very lucky I have a very prominent posture and reputation on a worldwide basis for my business building prowess and I try three or four times to use that to do preview seminars and conference calls to sell an expensive program. Each time, like one time we drew 1,600 people from around the world to an event. I was doing a free one day, which was a preview, but I never really practiced presenting, and so I closed like nobody. We spent opportunity costs.
We spent $40,000 on the event, and it was a waste. Same thing with conference calls. I presumed, okay, now I can do it.
We went out, and we got like 5,000 people on a conference call, and I closed nobody. So the key to it is the world's not, I mean, your competitor is so far behind in this knowledge base. Take the time to perfect the process and your understanding. And even I can be a hypocrite.
But if you do it safely and in arenas where if you don't execute well, it's not the end of the world as you're getting your proficiency, you can move very rapidly once you have the confidence that it works. you know how to work it. Does that make sense? That makes a lot of sense.
In all endeavors. And you can test anything. And again, sometimes tests are not definitive, but they're least indicative.
Like if you don't have a lot of money, you can try a postcard. You can have one salesperson try one approach for a week and one try another. And even if it's not perfect, if the one trying approach A gets three times the sales, even if he's a little stronger, you can assume there's probably indicative value in having salesman B, C, or D.
tested for the next week? Not a perfect world. But don't presume anything you do, you're going to be great at the first time you do it.
So put yourself in a safety net where if it fails miserably, you're unscathed. It's just an inconvenience and you can regroup and you have it. I mean, I've done some incredibly beautiful triples on the trapeze and forgot to have and then lost my balance.
forgot to have a net and crashed and burned in public with 8,000 people. And I wouldn't recommend it. It's very painful.
It's very embarrassing. And I probably blew an easy chance to add another $5 or $10 million literally to my pocket because I fired before I aimed. So you don't have to do it.
Learn from me. If I can make that mistake, you certainly can. Don't do it. I hope the one thing that should be evident, if it's not, not I'll make sure that it's clear is that nothing that I've said nothing that almost any of the people have said is really that complicated it's pretty logical it's just how you can you can create some pretty cool outcomes activities strategies and achievements just by combining some pretty simple things together aren't you figuring this out yet and if you systematize it you can own the world you really can't own the world would you have another question I mean, I loved how you guys did that with the emails. Yeah, well, it's all sequential marketing.
And as I said, I'll tell you, that's the good news. The bad news is... Is everything takes you can't really accelerate certain the dynamics of certain process it's like a catalytic system there's a certain thing that has to happen at a certain time and if you shortcut it you you screw with the dynamic years and years ago before I became a marketing expert and I worked in the in the world anyhow we would generate very sophisticated and expensive lead generating programs for financial investment companies, subscription programs for companies like Businessweek, Forbes, Playboy, Fortune. And I was a salesperson, telephone-based salesperson, and I found out that there was a process.
If I had a hundred people in prospective mode, a hundred companies, there was approximately a seven stage Call, letter, call, letter, call, or letter, call, letter, call. It didn't matter which one, but there were about seven integral processes that had to occur over about a 10-day period each. So 10 times 7, 70 days, give or take.
And if I had 100 prospects in the pipeline and I went through that program diligently and every time I had interaction, I added value and I connected on something that had interest, value, and usefulness to them. I would always close whatever it was, I don't remember now, you know, six or eight prospective companies every 70 days. It was a nice ticket, $25,000 to $250,000.
I never knew who they were, it didn't matter. I knew that it would work. However, if any time, because I was purely commissioned, I got stressed, my then-wife needed money for buying something.
or I felt pressured and I tried to shorten the process, it just never worked. Now, I say that because I told you, the last program we did like this, we had 700 people and we had 9,000 prospects. We had 13,000 prospects for this, but the last time we let the full 9 or 12-month gestation period work, I didn't want to do this, so we let other people write copy for us, and two things happened.
They didn't deliver it. it in time and they didn't deliver it acceptably so we had to jerry-rig it and we lost literally half of our gestation period and as i told you on the first day multiply this this room basically covers the cost of the program people in it we make our money on all the incremental people and also on all of the home studies we sell but if we had allowed our system to work for us Instead of a hundred and a quarter there would be six and a quarter and multiply 500 people times $5,000 incrementally almost all profit you can see what it cost you to screw with a success system Does that make sense? So take heed from me because even even people know better can get caught but try to always reverse engineer and my Recommendation is give yourself enough time and perfect your system and make sure you don't do it on the fly. A lot of people have a system they want to work on but they don't really have it developed and so they'll start and they have to sort of catch up and if anything goes wrong you screw up because you think