3 True Life Stories

Here are the 3 quick true stories I told you about last week. They may give you a bit of insight.

Story #1: Years ago, I was working a booth at a business show, showing off my books and tapes. About 500 people came through that booth over two days. About 400 took catalogs furtively and scurried off hastily, lest I grab them and sell them something. About 99 made small purchases. One guy handed over his credit card and said, “Ship me one of everything you’ve got.” I didn’t know him from Adam’s housecat.

But a few weeks later, I was watching a national TV program, and there he was being interviewed. Seems he was one of the most successful chiropractors in America, retiring from having built 3 $1 million a year practices, one right after the other, and now was head of a consulting firm with 600 clients each paying about $3,000 a month for his advice. That’s $1.8 million a month for those of you short on fingers and toes.

Story #2: Many years ago, a kid (too young to drive) walked a few miles from his house to a riding stable and pestered the owner for a job, and got hired to clean saddles and scrub buckets and mostly do the real grubby stuff nobody else wanted to do after school for $20 a week. The kids used the $20 to buy a used set of Earl Nightingale self-improvement tapes. The kid was Dan Kennedy.

Story #3: A guy at a garage sale found a set of my tapes (at the time) and bought them for $5.00. The fellow selling them told the buyer he guessed they were all right, but they hadn’t done anything for him. In fact, he’d just shut down his business, was selling off all his stuff, and moving to another city to take a job at a relative’s company.

He said, “The free enterprise system just didn’t work for little guys anymore.” He said, “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer and that’s all there is to it. The guy that bought my tapes for $5.00 listened to them, used them, worked with them, and started his own business. When he wrote to me two years later to tell me of making over $200,000 that year in his business, he said, “Funny thing. I was concerned about it at the time, but now I understand – you see, the business I started is exactly the same kind of business that guy I bought your tapes from got out of.”

Now let me finish this long-winded, gas-baggy diatribe with one psychic prediction: some people reading this will say to themselves, “Does Travis think I fell off a turnip truck yesterday? Heck, I can see through this as clear as day. This is just a clever ploy to separate me from my coins the next time he gets around me or mails me some literature. I’m not going to fall for it, no sir. I’m keeping my coins.” Some other folks will get it. It’s all kind of fun to watch.

"Rich people have big libraries, poor people have big TVs."

I recently purchased a brand new, very nice book case for my home office. That’s because the other walls of bookshelves are all full of books, but I want to buy more ‘because I’m always looking’ for the next good idea.

A great speaker I've head several times, Jim Rohn, says he’s never visited a wealthy person’s home that didn’t have a big library, and that ought to tell you something. He didn’t say it, but I sure have visited a lot of poor people’s homes where you couldn’t find a book at all. Of course, it’s easy to invest in education now; I’ve got the money to justify it. But you see, I behaved this way when I was younger and had much less money coming in. That’s why I didn’t stay that way. To once more quote Jim, he says, “Miss a meal if you must, but don’t miss a book.”

So when I’m out speaking, and I start giving a little commercial about my educational materials, these days I kind of smile and chuckle to myself about how very predictable folks are. Many think, “Uh-oh, he’s about to try and sell me something and take my money, so I’ll close my ears or duck out the back and save my coins.

Others think, “Oh, by, he’s about to offer me something I can get to multiply my coins. Bring it on, man, bring it on.”

Then I think, “Terrific – that wonderful self-selecting process, the cutting of the herd. The dumb ones who are just trying to hang on and keep the few coins they’ve got, will go away. The smart ones, who are committed to multiplying their pennies and who I’ll enjoy having a relationship with, they’ll become my customers. Couldn’t work out better if I’d designed human behavior myself.

I'll finish off this 'soap box' moment in a couple days with 3 stories that really illustrate how this works out in the real world.

www.3DMailResults.com

Your Beharior Matters

Last week I left you with a story about shiny Mercedes and old, dusty Chevy's and how their behavior was different I was that was.

Its simply really, because their behavior reflected their attitudes, and their attitudes controlled their lifestyles, as well as their practice’s level of success or lack thereof.

You see, the successful person loves being sold and tries to learn something from that by itself; then he loves to buy, because his experience has been and always is that every time he invests in education, he finds at least one good idea, acts on it, and recoups his investment plus more.

The unsuccessful person hates being sold, buys reluctantly, because his experience has been and is that every time he invests in education, he gets nothing out of it and has fewer coins in his pocket afterwards.

How can two people in the exact same business in the exact same town experience such dramatically different results? Clue: the education being sold and bought is the same, so it’s not the causative factor. Clue: in this picture, there is only one difference.

Very early, when I was starting out doing what I do, I got some very, very good advice from a friend of mine, with considerable experience selling how-to “stuff” to sales managers and sales professionals. He told me, “If you want to make money at this, ignore the people who obviously need your information the most and focus on selling to individuals who are already quite successful but eager to do even better.”

Here’s what I found out: winners live what’s called THE PRINCIPLE OF THE SLIGHT EDGE; they know that teeny adjustments and refinements yield disproportionately big improvements, so they are always hunting for even one idea that can tweak what they’re doing a smidgen to the good. They’re looking hard, every day, for some information to invest in that might give them a slight edge.

Not only don’t they mind being sold, they’re eager to buy. Losers stay losers for three basic reasons:

1. They do not learn from information.
2. They do not act on ideas; so
3. They don’t want more information.

I have a couple more thoughts on this subject, but I'll save those for next time. Until then, keep on marketing!

How To Keep Yourself And Your Hard-Earned Money Safe From Us Smooth-Talkin’ Salesmen, Selling “Success Stuff”

This is not an article about selling carpet cleaning. This is an article about the often unnoticed truth about what separates the winners from the Mediocre Majority in business, in any business, and in life.

I’ve been at “this” a long time; via speaking, giving seminars, and otherwise trying to inform, inspire and ignite people into action on principles, strategies, ideas and behaviors likely to lead to success in business and in life in general. And I long ago stopped trying to figure out why some people alertly and eagerly grab opportunities and ideas while others are asleep at the switch.

But I can tell you a few things I’ve learned about “reading people.” For example, in a seminar setting, the ones who are first up to invest in something designed to help them be more successful are usually the people in the group who need help the least. The ones who sit, arms folded, cynical, mumbling “heard that before” and grumbling about being sold to, are the ones who need help the most.

Over the years I have held several seminars. When I met them before the start of the seminar, I used to ask for their present gross and their goal. Virtually without exception, the first few people to rush back to buy the business-building materials already had the highest grosses in the room – and they took their armload of goodies out to Mercedes, Cadillacs, Lincolns and the like to drive home. The last few to ever-so-slowly wobble back to buy had lower grosses, except for the few who didn’t buy at all – they had the lowest grosses of all, and drove home in old Chevys.

Why was this?? Well, you'll have to wait for my next post in a few days.

www.3dmailresults.com

Life and Limb

Going back to the person who invests life and limb in creating her course on parenting. If she’s given any thought to parenting at all, she has statistics. She’ll say, “There are x-# parents of kids between a and b.”

Great. Unfortunately, an overwhelmingly majority of those parents don’t give a rat’s behind about being better parents. Some think they know it all. Some think their kids are screwed up, but they’re okay. Most don’t think at all. Some are dead broke. Some are functionally illiterate. And I could go on.
Somewhere in all that, there is a miniscule percentage who are literate, open-minded, concerned, self-improvement oriented, and have already demonstrated their willingness to invest time and money in being better parents. But if you have to wade through all the muck to find them, you will run out of gas long before you get there.

“But there are millions who NEED my product.” Terrific. Want to get me excited? Show me how many have previously, preferably repetitively, demonstrated their ability and willingness to invest in their desire for products or services like yours. Then, show me that we can find them and reach them. Now, we got something. Now I can help you.

A Buyer is a buyer is a buyer...

Before investing a year of your life putting together a whiz-bang course on parenting, how about finding out whether anybody has ever sold an audio-course, a video, a newsletter or a seminar on parenting to parents - other than in bookstores, and if so, who, how many, at what price, and how.

Now, what do these buyers “look like”? What are they willing to spend? How can they be reached? Let me tell you something about blazing an entire new trail; you get eaten up by the lions, fall off a cliff, or killed by Inguns.

Here’s yet another powerful marketing lesson:

“A BUYER IS A BUYER IS A
BUYER, BUT SOMEONE WHO
WON’T BUY, WON’T BUY.”

If you want to sell your “soap”, find an economically sensible way to reach other people who have bought different kinds repetitively.

OK, YOU’VE IGNORED ALL THE ADVICE AND BUILT SOME DARNED PRODUCT YOU’RE IN LOVE WITH, MARRIED TO AND IN DEBT WITH. NOW WHAT?

You’ve just got to find buyers. When you find one, you’ve got to learn as much as possible about that creature, so you can try and find more like them.

The buyer of a Mercedes is every different than the buyer of a Chevy. This industry idiotically talks to everybody about their products. But if you’re starting from scratch, with little resources, you’d better not do THAT. If you’ve got a “Mercedes”, you’d better find out exactly who will buy it.

Then find out where people just like him are. Do they all live in one place? Do they all read one magazine? Do they all go to a particular restaurant? Do they all shop at the same mall? You see, you can ONLY afford to communicate with these people who are precisely matched to and already proven likely to buy a Mercedes.

www.3dmailresults.com

Who's Your Who

You cannot imagine how many people arrive with their “soap” and no money left to promote it. “But I spent all my money making it,” they cry, “I thought somebody else would jump at the chance to put up all the money to sell it.” Please let me dis-abuse that idea.

If I wanted to sell “soap”, I wouldn’t invest my money in selling your “soap” and make you rich; I’d hire some “soap-maker” for a pittance to make “soap” for me. If I wanted to sell a course on parenting, I’d run a little ad in Writer’s Digest, Psychology Today, the National Writers Club newsletter, etc., have my choice of a zillion experts and writers, and pay one a few thousand bucks, at the most, and maybe a teeny royalty to create that course just for me. And that applies to anything and everything.

“Hey, that means he’ll steal my idea.” Nuts to you. That’s not the point. The point is that I don’t need to steal your idea for “soap”; I’ve already heard it 100 times before you got here.

The person who DOES get his “soap” promoted in a big way brings marketing assets to the table with the soap. The skin care product maker shows up with Victoria Principal in her pocket. The author with the course on parenting comes in with a nationally syndicated radio show, a contact at Sally Jesse Rapheal. The guy with the golfing thingamajig has access to a list of 135,000 golf newsletter subscribers, etc.

At the very least, the smart entrepreneur does research and builds a case for the successful marketing of “soap” BEFORE making “soap”.

Any Fool can Make Soap

earlier in the week I left you with this quote:

“ANY FOOL CAN MAKE SOAP. IT TAKES A CLEVER MAN TO SELL IT.”

It’s so hard to accept. The lady psychologist sends me the audio program she’s lovingly, painstakingly put together about successful parenting, and she does not want to think of that as “soap”.

She believes, maybe rightly so, that it is different and better than any book, tape, and anything else that has ever been put together about parenting. But there are two things she doesn’t want to get: one, I’ve got 11 other products just like hers piled up in a corner in my office, from 11 other people who believe just as passionately that their’s is the only/best doohickey on parenting ever invented. And over in Palm Desert, Cindi Anderson at Guthy-Renker has nine more. And down in Key West, in Gary Halbert’s office, there are 14 others. And on and on and on. Darn it, it is “soap”.

Second and more importantly, even if it is the best, most innovative, most technologically advanced, best researched, most incredible, etc. none of that matters if no one will buy the damned thing.

They will only appreciate all that if and after they buy it. And the truth is any psychologist, many other authors, coaches, teachers, ministers and parents can “make” this particular “soap”. It takes a clever person to sell it.

Now, the next tough idea to accept: the time to think about who it will be sold to and how it will be sold to them is BEFORE you build it, not afterward. We'll discuss that next week.

How To Make A Great Deal Of Money With As Little Pain As Possible

Now I will wax philosophic about absolutely essential business knowledge:

The biggest, single misunderstanding people have about business success is that the “wrong path” is so remarkably easy to wander down.

As you know, I talk to a huge number of entrepreneurs and daily, they’re most eager to regale me with every nitty-bitty detail of their incredible product or product idea. Sometimes I listen patiently.

And I groan inwardly as I listen to these people so into their particular product, so enthused with their product, so convinced that it’s one of a kind, so profoundly committed to its unique ability to stand out in the marketplace.

Because all of that is incidental to the issues we should be talking about. Like: Who was it built for? What evidence is there that they will spend money for it? What media and marketing method lends itself to the situation? Because:

An associate called me at 9 p.m. the other night, understandably excited by the succint way to explain this to people which he had just found in an old advertising book he had bought in an antique store. The quote said:

“ANY FOOL CAN MAKE SOAP. IT TAKES A CLEVER MAN TO SELL IT.”

There is the wisdom of the ages. There is a million dollar quote. We'll contine a little later this week on this same subject. In the mean time, really think about 'who's your who.' Until then.

www.3dmailresults.com