Micah Mitchell is an InfusionSoft expert and the creator of several Infusionsoft training courses.

InfusionSoft can be an amazing way bring automation into your business but it can also be a little tricky for those of us who aren’t tech heads.

In this interview Micah shares how we can succeed by using InfusionSoft including…

• How to create super advanced funnels to turn prospects into customers
• How to integrate and automate all of your email marketing, SMS messages, voice broadcasts, webinars and direct mail campaigns using Infusion and some other 3rd party tools
• 2 must have InfusionSoft plug-ins
• And a whole lot more. Click the play button below or read the full transcript...

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Joey Bushnell: Hi, welcome to the online marketing show. I’m your host, Joey Bushnell. Today’s special guest is InfusionSoft expert, Micah Mitchell. Go to mmmastery.com to find out more.

Micah thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Micah Mitchell: Of course, thanks for having me Joey.

Joey Bushnell: Micah, how did you get started in online marketing and end up creating an InfusionSoft training?

Micah Mitchell: Probably like a lot of peoples career paths some of it was intentional and some of it was accidental. I was working at a company and they needed a webmaster but didn’t want to pay for one so they asked me to learn how to do it. So I kind of Googled my way into all of it.

At some point along that route I started doing more CRM than web development. That is when I found InfusionSoft. The first time I saw it, it was funny because I was trying to sell a client something else, another CRM and he said he’d take a look at it with me if I’d look at this other thing with him, which happened to be InfusionSoft.

So when I looked at InfusionSoft I said “Yeah go ahead and get that” and then I started learning more about it and training people on that. So to get over to Infusion was kind of stumbling around but once I picked Infusion it’s been about 7 years now where I’ve specialized in just that.

So within InfusionSoft space there’s a training after market, there’s software add-ons in the market and so I’ve done add-ons before, training before and direct implementation. Ultimately the training is just something I really, really enjoy and InfusionSoft lends itself well to supporting a training business also.

Joey Bushnell: OK so let’s start right from the beginning, what is InfusionSoft? And what can it do for marketers and business owners?

Micah Mitchell: I’ll start with the people who haven’t heard about it and then cover some of the misconceptions from people who have.

But InfusionSoft for those who don’t know anything about it, is essentially a database for all of your customer information. All of their names, emails, addresses and such. Some people put that into whatever database they choose but the cool thing about InfusionSoft is it’s able to automate off of that.

So if you have an email address that sends an email that’s really basic but if you have an address you can set it up and connect it to where you can send other things like letters. If you have their phone number you can send automated voice broadcasts and differentiate between a live answer or a voicemail answer. You can connect it to text messaging so InfusionSoft is an autoresponder but it’s an autoresponder through multiple marketing mediums.

That is only the marketing end of it. There is a whole eCommerce engine that has shopping carts, order forms, you can do one click up sells and things like that, all sorts of discounts, trials and promotions.

They sell it as an all-in-one and I love InfusionSoft so this isn’t in any way negative but what all-in-one typically means is that they are not amazing at any one thing, although I’d say for them if it was any one thing, it’s their automation logic.

But they have everything under one roof which in and of itself is incredible because they have tied it all together in a way that you can automate your billing collections, you can automate sales, all the way through collecting the car door. If you have a sales team you can automate the sales team, there is a whole module on there that controls interactions with sales representatives and customers through the different stages, if you have to go into contracting and customizations and all of that. So it covers it all.

I’m not going to say that it might be better than any one system for one thing but in the way it puts it all together and allows businesses to put all of that together and automate so much of their business, not just to make money but a lot of time, they save a lot of money by automating things.

It’s an all-in-one with pretty much any internet marketing tool you can think of because it’s been demand generated by their users for so many years, just people wanting things. Sorry for the long answer there but it’s a lot it does a lot of things for a lot of businesses.

Joey Bushnell: One of the things people can sometimes think about InfusionSoft is because it sends emails, they can get thinking that it is simply a normal auto responder, something similar to AWeber or Get Response. But it’s quite a bit different to that.

So from an email marketing point of view, what cool things can InfusionSoft do that a normal autoresponder couldn’t?

Micah Mitchell: From an email marketing perspective I’d say that it has a lot to do with the impact of those emails.

So it’s going to send a batch of emails like anything and it might be able to send different emails to different groups of people. InfusionSoft, honestly, their emailing function is really good because it’s attached to the logic but just to be upfront there are other systems that do things like automatic split testing and dial in that conversion automatically.

InfusionSoft is more, here are all the middle level to enterprise level tools. They say it’s for small business but they used to serve enterprise and so some of the functionality and thinking have left over.

But from an email perspective it’s the fact that you can send an email, someone can click it and end up directly on a page with their invoice already generated, do you want to use a previous card on file or a new card.

A lot of time it can deliver the right email, with the right link in the email that can lead to a lot of the other cool parts of the software, again it’s the integration aspect but I don’t want to discount the email service, it’s not that there is any problem with it, it’s jut they really focus on it being part of the bigger picture instead of some services that hone in on spit testing emails and things like that.

Joey Bushnell: When you get into InfusionSoft you hear the word “tag” quite often, so first of all what is a tag and how does that help us?

Micah Mitchell: A tag in InfusionSoft, it’s a great question I can tell you did some homework, but the tag in InfusionSoft is a marker meaning you have all of these contacts and you can place different markers on them and they do things those are called “tags”.

This person bought, give them a tag. This person clicked, give them a tag. But the really interesting thing when I talk about the power of automation, this is a perfect example with tags, those tags are not only markers but they can also be triggers. So when you place a marker on someone, it can trigger a whole bunch of different things to happen which can be other tags and so forth.

These markers on contacts are not only for you when you look up an individual contact and say did they do this or that, but those tags are the basis of automation.

When you say “Lets take all of our contacts and lets send them into a split test of a few different sequences of emails” you can sort that out through the tags. The whole time they’re doing anything, clicking or buying you can have negative markers as well for them not doing things but with everything that they are doing you are making them and all of that is readily available for report filtering, segmentation or anything you want.

Tags are so universal inside InfusionSoft I think of it like oil in an engine. They basically suspend all of the other automation inside of tags like an engine with oil in it so it can run and that oil is every where, there are tags every where. They are filters, markers they are used in every part of the system for whatever you want. That is really the main key to the magic in my opinion.

Joey Bushnell: And a usual auto responder like MailChimp or GetResponse or other types can’t do, they aren’t that intelligent are they? That is the magic like you said, it’s the tags in InfusionSoft that give us the extra intelligence about the person we are emailing.

So what is an action set? That is something I hear when people are talking about tags, I also hear action sets being brought up. So what is an action set and how does that help us?

Micah Mitchell: An action set is kind of how it sounds, it’s a set of actions in InfusionSoft and those can be any of the things I’ve mentioned so far like invoicing someone or creating an order, applying tags to them, sending emails, or queuing off other actions like letters, direct mail in that case, text and voice broadcasts.

So it’s a bundle of things and it plays with the tags a little bit. In InfusionSoft you were saying tags give that extra layer of functionality, in Infusionsoft with the tags and the actions sets, if you think of them all as separate most systems like you mentioned Mailchimp, they are very linear “if this then that” this is more of a “well if this and that and that and that or this or this or this!.”

So you can add as many layers as you want and then the action sets are the bundles of things that happen at the appropriate points. Those can include all sorts of media interaction with the customer.

Joey Bushnell: So because it’s not linear, does that mean people can potentially because of tags and action sets, they can go through a funnel via different routes, customized to them and how they interact with your funnel?

Micah Mitchell: Yes that’s exact ideas, they are trying to provide automation with as much customization as possible.

Joseph Bushnell: So let’s assume that we have some sort of squeeze page and we are getting leads, how do we then get those people, who are perhaps strangers at that time, how do we warm them up so they eventually come to a point where they would like to buy from us?

Micah Mitchell: There is obviously a few things you can do, providing the candid answer “provide value or give them something”.

There is a difference between that and getting them ready to buy so just the way you are asking, that warming them up so they are ready to buy. To me it’s incremental, where let’s say it’s an email sequence, so everyone can understand that. We are slowly going to warm them up, not just send them a bunch of stuff and buy.

It’s a matter of testing in a way where you say “Let’s try one where we send them a few little warm ups and then we ask for the purchase”. Then maybe we send a few little warm ups from a different angle and ask for the purchase from a different angle, highlighting a different feature or something like that.

Then you have to weigh that against maybe what we should do is warm them up for a whole 30 days and get them to really love us and then ask them to buy because they’ll be more likely to buy. But there is a little bit of a trap in there that if you only give away stuff, the way information marketing works for example some people are able to get trained by certain companies to just take the free stuff you don’t have to buy, it’s all just free. You want to test and find a balance with that.

But that is the idea, how can we automatically enhance this users perception of our company and enhance their experience so far?

What I see works really well is giving them tools where you say “Here is the free thing, the tool that you opted-in for” then before generically warming them up or before changing the subject just follow up on the tool. You’re basically telling the customer when I give you things, I’m going to make sure you get the value. Then when you offer the next thing and that now has a price tag they understand it will be worth it because they’ll follow through with it.

A lot of those little things come into play but the technical part of it is, I mentioned the email sequence, it becomes a little better when you mix in other mediums like direct mail, text and all of that.

They all have their appropriate applications so to give you one example, if you use webinars here is something where you can have an email going out saying “Hey you’re registered for the webinar” and if you only follow up by email that works to a degree. But if you also get a text message out to the person the day of the webinar, you don’t want to hit them over the head too many days before hand you’ll get them to opt out that way.

But if you just send them one before the webinar that says “Hey, just a friendly reminder we’ve already sent you an email with all the log in details, here is the phone number in case you can only get there by phone, thanks.” something like that and really play it down. That is a lot more powerful because people are busy. They might just be in the next room and not by their email. They want to attend the webinar but they are just busy talking to somebody.

So that’s some of the power of InfusionSoft, is integrating that and the you could even say after the webinar sending to those who attended, if you collected their addresses of those who bought, a personalized thank you letter, even if it’s only an online course. This is again where Infusion is strong because it can branch out to other things.

So you take something as simple as a webinar, you add a couple different touch points around it and there’s cases where you can get someone to give a physical address registering for a webinar depending on the content of the webinar, so integrating that stuff together is another great way of getting someone to buy.

If it’s a free webinar, you warm them up for that, you send them a follow up letter in the mail giving them an offer, asking them to call up a phone number. There is a lot of details around this, if you had a phone number Infusion will let you track it. If it’s a separate phone number, there are ways to track where things are coming from so you get ROI on the other reports but that is a broad look at webinars for example. So use them as a warm up or make an offer right on the webinar so go with what you want but you have all of those options.

Joey Bushnell: Do you have any recommendations when it comes to webinars? Any tools that you find work particularly well with InfusionSoft?

Micah Mitchell: Yeah I do, there is something called Stealth Seminar and what is does is fake webinars so you can do prerecorded webinars. But it works with Infusion in that you can set these points in a webinar where it will apply tags back in InfusionSoft.

If you have 5 people coming to a webinar then one person didn’t come, one person came and left after 5 minutes, one person stayed for half of it, one person left just before the pitch and one person stayed for the pitch until the end. Typically you have no idea who is who. You can manually try to download that and try to update it. But Stealth Seminar provides the ability to do these fake webinars or evergreen webinars probably more PC!

But you can do that and then depending on where they ended up in the webinar, this is that power of automation, where you can then trigger a whole sequence of emails saying “Hey we know you only got to here, what you just missed before you left the webinar is blah blah blah” That can be really powerful.

We’ve done a few funny things, I have a friend Grant James who does a lot of Facebook training. We’ve done some funny webinars with him where we did a fake webinar about how to do fake webinars and it worked really well. I think people knew by the middle of it that was happening but they just didn’t care because the content was relevant and they wanted to learn it. But that is a tool I highly recommend.

One of the reasons I really recommend it, you can also do webinars with GoToWebinar for example and there are integrations to that. That kind of thing is something you can put into your funnel ongoing. People build these big funnels around a single webinar, a single date like November 15th. When that date passes all that work is lost and I see a lot for companies making that incremental growth by building up these webinars this way then using them here and there properly edited.

It’s like a shotgun you can blow your foot off with that thing if you do it wrong ,you can offend people. But if you do it right and you have good intentions, it really works well. Even in a marketing sense where you have a pretty savvy clientele even if they catch on to it, they know, they don’t really care if the content is good.

So content first but all the tricks of the trade are available with something like Stealth Seminar, everything you can really think of.

Joey Bushnell: Very Cool, you mentioned already direct mail, text and voice broadcasts and that they can be integrated with InfusionSoft, do you have any recommendations for tools there?

Micah Mitchell: First for direct mail there are a bunch of them out there but I personally like molding box.

It’s a fulfillment company and they’re cool because they’ll send your mail but they’ll also send your lumpy mail, like your packages. So if you have a CD and a workbook they will package it all up and send it. So that’s on the fulfillment side of things rather than the direct mail marketing. But they have direct integration to Infusion to where it kicks out to them, they mail it, they can kick back confirmation numbers if there is tracking involved and so forth. A simple letter with mail merges is the simplest end of that but it can get as complex as you want it. That’s molding box.

For text there’s a couple of tools out there. One is called InfusionSMS and that’s something I got at one point from the VP of InfusionSoft with my partner at the time.

That is another one where you don’t want to abuse it. With all these new marketing technologies there is a window where it’s cool, it’s new and it works then people abuse it and the consumer base stops caring. So with texts you want to be really careful if you use it.

Look at those things when you have a number that your going to send a text broadcast with is almost sacred little interactions where you want to be very careful and make sure the person perceives that as being you adding value, not just you trying to get to them in another way other than email.

Voice broadcasts, that one is the easiest of the 3. It is built right into InfusionSoft where you go in and put in your phone number and it calls you and an auto attendant says go ahead and record your message after the beep and so forth. So that one is the easiest.

I think each one is going to come with a little bit of a cost, direct mail postcards are typically under a $1 but it depends on the volume. Text I would imagine it’s some where under 50 cents to get a text out but I can’t remember for sure. Then the voice broadcasts Infusion charges 15 cents a minute. You add a little bit of money on top of it but again if you use it sparingly and you’re not harassing people and you’re not going to spend that much money anyways so all 3 are pretty easily done.

Joey Bushnell: OK so let’s move on to sequences. First of all do you just have one sequence where they go through, let’s say it’s 12 emails and then it comes to an end? Or from there, do you put them in to a different sequence based on their engagement with the previous sequence, is it possible for you to map out the process of how it works for you?

Micah Mitchell: Yeah and since you said “map out” that is a perfect analogy and perfect visualization.

If you can think of making a little mind map of your marketing here is a little bubble where the person opts-in and that leads to a square where this happens. I have those and I’ll have one like you said with 8 emails and it comes to an end.

Instead of connecting something right to that, I do have lots of sequences. So when you say “how many sequences do I have?” Probably over the years, I’ve got hundreds and hundreds, I’ve got multiple applications but the ones that I use at the end of any one sequence where I think “OK, this sequence is over but my relationship with this customer isn’t over” that’s where you just apply a tag.

So that is a marker saying “Sequence over” but the tag is also a trigger again so it says “Start this other sequence” at the end of that one. So I do a lot of chaining sequences together.

Joey Bushnell: Would the links in the chain be different or in different orders depending on things that they’ve done before?

Let’s say just as an example, you teach copywriting and traffic. Let’s say you have two back end sequences one is about copywriting and sells a copywriting product, the other sequence is about traffic and sells a traffic product at the end of the sequence.

So after going through the first sequence, if they indicated at some point maybe on a questionnaire or by clicking a certain link, that they may have indicated they are more interested in one subject than the other, could you then put people in to different sequences based on how they’ve acted in the previous sequence?

Micah Mitchell: There’s two ways to do it, so yes absolutely that is what everyone is doing. There’s people who branch which is essentially you’re going down the path and if you click this link you branch up, if you don’t it’s going to branch down.

So there is that kind of thing but even in the example of the 8 emails in a sequence think of selling something as a campaign, that is what Infusion calls it. So you have a campaign to sell something which might include 10 or 12 sequences. They might be going in the first sequence and if they click the first link in the first email, the first sequence completely dies and they just hop over the the second sequence. But the first sequence had maybe 10 emails in case they didn’t click the first one to keep following up.

That is what happens, each individual sequence is typically based on an action so if the customer does this we are going to do all of this stuff.  Those are all just waiting for the customer to take actions but a lot of those actions also cancel an existing sequence when they jump over to another one.

Joey Bushnell: So you could be selling the same thing but you are selling it to people in different ways?

For example if someone is really engaging with your sequence and opening and clicking all of the emails that you are sending, would they go through a different sequence than someone who is luke warm and not opening many emails, they are skipping some, they are opening but not clicking.

Would you send different emails to that person based on their behavior or would you keep it the same regardless of how they behave?

Micah Mitchell: You would and the way I think about it is fishing.

So with your example of the copywriting and traffic, they might have opted-in for copywriting and then you’ve got a copywriting fishing sequence where it’s basically sending them emails and as soon as they click one and that is the hook then they jump into a sequence more about that subject or that part of copywriting. So definitely you can hone in on that.

Then a lot of people also like the idea of cold, luke warm and hot leads and depending on how many times they click or whatever Infusion will say, now you are jumping up to hot lead so they’ll have a sequence based on “hot lead” that just totally takes over, cancels whatever else is happening and says this person is hot, now we are doing these things.

Joey Bushnell: OK let’s talk a little bit more about that, I know in InfusionSoft you can actually score your leads so when you are scoring leads Micah, what contributes to whether a lead is cold or hot?

Micah Mitchell: First of all let me define the way they do their lead scoring. They have these five little flames, so they really go along with the analogy of how hot the lead is.

They allow you to set up your own criteria saying if someone gets a tag or marker maybe they go up one flame, now they are one level of heat and if they end up with 10 tags they go up to two and so forth. You can pick your own criteria to do it.

The way that I do it is, I look at it slightly different. I should also state that the lead score they are using they use more for call center representatives where they say “When I walk in which lead should I ring first, should I call cold or hot?” So they have all of these emails to maintain their lead base and trying to get people past a certain point to qualify for a call.

In an internet marketing sense, tags in and of themselves handle a lot of that segmentation for you but you can pick your own criteria and warm them up. Like I said it’s a little bit more for the call center but it is helpful and in my case I really look at what they are buying because there are so many things they can click, it’s not quite as relevant to me.

But I have products where some are really expensive and some are cheap so I build up their leads score by saying how much money have they spent with us? That is more of a qualifier for me at this point with some of my info so a lot of things there but hopefully that helps?

Joey Bushnell: Sure and are there any other things contributing to that? Like whether they actually open your emails or other things like that, that could you score them on?

Micah Mitchell: Opening, no. Infusion doesn’t really offer a lot of automation based off of open rates just because they say it’s not really something they can rely on too much.

But clicking, absolutely. Again that becomes a tag so when I say a tag can create a lead score, well a click can cause a tag and other actions they take can cause a tag.

So aside from open, almost anything they do, even in the text messaging world, if they reply to a keyword you can have that apply a tag and change their lead score if you wanted to.

Joey Bushnell: Do you have any tips for keeping our list clean? I know that InfusionSoft is quite strict when it comes to being marked as spam they don’t give you too many second chances. So what can we do to make sure we are only ever contacting people who really want to hear from us?

Micah Mitchell: That’s a good question. The one good things is Infusion forces that there is always an unsubscribe link so they do a few things to keep people compliant automatically.

For example, if you upload a list of contacts they might only send to a few of them before they decide the list is safe enough to send to. So they police in a way which is really good overall when you consider that you are sharing some of those servers with other users and you want that overall score to be good.

But on an individual basis, I’ll start with this even though it sounds obscure, it’s all about the intent and what I mean by that is you can have people opt-in legitimately and do everything legitimately but still mark you as spam and you could steal a list and they don’t mark you as spam. The point is if the customer marks you as spam that is the ultimate indicator. People get caught up on the technical details. By the way, never, ever, ever buy a list that was just me just giving an example, they are always a waste of money.

But lets say you have your old customer base and you’re just getting into InfusionSoft and you think 2I have all of these customers, I’m going to put them into InfusionSoft on email”. Infusion is going to ask how old they are so forth. Even though there is that temptation to email them all, everyone feels it, you just make sure you follow the rules and your intent is there. You’ll see people reporting spam and that is your indicator.

One really big tip if you get InfusionSoft, the biggest tip of all is, I would get a good relationship with their email compliance guys because they don’t want to lock anyone out of InfusionSoft. When they have problems they have an attitude of “let’s figure out if we can fix the cause” they don’t want to lose a customer, they want to help you fix it.

So a lot of customers avoid that or are afraid of it but I would say call them up and say “This is what I’ve got, this is what I’m thinking of doing, do you think that is OK?” I’ve seen experiences where they say go ahead email it out and we will keep an eye on it, if there is a problem we can talk about it but thanks for letting us know. So that way you have deescalated even a potential problem.

Joey Bushnell: Do you ever delete contacts if they’ve not been engaged at all for a certain period of time? Or would you always try to keep them and reactivate them?

Micah Mitchell: When you say “delete” I might stop emailing contacts in some cases but I wouldn’t delete them just for having historical data.

But as far as emails go, if they don’t do anything, what I like to do is start one of those fishing campaigns where I email them every 60 or 90 days basically so now I’m not degrading my overall open rates by just sending too much email to people who don’t answer but I’m not giving up on that lead.

That sequence might last 2 years but it’s an easy sequence to write. It’s a simple tip where you go and write 8 emails that are timeless and then you put them in every 90 days for 2 years. That way your coldest, oldest leads pass in to there and if they click one of those things and reactivate themselves so you can open up contact again. It’s like a last effort that doesn’t hurt your overall sender score.

Joey Bushnell: Do you have any recommended plug-ins that can enhance our experience with InfusionSoft?

Micah Mitchell: Yeah, there are a lot of them so you can go to their market place and look them up but a few of them that come to mind are one from InfusionSoft from the same company that does the CRM but it’s an add-on called Customer Hub and they bought it from someone in the after market a few years ago. So they support it which is nice because it comes with all of that support.

But customer hub is one of the coolest things. That is the portal where customers can view their own invoices, change their credit cards and manage themselves so it’s a really good supplement to all of this push marketing, you have a portal for them to go in to.

It is also a membership site where you can lock down content and they can also click on links and they can automate themselves a little within there, meaning the customer can go into the membership site you can ask them questions, they can fill out a survey which applies tags or click links which apply tags. So customer hub is a really big one and that is what my whole thing is built on and I highly recommend it.

Another one for anyone who is into analytics is something called Report Mojo and it’s an add-on that uses InfusionSofts API which briefly, is how you can extend InfusionSoft, so it’s a software but they have a whole interface where you can write your own code if you feel like it.

But Report Mojo, that uses that API, that one is cool because it takes a lot of the data in Infusion which is compartmentalized, it’s maybe in different parts of the system or where you can look at it you can’t quite break it up in to the ways you want to. It allows you to break all of that data out and does a lot of graphical representation of the data.

So Report Mojo if you are an analytics nut, that one is a must have.

Customer Hub is a must have right out of the gates, it’s so valuable.

Joey Bushnell: Thank you for that, so my final question is do you have any final tips for us for getting the very most out of InfusionSoft?

Micah Mitchell: The main tip which I even give to 8 figure businesses who use InfusionSoft is just keeping it simple and being adaptable.

The bigger businesses but sometimes the start up businesses really want it exactly the way they want it. They get hung up on that aspect instead of putting in some form of simple automation that can begin doing something for them now. So that is a big thing, adapt to what it will do and keep it simple at least as a phase one. I understand the need for branding the bigger you get. But like I said even with big businesses it’s like “do you want to spend 3 months dealing with your whole customized mess or do you want to use it now and start making money?”

So that is the biggest tip, go for it and keep it simple and you’ll figure out enough to then create customization you really want.

Joey Bushnell: So where can we get more of this information form you Micah? You’ve given us some great tips and ideas and I’m sure you’ve got more where that came from so where can we go?

Micah Mitchell: Thank you. My website is mmmastery.com.

Right on the front page you can opt-in for some videos that will take you through, at first a really high level conceptually which is good for people who have not been inside the software, because my other training is once you get InfusionSoft, that is the market I usually deal with, people who have it and are using it and are having problems or people who have had a lot of training but want more things that they can do, so I do a lot of the technical but if you go to mmastery.com then there is a free video series that starts there from the beginning.

It probably assumes that you are a business owner and somewhat familiar with the internet but other than that it warms you up and teaches some of the concepts you need. It’ a free video series that will work whether you have Infusion or not so that is a good place for people to go initially.

Joey Bushnell: When they watch the videos are they going to see inside Infusionsoft? Some of the people listening to this may be thinking this stuff sounds great but without InfusionSoft being right in front of them, it’s difficult to visualize and understand how all this stuff works? Do you teach that side of things?

Micah Mitchell: I do, I said the videos will work without it but it references a link on the page to a demo of Infusionsoft so as soon as they go there and are done with the concept they can dive right in and go and click and look at Infusionsoft’s demo.

Joey Bushnell: Awesome. That brings us to the end of today’s show, thanks everyone for tuning in! Thank you Micah for coming on the show.

Micah Mitchell: Thank you Joey, I appreciate it.

Robert Stover is the author of Strategy Matters and the creator of GrowthMap, a step by step formula which explains how any struggling company can turn things around and experience massive growth.

Robert is also the creator of The Copywriting Master Formula. In this interview we cover a variety of topics including copywriting, marketing strategy and business growth but every insight Robert shares boils down to one thing… A more profitable business for you.

He reveals…

• The Copywriting Master Formula (and why the "Betty Crocker" approach to copy is flawed)
• The ITAP formula to help you identify your next (and easiest to achieve) breakthrough
• Exactly how to come up with game changing ideas that lead to huge business growth
• And much more. You can listen to the entire recording or read the full transcript below...

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Joseph Bushnell:  Hi, welcome to The Online Marketing Show. I’m your host, Joey Bushnell. Today’s special guest is Robert Stover. Robert is a top business growth consultant, copywriter and the author of the book Strategy Matters. Go to Robertstover.com to find out more.

Robert, thank you so much for being on the show with me today.

Robert Stover: Thanks for inviting me, Joey.

Joseph Bushnell: Robert, how did you get involved in this industry of business growth and copywriting?

Robert Stover: Well, it started out, I was actually a NLP sales—I can’t even talk today—I did NLP sales training, going back in ’89, I had a chance to work with Richard Bandler, learned from him and I was teaching sales people about NLP stuff. After that, I had what I call my “29-year-old mid-life crises” and I can remember when it happened…

I’m writing on a white board and teaching sales people these manipulative techniques, and I thought, what am I doing? How did I get here? Did I want to be here? Is this what I went to school to do? And the questions kind of came in. It was a miniature crash and burn there.

So I took six months off, I just stopped doing it and went and somebody gave me some stuff from Jay Abraham, of all people, some transcripts that he had from the ‘90s, or from ’89, and what fascinated me was the marketing. I went after it hard, I used to walk these country roads and down train tracks listening to tapes on marketing and studying marketing and just got fanatic about marketing.

I went back to one of my former sales training clients and said, “Hey, why don’t you have me come back in and consult with you but not on sales, but on this more powerful thing called marketing? You’ve got these great opportunities.” That’s how it launched, is I went back and started doing marketing for him and marketing for other people and looking for the leverage and doing some of these things.

For that particular client, one of the first things we did out of the box, the previous year in the seminar industry in real estate, the previous year they had mailed out this beautiful four-color brochure, professionally designed, just gorgeous thing, cost $20,000 to print. They mailed it out, they got one sign up.

Joseph Bushnell: Oh, no!

Robert Stover: So their annual event came back around and armed with my new-found knowledge, I’m like, “Hey, why don’t we actually do direct response copy?” They’re like, “No, no, no, we’re never sending out, let’s just send out these flyers,” and they were doing some black and white print flyers that there were mailing out. I’m going, “That’s insanity, let’s actually sell this thing.” He’s going, “No, that’s what the telemarketing team is for, they’ll call up, they’ll sell it, we’ll send out flyers.”

So young and stupid, so I went and wrote a long copy sales letter for this thing. I went and interviewed the people that did it, I interviewed the owner’s sons, I interviewed realtors that were there and it was kind of this whole vibe, this huge event, excitement. I packed all of that into the headline, I featured that. I wrote this letter and I went and showed it to his vice president at the time. The vice president said, “This is absolutely what you were told not to do, this is awful, and we’re not going to do it.” He goes, “I will not show this to the gentleman, the owner.”

So I end ran and showed it and the boss reads it and looks at it and he thinks a minute and he goes, “Let’s send it.” So instead of mailing his entire 80,000 list—this is back prior to email—they sent it to 6,000 people.

I stuck it in an envelope with no return address, so it wasn’t branded like typical stuff, no return address, and in the letter, because I didn’t know when this was going to hit in the mail and what not, I just put a Friday at 5 PM and I figured, well, if it gets to them on a Saturday they’ll think it’s the next Friday and if it gets to them on a Thursday, they’ll think they have to sign up by that Friday, because I have no idea when this is going to happen. We send this out, three days later the phone starts ringing, and ringing and ringing and ringing and in a week we sold, how many was it? It was like 900 of these seats at $395.

Joseph Bushnell: Nice. Out of 6,000?

Robert Stover: Yeah.

Joseph Bushnell: Wow, brilliant.

Robert Stover: It was massive. He’s stoked, the secretary wants to quit because all of these calls were coming in, they weren’t going to the sales team because it end ran the sales team as well. The sales team is ticked off because they’ve lost all their commissions. The secretary is ticked off because she is going, and when she comes in in the morning, there’s 200 messages on the answering machine with credit card numbers, they were leaving their credit card numbers on the answering machine and she’s having to take all this information down and as soon as she gets it clear, it would just fill up again. It was just craziness. The owner is stoked and I discovered both the power of marketing and the power of copywriting.

That was pretty much the launch and that got me a reputation among a lot of speakers and trainers and that’s sort of where I launched out into the marketing world.

Joseph Bushnell: Cool. So you’ve got a course, Robert, named The Copywriting Master Formula. But it’s slightly different to a lot of the other copy courses that are out there because you’ve got a bit of a different take on copywriting, so can we talk a little bit about that?

Robert Stover: Yeah, real quick, and I’m going to say something, a lot of your listeners, they want to hear stuff about copy and they’re very familiar with hearing copywriting, especially if they’re in the online world or blogging world, so we’re going to give them a little different take on that. Also what I want to hammer home a little bit later, is there’s something actually more important than copy that they should probably be focusing on before the copy. We’ll touch both bases there.

My take on copywriting, if you’re a typical copywriter and you’re just starting out or you buy a course, usually you end up with a template, which I call “The Betty Crocker” approach to copy, which is… “OK, you do a sub-head or a pre-head, (an eyebrow, with your insider language) you do a headline, you do a sub-head, you do a salutation, you do an intro paragraph. Then you go into either the pain or the benefits depending on the structure you’re taking, then you go into a bullet section, then you go into an offer section, then maybe you come back with more bullets and you handle objections, then you reach a close, then you bring in a time element and restriction or scarcity. Then you bring in a bonus, then you do another close and a summary, call to action, then you do a P.S., a P.P.S., and maybe a P.P.P.S.” There’s your Betty Crocker copy.

The other approach is, you start to realize that doesn’t work in all situations and every situation is unique, like a thumbprint. Every situation you sell in is a thumbprint, there’s something unique about that.

When the Betty Crocker doesn’t work, after you start sending copy a while, you end up with a big, giant bucket of copy technique. I can do this, and you’ve things like underlining and bolding and highlighting and scrolling stuff on the side. You end up with this sales tactic and this sales tactic and maybe you should and maybe you shouldn’t sales tactics, and so you end up with all this huge assortment.

In fact, one of the books out there has, I think it’s 2,200 or 2,300 copywriting techniques in it. When you sit to write copy, let’s be serious, can you access all those techniques as you’re cranking copy out and is that a structure? I’m going, no. We know movies have a structure, Hollywood has a movie structure, there is a structure.

So I started looking at what’s the underlying structure of copy and I looked at some traditional ways to structure stuff and there’s the attention, interest, desire, action. Well, yeah, you got to get their attention, but interest—what does that mean? What’s the difference between interest and desire? Isn’t what gets peoples attention, that which they’re already interested in? Where are handling objections in that? Where is this thing that Aristotle called “ethos” and authority, like you might see in Cialdini’s book on influence?

I realized these formulas weren’t doing it, they had gaping holes in them, so that’s still not something that you can base your copy off of.

Then I had an “ah-ha” moment, where I flipped it around backwards—and we’ll hear that again a little later, on flipping things around and starting at the end—but I flipped it and said, “What if I stop looking at what I’m trying to do to somebody, which is influence and persuade, and here’s all my techniques to do that” and instead I looked at a buying decision as a subset of decision making?

Well, there are models out there on how human’s come to make decisions, so I started studying it from when no one is there to persuade them, how do they sell themselves?

From that, I came up with a structure and all of a sudden this huge bucket of different techniques I had, fell into place. Like, “Oh, I get it, here’s why I’m doing that, it’s because it does this function in the decision-making process.” Whether it’s amplifying the pain or whether instantly they turn to look for a solution or it’s amplifying the authority of the speaker and writer because they’re looking for evidence or it’s doing this.

From that came The Copywriting Master Formula. It was my attempt to take all of the hundreds of techniques and to seal them into a repeatable thing, that I can go into a situation and go, “Okay, do I have this major chunk of decision making? Do I have this chunk, do I have this chunk, and do I have this chunk? Then below each of those elements you’ve got dozens of things.

If your listeners want to go look, I’ve got a free video up, it’s about 30 minutes long, I give the whole technique away and it’s at SecretCopyFormula.com. If they want to sign up, they have a chance to opt in and I even go into more in depth into the formula, so there’s a lot of free stuff there if they want to go out and get that.

Joseph Bushnell: OK, cool. Is there anything about that you could share with us now on the call itself, like what some of those major steps of the formula would be?

Robert Stover: Sure. If we start with decision making, you don’t make decisions in a vacuum. You just don’t go, “Hey, I think I’ll go buy a Mercedes today.” Something happened before that.

Usually what happens is common, is a problem. Somebody starts to get a bit of a problem, then that problem grows. “Well, I was minding my own business, all of a sudden my car needed $300 worth of work done to it. Then the guy at work, the other consultant, pulled up in a new Mercedes. Now my car, I’m spending money because it needs repairs, and now another guy looks better than me. Then I’m driving through a scary part of town and my car starts making funny noises like it’s going to break down.” Now I’m getting a little more scared, right? I use a pebble into water as an illustration. Problems always start and then they start to ring out and get bigger and bigger and bigger.

So in the formula, we talk about first of all, how do you even bring up a problem and there’s, I think, 20 formulas on how to give somebody a problem. Then there’s formulas on how do you take that problem and amplify it out and make it worse. Almost always then people are going to go a couple different ways.

If they’re scientific-minded, they look for causes. This is like one of the big ah-ha’s in the formula, as I went, “Oh, my word, no one uses causes.” Let me give you an example: OK, my car is breaking down or something, some people go, “Well, what’s wrong with the car, I’ll just fix the car,” and they kind of go at it that way. Or in business, if there’s a problem, what you’re taught in business school is, “OK, here’s a problem, what’s the root cause of that problem?” and that’s how you are taught to go after solving it, and that’s where a lot of people instinctively go is for the cause, what actually caused that problem.

If I’m overweight, what’s the cause? A great example of this, and I talked about it in the video, is out here we had a product called Cortislim for losing weight and their whole premise went like this: “You’re fat and you’re overweight. Oh, but it’s not your fault, scientists have discovered that when we’re under stress, our body secretes a hormone called cortisol. Cortisol causes us to store fat around our bellies. You can take all the exercise you want, you can do all the diets you want, etc., but as long as this stress hormone is in you, you’re going to be packing fat on around your belly. But with Cortislim, we can take that pill and suddenly it blocks the cortisol in your body from accumulating and you just lose weight naturally”. There’s an example of somebody using a cause to sell a product and what I discovered was, no one has ever written on that before.

You go to some of the greats, I mean, these guys are great, like say Gary Halbert and people like that, they never talk about cause and finding the cause or using a new cause in copy, yet if you study their copy, Eugene Schwartz, Gary Halbert, John Carlton, Clayton Makepeace, all these great guys all go to causes. I went, “Oh, my word, it’s right there in their copy, it’s been in front of me for 20 years and no one has ever identified that before.”

Another example of the cause, from medicine, is stomach ulcers. Up until 20 years ago, everybody thought stomach ulcers were too much acid and bad diet and all that acid is eating away at their stomach, causing a lot of pain, creating ulcers, and that’s how they treated it. So what’s the treatment for that? It’s bread and bananas and rice and no spices in your diet and milk, right? Really bland, nasty diet, that’s the cure, that’s what doctors have been doing for 100 years for ulcers. The doctors are smart, they’re intelligent, they had the patient’s best interest in mind, and based off what they believed the cause to be, their solution was a bland diet.

Some researchers come along, I think actually one of them was out of the UK, and they went like, “Hey, wait a minute, around these ulcers, when we’re looking at them under microscopes, there’s all these bacteria,” and they went, “No, it couldn’t be.” They started giving antibiotics for stomach ulcers—bam, knocked them out. The true cause of stomach ulcers were bacteria. No matter how well meaning you were, trying to treat stomach ulcers assuming the wrong cause doesn’t get you any cure. On the other hand, as soon as they started treating the right cause, it started working.

This causation thing is prevalent in decision making and in business and everywhere else, but it’s just never been introduced in the copy. Yet if you study great copy, you’ll find that great copywriters instinctively often go to a new cause being discovered, so the pattern would go like this: You’ve got a problem, you tried this, it didn’t work; you tried this, it didn’t work; you tried this, it didn’t work. Or if it’s a story: I tried this, it didn’t work; I tried Y and it didn’t work; I tried Z and it didn’t work, but then I stumbled across this new discovery, this new cause of the problem and when I did that, the weight fell off or my business exploded, or whatever it is you’re after, then muscles packed onto my body! There is a real quick thing, it’s not even a whole formula, but causes.

When people get hit with problems, the other place they look is solution and it’s like, “Oh, crud,” and they instantly go for a solution.

The other place people look, if they’re catastrophizers, as I like to say, strategists, they go, “Oh, future causes. If I’ve got this other problem, what other problems is that going to cause,” and it starts to ripple out.

What we know from the book Spin Selling, they studied 30,000 sales people, the absolute best sales people didn’t handle objections and didn’t try, they weren’t great closers, but what they were awesome at was taking a problem, dropping that problem into the water and going, “What other problems is that causing?” OK, so you’re a little low on money, is that causing stress with the family? Does that mean you can’t take some of the vacations you wanted to? Does that mean you’re not going to retire comfortably? What about sending your kids to school? Not going to be able to do that, are you? You might even lose your home, going to get in trouble with the IRS (if you’re over here, I don’t know what the UK revenue system is). So the best sales people go after causes and for example, Dan Kennedy’s formula is problem amplified, so that’s simply looking for the implications of a problem.

Next we’ll go to solution. Usually we don’t look at one solution, the human brain seems to look at three. If you go to copy, a lot of times you’ll see this three rhythm going, or if you watch people in your life make decisions, you’ll see they look at three options and that’s about all we can handle and juggle for some reason. I mean, that’s not the limit, but our brain seems to go, “Oh, do I do this, this, or this?”

Well, how do you choose among those? Here was the other big discovery, it’s criteria. There is this thing called criteria in decision making. If you go into copy, it’s all over the place in people’s copy but it’s never been talked about.

A great example of this is, I had a client in the mortgage industry, they’re selling loans to homeowners. In the US, when people would call them, there are all these ads of people doing all these bogus rates, phony rates, low rates, and so what consumers out here got in the habit of was ring, ring, “Hi, Joey, what’s your interest rate?” If you said anything that wasn’t as low as the phony rate in the paper, they hung up on you. But the truth is, everybody’s situation is different and everything is unique.

My client created a software that did an analysis and what it discovered is, and it’s kind of a complex story on how it works out, but based on how long people are in the home, based on the pay-back rate, all this other stuff, very often the lowest interest in the short term carried a much higher cost. So if you got a lower rate and you’re in a home for 7 years, not the full 30, you might actually pay way more out of pocket with a lower interest than with a higher interest. It’s crazy, but it was for real, but getting anybody to hear that was impossible. They want to hear the lowest rate and they’ve been trained by all the other mortgage companies, “Rate shop, rate shop, rate shop.”

The problem my client is having is that people are calling up: ring, ring, “What’s your rate?” They’d give an honest rate—bye, click.

We solved that with criteria and we did it with a question and the simple question was: ring, ring, ring, “What’s your interest rate?” We trained the sales people to go, “I’m sorry, did you want the lowest interest rate or the lowest total cost loan?” They just shut up and the consumer goes, “Uh, what’s the difference?” Then the sales people go, “What, no one has ever shown you this before? Have you talked to other people and they haven’t told you? Well, that’s just wrong.” Then it gave them, “Well here, let me show you,” because they could send them spread sheets and stuff, and it’s like, “Well, let me show you the difference and show you how this works and show you why,” and it opened the people’s mind to a conversation, it was extraordinarily successful. But what made that possible was that step called criteria.

Criteria, when we’re looking at two or three things, which one is the best? Criteria might be things we value, like speed, time, cost, etc., those are our criteria that we use to juggle. I had not seen that written much about in copy, so that’s one of the steps in the formula and it comes from how we naturally make decisions.

Then we have to go from all of those to one. How do we choose just the one? We have to move to preference. Again, I found patterns out there in copy, fundamental patterns that: A) That’s the way we make decisions naturally, we look at many options, we take criteria, we narrow to one.

Well, I started seeing ads that follow that same fundamental thing and I use the example of a luxury car ad. It starts and it shows, I don’t know, six or seven luxury cars all coming at you down the road and it goes, “If you take away all of the luxury vehicles that don’t have 5 square feet trunks,” and two or three vanish off the road. “If you take away those that don’t have four-wheel disc brakes,” and two more vanish. “And you take away the ones that don’t have seated air conditioning,” and there’s only one car left. “Your choice is obvious, it’s the XJ7 Roadster.” So there is an example, I call it the decision funnel.

We do that to ourselves all the time. Advertisers do it, I’ve never seen it written about before. It’s a very common pattern you can do to create exclusivity.

If any of your listeners out there are freelancers that sell individual product, they’re always going to come up against competitors and a very fast way to set yourself apart, say they’re into copy or something, I don’t know, and you go, “You know what? Out of all the copywriters that you could hire online, there are five that are really good.” You admit the truth. “There are five that are really good. Of those really great copywriters that live in the UK, there are two of them. Of those that specialize in online businesses, I’m the only one.” There’s an example of using that decision funnel and coming right down to a point, so you went from the broad selection, you admit it and anyway, those formulas and many more are free.

From there, obviously they have to take action and from action, I throw up benefits on the end because that’s what people want and that is what’s kind of pulling the decision through. I’m going to make this decision with all the good stuff I’m going to get and then we move into judgment.

Here’s where almost everyone falls down, which is what we forget about, is once we’ve made a decision in our personal lives, we come back and go, “Was that a good decision or a bad decision?” We go, “Oh.” All of our customers do the same thing, so we have to sell through that judgment phase.

All along this process, there are three other elements at play and one is the constant search for evidence and proof. What most copywriters, at least when you look at a lot of online copy, they’ll do all the copy and then they hit a segment near the close where they start handling objections all at once in a big clump, but that’s not when people are objecting. People are actually objecting every time you make a statement or a claim through all the copy.

What I say is that search for, it’s called reputation and rhetoric, objection handling has to start very early and you do it with almost every major claim you make going through the copy, not waiting until the end.

The other thing is to search for proof and evidence, depending if you’re a sales guy you’re offering proof, if you’re a consumer you’re looking for evidence. But again, the evidence starts not at the end and not with a cluster of testimonials at the end, it starts way back when you’re stating a problem. Well, what’s your proof that’s actually a problem? Do you have supporting evidence that that’s a problem? What’s your proof this is the real and true cause of something? What’s your proof that these are actually the implications they’re going to have?

If you study great speeches, get a book like on the 100 best speeches ever, something like that, and you study that, you’ll find out that they’re offering proof and evidence very early on, they’re not waiting until the end.

Then the other final part, extraordinarily powerful part, and I took the word from Aristotle, is ethos, and that is: What is the power and credibility of you as the writer or speaker have on the entire process?

One example of ethos, some of your listeners would be familiar with the great copywriter, Gary Bencivenga, probably one of the greatest that ever lived. Well, out on his page, selling his stuff, he does something that was kind of interesting, he does something that he does not teach in his $5,000 course, and it’s an ethos technique. What he does is before he tells you how good he is, because he’s writing in the first person, he first tells you everything he’s bad at. He goes into a segment of, “You know what? If you’re looking for a guy to fix a car, I open the hood of a car and I stare at it like a cow staring at a fence. I’m worthless around the house, I can’t fix anything, I can’t do this, I can’t do athletics and I can’t do this.”

So he’s just told you all the stuff he’s terrible at, and then he goes, “But when it comes to copy, I know 30 different things you can do to a headline to increase it by 300%. I know tweaks that you can do on your offer, I know things, I eat and breathe it, I study it 16 hours a day.” If he had just come out and said that, you’d go, “What a braggart.”

Joseph Bushnell: Yeah.

Robert Stover: “What a boastful man.” But by his first going, “Oh, I’m so cruddy at this stuff, I’m a klutz, I’m this and that and the other,” and then coming out and going, “I’m a chess master,” the believability, first of all. It’s, “Wow, that’s very believable, I believe him when he says it because he told me all this stuff he was bad at,” but secondly it’s like, “Oh, wow, he’s a nice guy.”

So the definition of ethos is: The good man speaking. There’s two major components to it. 1) Do you know yourself? Are you smart, are you knowledgeable? Let’s take loan guys again, let’s take a guy that’s been in the business 20 years, let’s say he’s using my client’s software and he can show you all this stuff about loans. That’s a guy that’s extraordinarily knowledgeable.

Now let’s take your brother-in-law, you like your brother-in-law, he’s a good guy but he just got into the business six months ago. Is he that knowledgeable?

Joseph Bushnell: Probably not yet.

Robert Stover: Yeah. He’s got your best interest in mind, but he’s not that knowledgeable. On the other hand, you can take somebody that’s extraordinary smart and knowledgeable in an area and they’re a snake and they’re going to take advantage of you and things like that, so your guard is up against them.

So you have to have two things and it’s not likeability, it’s are they knowledgeable? Like a doctor, smart knowledgeable? And do they have your best interests in mind? When you pair those two you get that lightening in a bottle called ethos, where people just trust you.

Joseph Bushnell: Brilliant.

Robert Stover: But you have to pair those two together. They respect knowledge and they respect that you have their best interests in mind, but there’s a lot of people that have our best interests in mind that are stupid and there’s a lot of people that are knowledgeable that are going to try and take our money from us and rob us.

So those two have to come together and Aristotle discovered that when they do, it creates a very powerful speaker/sales writer salesman. So that’s the other element that the formula goes a lot into.

Joseph Bushnell: Awesome. Thank you so much for sharing that, Robert. If we want to dive in deeper, we can go to your website and watch your video and check out more of that, can’t we?

Robert Stover: Absolutely.

Joseph Bushnell: Awesome. OK. You mentioned earlier that there was something that’s even more important than copy. I’m wondering what could that possibly be, Robert?

Robert Stover: What could that possibly be? As I looked, and I’ve got the advantage of being an older dude, so I’m looking over my history and I look over my work with clients and I started noticing copy wasn’t always the answer. It’s a powerful one, it’s not always the answer.

I noticed something very simple: Strategy. A great strategy can overcome bad copy. Good copy can’t overcome a bad strategy. The world’s greatest copywriter can’t write his way out of a bad strategy, not going to happen. On the other hand, if you have a brilliant strategy, the copy doesn’t have to be that good.

I started noticing these situations where we changed some factors on the ground, not the copy, and it just created blockbuster results. Coming out of that, I wrote my book, Strategy Matters, and it became a passion, was helping people find the right strategy. So before the copy has to come strategy.

Copy would be the servant of strategy and there’s a lot of people spending a lot of money on copy courses that should be spending more time on the core fundamental strategy when they go in.

Let me give a quick rule of thumb on what strategy is. We’ll talk about the ITAP formula…

The formula is called ITAP. The I stands for identity and identity is made up of what’s my purpose, what’s my mission, what am I actually trying to accomplish here?

Quick true story: In the real estate market here in the US, there were two individuals, both started a company, pretty much trying to do the same thing, training and marketing themselves. One individual wanted to get wealthy, the other wanted to have the largest ad agency in the real estate industry. They started off with fundamental different purposes. The one that wanted to have the largest ad agency, he had staff, he had people, he had nicer buildings, because all of that goes into largest agency. They also ended up with massive overhead and about to go bankrupt.

The guy that wants to get wealthy, he’s looking for ways to cut costs, to sell better, to add new products that people buy more of, going out with repeat products, being careful about offering too many services that are labor intensive, things like that. There’s an example of two different goals, created radically different companies.

The first part of your strategy is: What the heck are you trying to do? What are you in business to do? Just get to the guy that wants to make a lot of profit versus the guy that wants to serve people the best.

I was actually cruising through the Steve Jobs’ biography that I’m like the last guy on planet earth to read, but it was very clear, his whole thing was about making insanely great products, not making a lot of money, but the money followed the insanely great product. His thing was, in his words, “create a dent in the universe, I want to make insanely great products.” Versus other guys that he didn’t like that just wanted to make money. That was one of his beefs with modern business school. Those are two different objectives and goals going forward.

I’ll give you another simple one. One of my favorite questions is why and we can instantly make your listeners here strategic consultants with this one three-letter word: Why? Typically people are taught to talk about, to looking for causes, for example, the Toyota Six Sigma and the five whys: Something is wrong? Why? Oh, well, because of this. Well, why? Oh, well, because of this and this. Well, why is that happening? Because of this. And what it does is it reduces you down smaller and smaller and smaller until you find in theory the root cause.

The way I like to do it is the opposite. I take it the other way. Somebody comes to me with a problem, or a goal statement. For example, one of my clients came and they go, “We want to reduce objection handling, can you give us training in handling objections.” I’m like, “Why?” They look at me like I’m an idiot and go, “Well, so we can sell more, make more sales.” I went, “Well, why do you want to make more sales?” They look at me like I’m an idiot again and was like, “Well, duh, so we can make more money, more profit.” I said, “Well, why don’t we make that our goal? Instead of coming and asking me how do we handle objections, why don’t you come and ask me, ‘How can we make more money?’” They’re like, “Oh.”

We ended up creating a solution where instead of handling objections, their sales people were cold calling manager’s offices and selling the managers a $1,800 management training course and they’d kind of: Ring, ring, “Hi, you’ve heard of “big guru name,” and they’d start pitching the course over the phone. So I mucked about in their offices and I found out they had a demo tape that after they’d try to do this and call back a bunch of times, they’d offer a demo tape. “Well, here’s our guy actually doing these management lessons.”

Then I mucked around and I found out they had a sheet that listed, I think it was 20 different video cassettes in this course they were selling and the sheet actually listed all of the content. Hey, there’s some bullets! I took that and I took this other stuff and I go, Let’s do this: Call up someone and go ring, ring, “Hi, looking into the future, do you want to grow your business by adding more staff or making the staff you have more productive?” “Oh.” That criteria thing again, right? It was, “Oh, well,” and it really didn’t matter what they answer, and you go, “Great, sitting here on my desk—you’d slap the desk—I’ve got a package with a video and training stuff I’d like to send you on how to do just that, but before I send it, I just want to make sure you even wanted it.”

So they’re thinking I’m insane doing this. Who calls up and says, “You might not even want it.” What they found out was a large majority of the people said, “Well, send it to me.” Then we packaged the video tape and we packaged in a real sales letter with it, but then we did another thing. We’d say, “OK, great. I’m going to send this out three day, it’ll be to you in three days. I’m going to set an appointment to talk to you on the fourth day.” They’d set up a second appointment right then and there.

They’d send this out and one of the other things I’d discovered is they had these insane testimonials on how great the product was and how people had used it to transform their business and motivate their people better. They sent it out and then that same day they’d send a fax, end of the day—today it would be an email—but it was like, “Hey, so-and-so, great talking to you, I shipped your product, oh, I thought you might find this success story of interest.”

The next day they would send a fax, “So-and-so, I was thinking about you, here’s another success story I thought you’d find interesting.” The third day they’d get another fax: “So-and-so, your package is coming today, make sure your secretary comes in, we’ll be talking to you tomorrow, make sure you watched the video. Oh, by the way, here’s another instance of a guy that took this and increased his productivity massively.” Fourth day they’d call. In the sales letter, I threw an offer in which was, “If you call me, I’ll throw in another extra set of this management tape on this other topic for free.”

Joseph Bushnell: Cool.

Robert Stover: All of a sudden, people start calling them back before the four days are up and then when they call… anyway, the upshot of that was, they increased their sales 300% in 2 weeks of an $1,800 product, because we went after an objective, instead of the initial problem, by using that why technique.

The next tap in T is target… who are you targeting, who is your audience? We can go a lot into depth on this, it’s a critical leverage point. I was just recently working with a business in the health industry and they were targeting like everybody but they’re in a cash flow situation so they need to close deals faster. In their industry, their sales cycle is two years; hard to close sales fast on a two-year sales cycle. When they close, they’re worth a million dollars a month, but until then, you got to survive until you close one of those puppies.

But there were some deals that were closing in three and four months, so it was just like an obvious, I came in and went, “Give me the profile of the people that are closing in three and four months, tell me about that business?” They went to work and the profile became, healthcare plans with under 30,000 members, was the prime thing.

Instead of targeting people with hundreds of thousands of members, we just had them run through their database, they had all the stats, pull up the companies that have about 30,000 people in their database and instead of cold calling them with sales people, we FedEx’d, we went right after them with an executive briefing which were major changes coming into healthcare industry, we will fly out and do an executive brief to your team that will show you hot juicy fact one, hot juicy fact two, hot juicy fact three, and how you can reduce rejection rates and all this other stuff.

Then they would follow up and they followed up with the president going, “Hi, this is the president of such-and-such company and we sent you a thing on an executive briefing, I want to fly my team out, is this something you’d want or not?” All of a sudden they’re closing, 20% of those companies are going, “Yeah,” and they started closing deals in three and four months. Radically different approach, but it came by choosing a separate target in their business.

Joseph Bushnell: OK.

Robert Stover: In all of our businesses, who we choose to select as clients or targets is a massive strategic decision and as I look over, the businesses that succeeded and failed are those that had huge breakthroughs, that T in the ITAP formula was massive.

The next one was A, which is approach. This one kind of throws people. It’s a blend of your marketing channels, how do we market out and it’s a blend of how we actually use those channels together. I look at it not like separate channels all over the place, but I look at it like a football team.

In a football team, at least US football, some guys block, some guys end run and fake, and other guys run through the holes, but it’s a team unity effort. When I look at channels and media, I try and turn them into a football team, not individual efforts. OK, here we do this and over here we do this and then this channel, we got Twitter and we got Facebook and we’ve got our blog and we’ve got PPC and we’ve got this and they’re all working separately. It might be the same message going down all those channels, but they’re not working together in a team unity.

Team unity would be an example of, let me take your sales people, let me have them call up somebody, offer them a package, now let’s take your direct material and put it in that, now let’s add in the testimonials, now let’s come back and close. So you’re using all the media but in a unified manner. I don’t have a better way to explain that. The illustration I gave earlier of the 300% in 2 weeks is an example of a unified approach to altering your strategy on your approach.

Another example, I work with a company and they work with kids with learning disabilities. Learning disabilities—when you use that word—people tend to think more extreme cases of mental disabilities. But the truth was, these are kids that were more ADHD, they couldn’t concentrate in class, they were really, really smart but they were only getting C’s. The way it was sold was: “Knock, knock, hi, we’d like to talk to you about this program with children with learning disabilities in your private school,” and they’d go, “We don’t have any of those children.” Not the most effective sales strategy.

What I did was I changed it, they had a huge amount of information that an average teacher could use in an average classroom to work with struggling students or kids that were kind of in the struggle range. Instead we said, “Hey, so-and-so, I’m with this company, we work with these children, we’ve got so much information your teachers could use right now and when’s your next teacher’s meeting? We’d love to come and present all these strategies that your teachers could use in the classroom and make teaching more effective.” They’re like, “Oh, well, come on in.”

So then we get in and we do the chat in front of the teachers and it was pure information, it was not sales. I mean, it did kind of stroke the problem, but we were giving them strategies they could use and then they’d go, at the end, what did all the teachers ask, “How do we get this program?” And it was done. The administrator is over there like, “Oh, well, maybe I should talk to you.” That was an example of changing an approach; that increased sales 50%, instantly when the approach changed. That is kind of a different away to look at it, but that’s approach.

P is what’s your proposition? Which would include your product, your offer. It would include the positioning and all of those elements include your promise when you go in.

In the mortgage industry, I have this client and they sold to the mortgage industry, so they sold to loan officers and they were selling their product based on “we can increase your sales”. I had done some research a couple years earlier and I found out that referrals was a hot button. At the time, the internet was blowing up and I said, “Here’s how to turn CPAs and financial planners into an internet super highway.” That exploded. They could mail that out to a cold list and get a 13% response rate.

Then we modified it as time changed and moved to one of the fellows that had used this program and he was generating $500,000 a year in referral commissions and it was: How to Become a $500,000 a Year Referral Machine. That ran for 10 years, that was worth millions of dollars, that one thing. But by changing the core proposition you’re going to the market with, it radically alters, that’s the other key point on your strategy there. It can be the promise, it can be the positioning of your product, it can be your product. You know what? Stop selling this product, let’s do another product.

Those are four major things…

The I, what’s your identity, what are you trying to do? What’s your purpose, what’s your mission?

The target, the T, who am I going after? Who’s my client, who’s my prospect?

The A, what is the approach I’m going to take to get them? Don’t think just in terms of channels—which you have to—but in terms of making them work in unity.

Then P, what’s my proposition I’m coming to them with, and the proposition is, the product, the offer, the promise the product is making and the positioning of it.

Joseph Bushnell: Excellent. So any one of those four could lead to a massive breakthrough but if we make improvements in all four of those areas, it’s going to be really exponential, isn’t it?

Robert Stover: Yes. There’s a caution though and here’s what will throw you… you may only want to change one of those.

Joseph Bushnell: Oh, OK?

Robert Stover: What I found out is almost every business ends up morphing around, it’s kind of like evolutionary cycles and how bats in one area develop bigger ears and only eat fruit and in another area they got tiny, little ears and they eat insects, and they specialize.

Well, all the businesses tend to specialize around their food source. However they started and they start to get their leads or their approach and they’re getting business, they tend to structure around that. It’s hard enough to change one of those, like if you’re using one approach or one channel and you go from using classified ads or you go from magazine ads that are kind of branding oriented to using PPC, which is response measurable, ordered, that’s like throwing the whole—the company can hardly handle that and survive.

If you change two things at once, it breaks apart.

It’s almost like the company, so yes, it would be exponential and often just changing one is exponential, but if you go changing two or three at the same time, it blows apart.

It’s like the company, the organism, can’t handle all that change at once, because it is fundamental and strategic. If you’ve been feeding off one kind of prospect or target market and then you shift target markets, as soon as you shift your target market, already the approach you’re taking and the promises you’re making and the product has to change a little bit. So you really are changing them all at once but if you try to massively change, I’m going to change who I’m going after and I’m going to radically change our marketing channels, you’re going to break the ship. So that’s just a caution.

Joseph Bushnell: So would you in that case just change one thing and then leave it as that or would you then, once you’ve changed something, the organism is still intact, would you then maybe go to something else or would you just leave it at that point?

Robert Stover: I would go to something else.

Joseph Bushnell: Sure, OK.

Robert Stover: Yeah, once we know they’re going to live, they can go to something else, but just like changing who your target is or changing what your core objective is that you’re actually going after, I’m going to go from wanting to be the biggest ad agency to being the most profitable is your core objective under the “I”, that will radically change everything. That’s going to filter down to the whole organization.

So you got to give those things time to go in, and as tempting sometimes as an outside guy to go in, or your listeners go in or they’re working in a company and I go through this talk and they’re going, “Oh, my word! I can change this and change this and change this,” and the company just can’t handle it. They’re going to fall back to what they’re doing to survive or they’re going to break apart.

Joseph Bushnell: OK. Just before we move on to our next topic, one last question about strategy and copy, you mentioned to me in a previous conversation about something called the Ansoff Matrix. How does that apply with this subject?

Robert Stover: Let me tell you the story of it and then I’ll go to how it applies.

Joseph Bushnell: Sure.

Robert Stover: I didn’t originally know it as the Ansoff Matrix, I knew it as some old dealmaker sat down with a wink and goes, “Hey, kid, let me show you something,” and I used to select deals and predict which are going to win and fail and put myself in the highest position to win every single time.

So he sits down and he draws this little matrix, just a square, tic-tac-toe box, on the piece of paper and in the bottom, bottom left, he goes, “Existing product, existing customer” writes that in there. That would be what we call optimization; selling more of your existing stuff to more people, making your web pages work better, making your lead system work better, changing headlines. If somebody is already running ads, changing ads, you’re not doing new stuff. Product manufacturing, going to a wider mouse so the customer uses more of it by accident. All those kinds of things—selling more stuff to existing customers, and I even say existing markets, which is just expanding your market a bit.

Right up from that, so in the upper left, he writes, “Existing customers, new products” So now we’ve got these customers that we have a relationship with, what else can we sell them? Here you get into, if you don’t have something to sell them, you get into affiliate marketing and all of these other things, but affiliate marketing to your own people, not going out cold.

Then he said, “Your existing products to a new market” What we find as we’re doing this is the probabilities of your succeeding are getting smaller and smaller.

If you’re doing marketing and you’re working with any company, I would encourage anybody that wants to do better at marketing, move up in their companies, eventually move on their own, is take a look at the existing company’s marketing and find ways to start making small tweaks. That’s extraordinarily high probability of success, if I tweak a headline, if I tweak an offer, if I tweak our approach to the existing customers, I’ve got an extraordinarily high chance of what I do working.

If I come in and propose, “OK, let’s take and bring new products and services to our existing customers”, I have a very high probability of succeeding. I can talk to the customers, I can ask them what they want. That clues me off on what their problems are, what their challenges are, things like that. I’ve got an existing relationship with them that I’m coming in with. That’s got a very high probability of success. The second I move to the right side of that matrix on that upper quadrant box, which are my existing products that are known to work and I’m trying to reach new markets with them, I start to get a little away from success. It’s going to be a lower chance that I actually succeed.

Then “new products to new markets“. If I’m coming into a market and I’ve never sold this product before, in fact, it’s a newer product, and I’ve never sold to these people before and have no relationship with them, I’m in the extraordinarily high probability of failure quadrant. Conversely, I’m in the extraordinarily high probability column that if I do succeed, it’s going to be an Apple Computer breakthrough. It’s those different quadrants, so you have to know your payoffs.

For smaller companies, they shouldn’t be jumping out to that fourth quadrant. If you’re a major corporation with major money and you can take some losses and you know that’s part of business, absolutely they should be, at least part of their investment, needs to be going into that fourth quadrant.

There’s two ways to use this tool, maybe three. The first is, I mentioned the ITAP formula, and you’re trying to come up with ideas and strategies, those ideas that you come up with are going to fall into this box.

Joseph Bushnell: OK…

Robert Stover: This box helps you know what’s going to succeed. Next, if you’ve got a lot of freelancers, designers, copywriters, things like that listening, or people looking to jump in, to get in business, I don’t know why, but everybody wants to jump into that fourth quadrant, it’s what everybody wants to do instinctively. “Oh, I found a market where no one has ever done it before and it’s a new product. Whew!” They think they’ve hit the mother-load! What they’ve done is hit the 95% chance of hitting the wall mode! For some reason, untrained entrepreneurs, that’s the pool they want to jump in, the pool without water and a high dive.

Instead what they should do is aim for, “Hey, am I doing marketing, am I doing freelance, am I doing consulting around your existing stuff? I’m going to look like a stud. Am I helping you take new stuff to your existing relationships? I’m going to look like a stud, I’m going to do well”. As soon as we start jumping out into new markets, there’s a good chance or a higher chance I’m going to fail.

For example, for copywriters, Gary Bencivenga never used to look for new people that had never done anything before and he never tried to do these breakthrough packages. He looked for people that had existing packages, mail packages, that were breaking even but that they weren’t doing all the things he knew that they needed to do. He called it “picking on wimps”. That’s how he started winning all the time.

Jay Abraham, the great marketing genius, he either does box one, which he starts tweaking existing—they have sales people, he starts tweaking what they’re doing. They have ads, he starts tweaking the ad, the headline, the offer, the structure of it, he doesn’t come in and go, “Let’s do completely new things.” Or he comes in and goes, “Wow, you’ve got a customer base of 300,000 people and you’re only selling one product and you have incredible relationships with them, let’s do a joint venture and offer them something new.” He does not go out into those other boxes. He might teach how to do it, but when he does deals, he’s doing deals in box one and two.

As a copywriter, I remember being hungry for business and somebody comes to you with something, and almost always it’s going to be something like in box four and you’re like, “Oh!” you write and work your tail off and you just have to know there’s a high probability this is going to fail. On the other hand, if a guy with 80,000 customers comes to you and goes, “Hey, I’m introducing this new product, can you write something to my existing customers about it?” pounce on it, because you’re going to look like a rock star.

I use the Ansoff Matrix, you can use it, it’s kind of a core, OK, I’m looking at a business, here are four major things they can do to grow, let me look in each of those boxes for things to help them grow or I can look at my own business through that lens. What are things to my existing customers, existing processes, existing marketing, existing advertising, existing lead generation systems, what is stuff I can do to optimize and tweak that? That’s where a large part of the industry is.

Joseph Bushnell: Brilliant.

Robert Stover: The next is, wow, I’ve got relationships now, how can I sell them more stuff, more of my product, more of other people’s products, things like that? You can use it to screen all the ideas, like anybody listening to this or any of your other interviews, you can end up with hundreds of ideas if they go through all your interviews. This matrix serves as your criteria screen, as we talked about earlier. They can throw all that ideas, where does this fit within the matrix?

Joseph Bushnell: Brilliant.

Robert Stover: And as I learned later, it actually wasn’t this old deal maker’s idea, it was actually the MBA professor Ansoff who created it and it’s called the Ansoff Growth Matrix.

Joseph Bushnell: My next question for you, Robert, I know that you’re writing a book at the moment and in the book you talk about something called The Growth Formula. How did you discover that?

Robert Stover: Well, this is fascinating. I’ve done the copywriting thing, I love and I’m passionate about copy, but strategy is just flat out more important, no matter what anybody, selling anything says, and that strategy can just have these huge transformations. So I write my book, Strategy Matters, based on these things and you’ll discover things like the Ansoff Matrix in there, as well as the formula, as well as the process to do strategy. I wrote that book, very happy with it, that book started opening more doors for me and I started looking around, like what’s next?

I go, you know what? I think I want to do something on growth, not just strategy, but kind of a more tactical thing called growth. So I started focusing on growth and I started thinking of all my growth stories and everything I knew about growth and so I think I’m pretty smart and I’ve got this, I ended up again with a big bucket of ideas on how to grow a company. Then I have something like, you know, forehead-slap-duh, and I was like, you know what? Instead of just looking at me and what I’ve done, why don’t I get out there and talk to other fast-growth CEOs and fast-growth companies and find out what they’ve done and just take myself out of it for a bit here.

I started looking up and around our business pages here, we have the Fastest Growing 100 Businesses, top 100 here in Orange County, California, and all the other cities in the US, there’s also the Inc. 500 list, so I started targeting these CEOs to interview them and find out what they did. So I started off, yeah, it’s fun, you’re talking to guys that have grown businesses from nothing to 10 or 20 million dollars and they’re telling me everything that they’ve done and going on about it.

I’m having fun for a while, but then all of a sudden I’m noticing I’m ending up with that big bucket of ideas again. It’s like, well, yeah, they got hit and they got knocked down and they got up again. We know we kind of have to persevere. They work hard. They’re smart, they do this. Some used more modern text marketing, some used internet, some used this—so all of a sudden I’m ending up with this big thing of tactical stuff that they’ve done, and I’m kind of frustrated. I’m going, well, this is nothing to write about that no one else has ever written about.

So I start thinking about it and I have a friend who is a martial arts master in the true sense, he spent 10 years in China, came over here, he’s a Pan American jujitsu champion on top of the Chinese martial arts. He’s written a couple books, one of them was Effortless Combat. What he did is he was looking at throwing and he’s kind of looking at how people get thrown and he’s kind of going through what I’m doing.

Well, you’ve got the Japanese system of throws in jujitsu where you name the throw after the joint you use. If I grab your wrist and use that to execute a throw, it’s a wrist throw. If I use your elbow or your shoulder, it’s a shoulder throw.

Then there’s the Japanese system of judo, they name their throws after the body part that you use to do the throw. So it doesn’t matter what you grab on the opponent, if you step in with your hip, it’s a hip throw. If you loop them over your shoulder and do it, it’s a shoulder throw, that’s how they named it.

He’s trying to look at all of these techniques in addition to all of the Chinese systems and they had different ways of categorizing their throws by forces and things like that. He goes, “Well, let me turn this around and if I’m being thrown, what is happening to my body?” He goes, “Oh, there’s only three things: there’s a circle, there’s an arch, and there’s a spiral.” He, for the first time in hundreds of years, came up with a different way to categorize throws, which is pretty amazing, given all the time people have spent on this.

Inspired by him, I looked at all these businesses and I go, “Instead of my looking at all the tactics they use, let me start at the end result of a breakthrough, the growth shot up 300%, what happened right before that? So I started backwards and worked forward. I started going, like it was pretty darn fast. The first thing that has to happen, there’s a breakthrough result, what happened right before that was some kind of action, they took action. OK, cool. We’ve all heard it before, but that is absolutely the step that happens right before results.

What happens before somebody takes action? No one, even like in an instinctive situation, takes action without first having the concept of what they’re going to do, they have to have an idea. That idea might be a single idea, it might be a strategy, it might be a plan, it might be a product or something, but an idea is formed, then they take action, then they get results.

Great, so now we’re to the question, what comes right before an idea? Like, “oh crud”, well, people have been asking that for centuries, right? Where do ideas come from? I’m kind of stumped a little bit and then I’m interviewing this guy and here in the US, I think Europe was way ahead of us on this, he was the first guy in the US to start reselling used cell phones in a major way.

He and his partner started off and they do school fundraisers and all the kids that bring their phones in, they’d buy them off them and then they’d go to the garage over the weekends and they’d sit and when you do it that way, they’d end up with 3-400 different phone designs from different manufacturers and they have to test and make sure all these phones are working. I mean, it’s massively labor intensive and it’s incredibly intensive to go out and create these school fundraisers and get them going. And they can’t quit their full-time jobs, so they’re doing this part-time, so that’s where they’re at and they’re doing this.

One day they grab another box of cell phones and open it. Instead of there being 50 different phones in there, there was one type of phone and that one type of phone was from one corporation, and the light went off. They went, “Oh, my word, we’re going to approach corporations that are dumping all their corporate phones, forget the fundraisers, we can go to corporations and say, “Hey, you want to save the environment? Send us your used phones and they can send us thousands of phones! Our testing process, we just saved our time, we only have to use one piece of testing equipment to blow through all these phones to see if they’re working or not.” Right? Bang, they could scale the business and they were, I think they were outgrowing the industry by 130% on the Inc. 500 at the time, they were Inc. 500 2 years in a row, the fastest growing.

So they’re just smoking off that single shift and when they had that insight and he’s telling me that story. A couple days later I’m thinking about it and I forehead slap and go, “I know what happens before people have breakthrough ideas and it’s insight into a leverage point”

I started going back over all these breakthroughs I’ve been involved in. I started blowing through the business press, studying breakthroughs and stuff, and there it was, every single time, is somebody found a leverage point, then they created the idea and then they went.

To show you how powerful this is, take the Folgers Coffee here in the US, they’ve got a campaign that ran for years and it allowed them to dominate the market and it was, “The best part of waking up is Folgers in your cup.” One of the people on the creative team realized that out of all the research they’re doing, people had set the timers on their coffeemakers so when they woke up, it was already brewing coffee. They took that insight, that leverage point, and it became one of the ad campaigns in coffee history, just like these guys took the cell phone and went.

I had a guy who was a bounce house guy, the little kiddy bounce houses that you rent for birthday parties and stuff, and he’s a growth-driven guy, he’s got a lot of drive, so he starts adding more bounce houses, and then he adds more people to deliver the bounce houses, then he has to buy cars or trucks with trailers on them to run these things around. The more he grows, the less money he’s making, the harder he’s working, and in southern California traffic, on any given weekend, a couple of those guys are going to be late or miss a party because of traffic and traffic accidents, so you end up with moms just irate screaming that they’ve ruined their child’s life because they missed this bounce house at a party.

So he was frazzled, his people were frazzled, his equipment is wearing out, he’s having to replace it, he’s one frustrated puppy. All of a sudden he gets a call from a church group and they go, “Hey, we need seven of those bounce houses.” He’s like, “Huh?” So he does it and then he realizes, wow, that was easy. Instead of having seven different guys go to seven different parties and stay out late at night bringing all these things back, I can throw seven of these on a truck and drove them to one event and made seven times the money.

That was his leverage point, was a new market that was much more ripe. He just changed everything on his marketing and he went after church and synagogues and kind of social—out here it’s the Rotary Club and Lion’s Club and associations like that. He went from being the bounce house guy to being the third fastest growing party rental company in the southern California area, all off of that one insight, that one leverage point.

I found out that those leverage points in almost every real successful business growth story were there, whether they just stumbled onto it or whether they found it. Then I started looking at these things and I go, with a lot of the companies that found these leverage points, that leverage point was available to them a year, two years, three years earlier, if they had just seen it. Why aren’t they seeing the leverage points?

I started looking into it some more and we’ll call it desire or we’ll call it pain, in about 50% of the cases, they faced an existential threat to their business. They’re going to fail.

In one case, one of my clients, they’re one of the first companies to start the voice marketing—I don’t know if it’s legal in the UK or Europe—but they leave the automated messages on your answer machines. He was one of the first companies into that. FCC got into it, because people complained about it, started regulating it, and they came out with a rule that stipulated companies can’t even call their own customers past 18 months, using the technology, and you can no longer use it except in political stuff, you can no longer use it.

So all those companies that were thriving off using this thing for lead generation can’t do it any more; he’s going to lose all his clients, he has a crises. We take a look at his business and we discover one industry, the retail industry, they’ve got a lot, I mean, each retailer had hundreds of thousands of clients because they’re running sales and promos all the time, they had a reason to use the service almost weekly, and an ad created for one or a strategy created for one could be leveraged across the entire industry. They could all use pretty much the same follow-up message, so it was highly leveragable, and it was insanely effective. When these people did this, their sales jumped 5, 10%, if they alerted people by phone the night before a big weekend sale.

He said, “OK, that’s it, we’re dropping all these other industries, we’re going after retail.” Everybody on his team is going, “You’re insane. We have to go to everybody.” He’s going, “You know what? No. This is the future, let’s go after that.” Bottom line, he was struggling around about 1.5 million a year, over the next 2 years they went up to 7 million, then they went to 10 million the next year. All off an insight, but they didn’t get that insight into the better market, that leverage point, until he was in pain.

Let’s flip the formula around and here’s kind of what you get: You either get what I call a growth-driven leader, say Steve Jobs, these guys are just driven, or Bill Gates, I mean, these guys are just driven to grow, so they’re constantly looking for the insights.

Or they get in trouble, they get fired, they lose their job or what they’re doing, the market gets threatened, a competitor moves in and it threatens to wipe them out, they have to go looking for a better way or they’re not going to live. Those are the companies, the driven because they’re driven or the driven because they’re in pain, that discover leverage points. Once you discover a leverage point, the ideas are easy.

If I tell you, hey wow, 1 type of your customer can generate about 100 times more revenue than the others, what big idea comes out of that?

Joseph Bushnell: To target them better.

Robert Stover: Exactly, it’s simple, right? All of these ideation techniques, they work but what I’m looking at is like this real consistent pattern, so yes, there are other ways to generate ideas, finding leverage points is a really, really, really good way to generate million-dollar ideas.

Joseph Bushnell: OK.

Robert Stover: First look for the leverage point and then you get the idea, then you have to take action on it and so forth. As we talked about before, in taking the action, there’s smart ways to take action and there’s stupid ways to take action.

What most online people understand is this thing called testing. Before you go taking a flying leap, you can A/B split test and I joke, I call it the entrepreneurial crash test dummy.

I’ve got a client, he’s also a friend, but that guy’s approach to testing new businesses was just full on, full bore, 100% commitment, he’d just run in there and attack it, whether it was a good idea or a bad idea, because he’d never tested it. What he’d end up doing is like you’d send him in a room and he’d put a helmet on and he’d run at this wall—bang! Run at another wall—bang! Another business idea, that one doesn’t work, he’s up running—bang! I mean, it was just painful to watch until he finally finds like a window he ends up crashing through and there’s his next million-dollar business. He repeated this pattern over his life. It was effective, at least he took action, but there’s smarter ways to take action, through testing, through prototyping, and things like that. Then you get the results.

So anyway, that’s roughly the growth formula. First do a desire check, I call it start a fire.

Next, find the star, you got to take those problems and frustrations or you got to take that desire and you got to make a clear objective out of it, what am I trying to do? That can be a grand objection, I’m trying to create a business that serves the people, like Henry Ford, and I’m going to create a business that creates an automobile that the average person on an average man wage can afford. That was his big drive, that’s a big dream. If you’re inside of a company, your objective might just want to be, “I want to increase sales 20% in the next 60 days.”

But whatever that star is, you have to have a star. Take the desire, the pain, or the drive, turn it into a specific objective, not all objectives, just one clear objective, one clear star you’re going to go after, and then you start searching for leverage, what I call, grab a lever.

You start going through your business, that ITAP formula we mentioned earlier is a great way to start trying to find leverage in the business. Who am I targeting? What are the approaches we’re taking to them? What about that? We mentioned the Ansoff Matrix earlier. Wow, OK, here’s my objective, I want to increase sales in the next 20 days. Can I do it by optimizing what we’re doing? Can I do it by bringing something new to our existing customers? Are there some easy markets that we can go into if we find any joint ventures ourselves and going into new markets that way, that are a high probability?

Other ways are looking around, and this came out like extraordinarily common, was people look around at other industries and what are they doing and then they import successful ideas into their own. That was another major source of leverage points.

Another major source, we all know it, we all talk about it, and I go into business after business that’s ever done it, and it’s the 80/20 principle. 20% of our customers produce 80% of our revenues. 20% of our sales people produce 80% of the sales. 20% of our marketing produces 80% of the leads. Going through with a fine tooth comb 80/20, it’s universal; anybody can do it in their business. Those are just a few examples of ways to find the leverage points.

What I find, like if I’m in front of an audience talking and I’ll tell the audience, “OK, we’ve been talking about growth, turn to your neighbor and tell him all the things that you should be doing to grow your business in the next one minute, go ahead, should on each other—go.” They start, “Oh, I should do this, I should do this, I should do that, do this, do the other.” Then I bring it back, “OK, out of all of those ideas that you just suggested doing, how many came up with the idea of stopping something? I’m going to stop serving markets? I’m going to kill off a product? I’m going to eliminate this division of the company?” No one comes up with anything, because everybody looks at growth like doing more and more.

Joseph Bushnell: Yeah.

Robert Stover: But in a lot of the stories I just told you, they didn’t do more and more, they narrowed it down into one type of marketing, to one approach, to one type of customer, and they narrowed it back down. Anybody listening to this or they go through all the interviews, you end up with all these things you should be doing and the truth is, you should probably stop doing some stuff.

Grab Forbes, flip through it, look at the turnaround stories. How many of those turnarounds came from them doing more and more stuff versus how many of those turnarounds came with a new guy coming in going, “OK, we are stopping that. We are not going after this market and this product sucks.” We are not selling that thing any more; we are going to do this. So it’s ironic, but some of the leverage points are letting go—letting go of all the stuff.

One I like to emphasize, and it’s not a leverage point but it’s a way to find leverage points, is what I call time for reflection. In my ongoing informal survey with entrepreneurs—you know, by show of hand, that kind of survey—when do you think about your business? There’s two answers to that, sometimes three: In the shower or in my car on the way to work, and occasionally, sitting on the loo, so that’s when. They are so busy all day long, they’re not taking time out for reflection. Just to think about the business and get away.

One of my clients is real successful, he had an inner office built inside of his office, so it was like between the walls, you couldn’t even see it, and he built a little library in there and a table and a study and he would just go in there for a half hour once a week, on Fridays. On Friday afternoon, he’d lean back in his recliner and he’d just ponder and reflect on his business. When you do that, a lot of business people, they already know the answers. They know where the leverage is, they know what’s working, what’s not.

But we’re supposed to be busier, and busier, and busier and do more and more stuff—I have to do Twitter, I have to do Facebook, I have to do PPC, I have to do joint ventures, I have to do this, I have to do that—we get like so busy, we’re not taking a step back and just reflecting on the business and going, “Where do I want to go? Where do I want to take the business? What customers do I like working with the best? Which don’t I? OK, here’s a problem that keeps coming up, why does that keep coming up? What’s the pattern?” You’ve got to take time out to reflect on the business, it’s another major key there on the leverage points.

As far as generating ideas, like I said, that used to be my whole focus, I’ve got a library that’s got 2,000 books, probably 3/4 of them are sales and marketing, the other 1/4 of them are on ideation techniques, how do you create ideas? How do you create ideas? I was all about the idea, hey, I’m an idea man.

What I learned was I need to be all about the leverage. The ideas come from the leverage pretty easily, once I found the leverage. That’s a little shift in my behavior in the last two years. Then taking action, I have to take action, one of the big things standing in the way of action is fear. It’s like, “Get over it, do something small, do something,” but I like to say that once you take an action, there’s three R’s, R3, if you want to write a code.

Take a look at it and you ask: Did it work? Do I refine it? OK, it worked so-so, it didn’t work all the way, do I want to refine this and make it work? Did it bomb? What we do instinctively, because we’re not quitters, is we try and, it’s called reinforce failure, “OK, this idea didn’t work, so I have to try harder. OK, that didn’t work, now I have to even try harder. Wow, that still didn’t work, I need to bring in my best team members and work on this”. We start what Drucker called feeding failure. We take our best people, our best talents, our best time, our most emotional energy and we throw it into what’s not working.

Instead we should, the second R is reject it. So can I refine it, make it work better? Can I reject it? On the other hand, sometimes we do stuff that works really well, like we send out a letter without a return address or branding on it and it creates $395,000 worth of sales in a week. Hmm, maybe I should roll that out, and that’s the third R, rolling out.

So R3, how do I take action? Find something to take action on and then R3 it, refine it, reject it, or roll it out.

Joseph Bushnell: Brilliant.

Robert Stover: Last step—enjoy the results!

Joseph Bushnell: Have the breakthrough!

Robert Stover: Yeah.

Joseph Bushnell: Awesome. Robert, I have to say, you’ve really got me thinking about all sorts of things right now, leverage points in my own business. I hope everyone listening to this is having that same thought process as well. It’s great that you’ve clarified that and just shed some light on an area that we all would like to benefit from but sometimes don’t know where to start and knowing that the leverage points is where to begin. Well, I guess we begin first of all with the drive and wanting to get that breakthrough in the first place, but then finding that leverage point, I think is probably the step where a lot of people are missing, so it’s fantastic.

Robert Stover: Right. Intuitively, and I do it, too, you feel the pain, maybe you form or don’t form a fuzzy objective or a star, and instantly you start creating ideas.

Joseph Bushnell: Yeah.

Robert Stover: It’s like, OK, well, get those out and then take a step back and look for leverage. That’s really the grab a lever, like if I’m leaving something with your listeners, it’s grab that lever, because that baby is where it’s going to happen, that’s what’s going to grow your business.

Joseph Bushnell: Thank you for explaining where to actually look for those levers as well. This has been absolutely excellent and really solid gold information, Robert, where can we get more of this sort of stuff from you?

Robert Stover: It’s pretty simple, RobertStover.com

Joseph Bushnell: OK.

Robert Stover: I mentioned the copy course earlier, but pretty much everything else I’m talking about is happening out of RobertStover.com. If you go out, there’s a brief video that explains the formula and how I discovered it and some more examples that they can use and if they want to opt-in, they can get this kind of stuff on growth levers coming to them on a consistent basis. There’s tons of free stuff out if you want to go kick around the site as well.

Joseph Bushnell: Great. That’s the end of today’s show, thank you for tuning in, I hope you enjoyed the show. Please remember to go check out RobertStover.com, there’s some fantastic information over there, you’ve heard today what kind of amazing info Robert has for you and how he has the ability to help you grow your business. Robert, I’d just like to thank you once again for being on the show today

Robert Stover: Thank you much, Joey.

Joe Sugarman is one of the all time greats of Marketing and advertising. Once named the “Mail Order Maverick” by The New York Times, Joe is a ground breaker in every sense of the word. His achievements in marketing innovation alone give him the right to be called a legend. He is the owner JS&A Group, Inc which is behind some of the biggest marketing campaigns in recent history.

He is also the author of many best selling books on the topic of direct marketing including Triggers: 30 Sales Tools you can use to Control the Mind of your Prospect to Motivate, Influence and Persuade, The Adweek Copywriting Handbook: The Ultimate Guide to Writing Powerful Advertising and Marketing Copy from One of America’s Top Copywriters and Advertising Secrets of the Written Word: The Ultimate Resource on How to Write Powerful Advertising Copy from One of America’s Top Copywriters and Mail Order Entrepreneurs to name just a few

In this Interview I ask Joe Sugarman for his best marketing tips and he reveals….

• The marketing principles has used to consistently generate 7 figure ad campaigns for the last 40 years and sell over 20 million BluBlocker sun glasses world wide
• The 3 most powerful human emotions you must take advantage of when writing ads
• How to control the buying environment when someone reads your ad, no matter where they are actually reading it
• The slippery slide formula to ensure the whole of your advert gets read
• How to over deliver so your customer won't even think about asking for a refund
• The secret method to get the reader to draw conclusions you set up for them, so that they think they thought of it themselves
• How to ruthlessly edit your ads so that every last word earns its place
• And much more. Click play button below to listen to the interview or read the full transcript below.

Click here to subscribe to The Online Marketing Show on iTunes

Joey Bushnell:  Hello everyone, this is Joey Bushnell. I have with me today an absolutely fantastic special guest, he is Joe Sugarman. Joe, thank you very much for being with me today.

Joe Sugarman:  Well, it’s wonderful being with you Joey, thank you.

Joey Bushnell:  Joe, thank you very much, I really appreciate it. Joe, can you just let us know how you first got into marketing and advertising?

Joe Sugarman:  Well, when I was in high school, I was a photographer. I was a school photographer and I had my own column and people would enjoy the column but it was a very conservative school and so I couldn’t say what I really wanted to say.

Finally, I decided, you know what? I’m going to come up with my own newspaper, my own magazine. So that’s what I did, but I had to sell advertising and I had to recruit writers, so it was my first experience and it was eye-opening, I mean, just to get people to advertise in your publication.

But it was very successful, we made national news for doing it and we did well. We only had one issue, but it was a great issue and everybody enjoyed it and I went on to college to enter journalism. I was going to be a journalist, didn’t turn out that way, but that’s what I was intended to be.

Joey Bushnell:  OK. And you have had quite a long, celebrated career since then, Joe. What would you say would be just the highlights of your career?

I know you have a few books that you published, which I’ve read, which is what prompted me to get in touch with you so what would you say are some of the best bits of your career?

Joe Sugarman:  Well, we were the first company to introduce the pocket calculator, the integrated circuit. We were the first company to introduce digital watches, and this is back in the early ‘70s. We were also the first company in the world actually to take credit card orders over the phone.

Joey Bushnell:  Wow!

Joe Sugarman:  As a matter of fact, it was illegal at the time, you had to have your customer’s signature but I’d get calls from customers that say “I need that calculator right away, please could you send it?” I’d say, “Well, I need your signature.” He says, “Well, just sign my name,” so I would, and I noticed that after several months that nobody ever took advantage of it and it was kind of confidential.

I said, “You know what? What if I put in my coupon, credit card buyers, call toll free,” which I did. What happened was we were deluged with phone calls because Bell Systems had just come out with their toll free customer service lines actually and so we took advantage of it to sell product. We did this for like six months and nobody, you know, the credit card companies, instead of preventing us from doing this, just were quiet.

Then we get a call from Bell Systems here in the US and they said “Hey, we know what you’re doing, we’ve been following your success and we want to publicize what you’re doing in the Wall Street Journal in a full-page ad”.

So they did and that really helped direct marketing tremendously because catalogs proliferated during that time, call centers opened up, I mean, it was just a whole revolution and it was funny, it was just the one little thing, that serendipitous opportunity that I took advantage of and it turned out to be a great money maker for me and of course it brought the entire direct marketing industry one level higher.

Joey Bushnell:  Brilliant.

Joe Sugarman:  Yeah, so the toll free number, I’d say that was probably among my best successes.

But also we were one of the first to do infomercials, one of the early home shopping people, you know, that sold products on home shopping. As a matter of fact, I’ve been in London so many times on QVC there in London, several years, and really enjoyed London. I enjoyed the people and it was just great fun and I continued to innovate in different areas.

Joey Bushnell:  Fantastic and if you don’t mind me saying Joe, you’ve been decades in the industry and the type of ads that you write, they are million-dollar kind of ads, aren’t they? You know, we’re talking pretty big league here, aren’t we?

Joe Sugarman:  Well, you forgot probably one of the most important things and that was that I started a company called BluBlocker Corporation, selling a pair of sunglasses called BluBlocker and that product, we sold 20 million pairs and we used infomercials and print and we used home shopping and we used just about every conceivable marketing method and some months selling as many as 300,000 pairs. This is all over the world, including of course, England and the common market, you know, the Euro.

So anyway, it was a huge success and that was probably my biggest success. But I’ve had a lot of others and probably the biggest thing about me is I’ve probably failed more times than anybody can possibly imagine and it’s through failure that you learn and you grow and eventually you’ll be successful. Just the key is never to give up.

Joey Bushnell:  Sure. Thank you for that. All right Joe, so the questions that I wanted to ask you today, they are from, well, they are inspired by the books that you’ve written and I just wanted to go through some of my favorite bits and if you could just sort of let us know a little bit about them and maybe at the end we’ll discuss some of your books as well, if that’s okay.

My first question for you would be, in your book Triggers, you talk about product nature and I was just wondering if you could just let us know what product nature is and why it’s so important to understand it well, for creating advert.

Joe Sugarman:  Well, product nature. Let’s say I was selling a burglar alarm and what I’ve learned about selling burglar alarms, because we did, actually we were one of the top companies selling burglar alarms through the mail. What I learned was that people would tear out the ad and not respond, they would just keep the ad. Then when their neighbor got robbed or if there was some bad experience in the neighborhood, then they’d take out that old ad and they’d read it and then they’d give us a call.

So the nature of that product was that it was something that when people felt a real need, when it was something where circumstances created the need, they would then respond. Well, you have to know the nature of your prospect.

Another good example is I was sitting in my bedroom upstairs in my home, all of a sudden I see an ambulance pulling next door to my neighbor’s house and out goes my neighbor who had a heart attack and died.

Now prior to that, I had this insurance agent constantly calling me, telling me I should have insurance and he’d come to my house and buy a few pocket calculators, so he became a friend. Then when my neighbor died next door, and he was a young kind of guy, I was really shocked, I called up my insurance guy, the guy that had been badgering me, and I said, “Hey, you know that insurance you were talking about? I think might be a good idea.” So that’s product nature.

Joey Bushnell:  OK. You talk about prospect nature as well Joe, is that sort of linked with product nature?

Joe Sugarman:  Yeah, you’ve got to understand your customer. You’ve got to learn everything you could possibly find out about, what is that customer about. In my books I talk about some beautiful examples of that, where if you discover the nature of your prospect, and again, that comes through in learning about that, you really have a powerful, what we call a psychological trigger.

I think a real good example that I learned this from was, there was this guy that was the best salesperson in this store that sold television sets and washing machines and everything like that. He was the most successful salesperson they’d ever had. He was retiring and he was going to give his speech and he decided he would tell everybody what he did.

What he did was he would look at the people that would walk in the store, he would just be standing on the sidelines and then when he saw somebody turning the knobs of a television, he knew that that person was a good prospect.

I hope that answers your question but I’ve got a lot of examples of the nature of prospects and how you can determine how to deal with them and how to interact.

Joey Bushnell:OK. One of the things you talk about in your books as well, you basically say that you can, when someone is reading a written ad, that you control the buying environment, similar to like when someone is in the shop, they’re in a buying environment but when I first read this, I thought, “Well, how can you possibly control it where someone is reading your ad, how do you control the buying environment?” So I was just wondering, how do you do that in your adverts? How do you control the buying environment?

Joe Sugarman:  Yeah. I mean, if you’re going to sell an expensive product you want your ad to reflect the quality of that product. You want to create a buying environment where people will feel comfortable.

A good example is I went to an art galley and in the art gallery the paintings were on the floor and it was kind of slacky looking and I didn’t expect to pay much for any painting that I’d buy there but I went to another gallery and the gallery had carpeting and they had pictures where they hung on the wall and there was real comfortable chairs where you can sit and discuss things, so I expected to pay more for that as well.

So buying environment often is reflected in different ways and you can reflect that also in copy.

Joey Bushnell:What do you mean by the “slippery slide” when it comes to copywriting? What’s the slippery slide?

Joe Sugarman:  When people see your advertisement, the first thing that attracts them is the headline and maybe the sub-headline and maybe the captions for the pictures and maybe the paragraph headings—in other words…

The whole idea of the slippery slide is to get you to read one of the elements and that element is so persuasive or so curiosity building that you want to read the second thing, like the sub-heading. That would be so curiosity building that you’d want to read the first sentence. When you read the first sentence you might be so curious, “well, what is it?” and then you read the second sentence and the third sentence.

So you create like a slippery slide, you create something where you can’t get off, you keep on reading because you’re so compelled through curiosity and through a bunch of other techniques that you read the whole ad.

They say that if you can get the person to read the first two paragraphs and you’re doing a good job of copywriting, that person will read the entire ad. I’ve proven that. I’ve written an entire ad where the payoff of course was at the very, very end and sometimes these ads are extremely, they’re extremely wordy.

Joey Bushnell:Sure. I guess that means that there’s no room for boring or redundant paragraphs, every single paragraph has to really own its place in that case?

Joe Sugarman:  That’s correct.

Joey Bushnell:  OK. In your books you also talk about how emotion is all important in copywriting. There are three emotions that you specifically mention as well that I’d like to ask you about, Joe. So how does guilt come into play in marketing?

Joe Sugarman:  Well, you know, it’s making a person feel a little guilty. Ever get these mailings and they have address labels in there? They say please respond and please send us $20 and you feel kind of guilty because they sent you this gift. Sometimes they’ll send you a dollar bill and they’ll ask you to fill out a survey and you feel kind of guilty because they sent you a dollar bill but you spend about a half hour filling out a survey and your time is pretty valuable.

So that’s a kind of guilt, guilt is used in a lot of different ways. I talk about several different ways that you can use guilt in causing somebody to taken an action and purchase your product simply by feeling, “Gee whiz, I really feel guilty unless I buy this product or I buy this service.” It works for products and services.

Joey Bushnell:  OK, how about hope? You mentioned hope as well. How does that help us with with our ads?

Joe Sugarman:  Well, some products, like for example vitamins, you buy it on the hope that the vitamins you’re buying are going to help you and are going to make you feel better and are going to make you healthier and prevent disease or whatever.

It’s not something, I mean, it’s hope, you’re selling hope, you’re selling opportunity, you’re selling—and in my books I explained how to use the power of hope to sell things that typically would be very difficult to sell.

Joey Bushnell:  Sure. OK. So we covered guilt and hope, and then last of all, greed. Why should we remember greed when we’re writing an advert?

Joe Sugarman:  Well, because people respond to strong price points, or low prices. We had, for example, a product we started selling for $69.95 and the manufacturer got really, or excuse me, $59.95, and the manufacturer got really upset because he said everybody is selling it for $69.95 and you’re undercutting everybody, so what we did is we ran an ad and we said in the ad that look…

“We’ve got the wrong price point, but for the next two weeks we’ll let you purchase it at this lower price point,” and it turned out that that little ad that we placed worked so much better than the original ad.

The bottom line is people are attracted to bargains, even if you’re a wealthy individual, you will be attracted to value and that’s basically what greed relates to.

Joey Bushnell:  Sure, yeah. I totally get what you mean. If you can get it for less than what you’d expect to pay and of course you’d much rather do that than pay more than you have to, of course.

Okay. My next question Joe, was you talk a lot in your books about satisfaction conviction and that’s not a term that I’ve really heard anywhere else, so what does that mean?

Joe Sugarman:  You’ve heard of the 30-day trial period, the 60-day trial period and basically it says, “If you’re not happy, return the product within 30 or 60 days and we’ll give you your money back.” Well, a satisfaction conviction goes way beyond that.

A good example is when we were selling BluBlockers on television, we said, “When you get your BluBlockers, if you’re not happy, even if you’ve waited, two, three years, you can return it and get all your money back. Well, that was a satisfaction conviction, basically it was saying that you’ve got to be satisfied or you’re going to get your money back.

Another example of satisfaction conviction is we were selling a digital watch and at the time, digital watches were kind of, sometimes there were problems with them. We addressed that head on, we said, “Hey, if you have a problem with your digital watch, call us up, we’ll send you a loaner watch and we’ll send you a box to put your defective one and send it back to us.”

Well, that was a good satisfaction conviction because we were saying basically if you have any problems at all, we want you to be very satisfied and we’ll replace that and it won’t cost you a penny and as a matter of fact, we’ll send you a loaner watch in the process and that promotion did exceptionally well.

Joey Bushnell:  So it’s kind of going really that extra mile to make sure that the customer is going to be satisfied, yeah?

Joe Sugarman:  Yeah, absolutely. All these things could be grouped into 3. We have 31 psychological triggers and all of them could be actually grouped into 3 different categories.

The first category is to create an environment, a buying environment.

The second one is to create trust in your prospect, in other words, where there prospect trusts you.

The third is something that will trigger a sale.

Satisfaction conviction is a very powerful tool to trigger a sale. We have had examples where we’ve had 1,000 word ads, 2,000-word ads, and we changed just 1 word at the end of an ad, changing the satisfaction conviction slightly, and response will double. I give a lot of examples of that where you can double response simply by a strong satisfaction conviction.

Joey Bushnell:  OK. You also talk in your book about linking and again, that’snot really a term that I had heard up until I read your book. So what is that and why does it help us?

Joe Sugarman:  It’s very difficult to sell a miracle, a miracle product. You have nothing to compare it to, it’s usually a major breakthrough our whatever.

What linking does, is it links what you already know with the slight advanced improvement that your product has.

For example, back when calculators, you were able to store—well, I go back to the early days of the calculator when Cannon came out with a calculator that you could program the memory and it will hold all your telephone numbers. Now, of course today that seems almost too simple, right? But back then, that was a major breakthrough, but how do you sell that?

What we did was we related it to a pocket, we called it the pocket Yellow Pages and we linked it to something that people understood, Yellow Pages, a directory, and we explained of course, how that worked. So that’s what I meant by linking. You link it something that people already understand and can take the next step in terms of being convinced that your product is really a special product.

Joey Bushnell:  Brilliant. OK. You also talk about exclusivity and why is that a powerful factor? What is it about exclusivity that really attracts people to a certain product?

Joe Sugarman:  I use an example where I had snowmobiles at my estate, I had an estate up in northern Wisconsin, snow country, and I had several snowmobiles because I would be giving seminars up there and I’d have my seminar participants using the snowmobiles.

Then I went to the snowmobile dealer just to see what was new and he showed me the new model that went 100 miles an hour on the lake. I said, “Who would care about that? That’s kind of ridiculous.” He says, “Oh, no, no,” he says, “you don’t understand, this is real popular, in fact we only have two of them and that’s all we’re going to get for the whole year.” I said, “Gee whiz, let me get one then.” In other words, because it was exclusive, it attracted me because I wanted something that was really different.

When do you use that? You use that when you’re selling art or collectibles or things that are very exclusive and very few people will have. It’s kind of satisfying your ego really because you’re getting something that very few people have. If you can convince people—and I show several ways of doing it—if you can convince people of its exclusivity and its rarity, you could trigger a sale.

Joey Bushnell:  OK. You also talk about mental engagement, which is kind of leading the prospects to reach the conclusion that you want them to but you make them feel as if they reached that conclusion on their own. That sounds quite difficult to me, how would you go around doing something like that Joe?

Joe Sugarman:  When we have something to sell, let’s say, oh, I use one example in the book, talking about a digital watch that was produced by Seiko that was so much less expensive than another particular model that was very popular and it was explained, and I said— “Jewelry stores love this because they sell the product for $300 and it only costs them $150”.

Now what I don’t say is those jewelry stores are making a fortune and it’s the mark-up that’s causing that but people perceived, people came to basically that’s conclusion.

So it’s using, letting the customer reach a certain conclusion without you having to be very obvious about that conclusion, and that is a very effective thing. People, believe it or not, when they exercise their brain, they’ve done brain scans where the brain just becomes alive as opposed to hand feeding and giving people what information that they need. By causing them to think activates the mental mechanism and people tend to respond to that.

Joey Bushnell:  And of course it’s much more powerful if someone believes that they’ve convinced themselves. No one likes to feel that someone else convinced them or changed their mind but if they feel that that’s their own conviction, then of course it’s much easier to make a sale, surely?

Joe Sugarman:  Joey, that’s exactly right. Absolutely.

Joey Bushnell:  My final question for you, Joe, was about editing. I would imagine that when you’re writing an advert, when you’ve done a first draft, there’s lots that has to be chucked out the window. Any tips for us when we’ve written something, how do we edit it, refine it, make it, bring it to that final version?

Joe Sugarman:  Well, in my opinion, the most powerful thing you can learn is how to edit because everybody can write, people tend to either write too much or too little but it’s in the editing process that you really refine the ad.

Every word has an emotion and every emotion, you sell on emotion and you justify with logic, is basically what it is. The things I look for in my ads, I look for rhythm, where you start out with a short sentence and then you have a longer sentence, then a shorter, then two shorters, then a longer. In other words, you vary the ad so that they’re, oh, how could I put it, they’re different lengths, and that creates a certain rhythm, and that’s really important.

The other thing is, always look, for example, for the word “that” and if you read, if you say something like, “And it’s very clear that,” you can take out it’s very clear, or “It’s been really known that,” you can take out everything before the word that, so if you see a word that, determine if the words that precede that are really that necessary, if you can really eliminate those. You want simplicity in your sentences, you don’t want any complicated words. There are always easier ways to express yourself without having to be too complicated.

The bottom line is, in my book I talk extensively about the editing process, I go through several examples of things that you could do to tighten up your copy and make it very effective.

By the way, if I haven’t mentioned this already, your ability to write copy, your ability to write advertising that sells people, that sells a prospect, that causes a person to buy, is an extremely powerful tool that could build a business literally overnight. I have several examples in my lifetime of building businesses overnight that didn’t exist before I sat down to write the copy. It’s again, it relates to editing because editing is the key, if you want to be a great copywriter, you want to learn editing. That’s one of the things that I teach in my books.

Joey Bushnell:  Joe, I just want to thank you so much for doing this interview with me, it’s been really fun to do this and the information that you’ve given us today is just absolutely brilliant.

Can you just tell us a little bit about your books because I’m sure the listeners want to get more because like you mentioned, there’s 31 psychological triggers and we’ve only covered maybe a handful of those today, I’m sure they want to know all of them. So please tell us a little bit about your books?

Joe Sugarman:  It’s being sold on Amazon.com, I have a book called The Adweek Copywriting Handbook, and the sub-heading on it is The Ultimate Guide to Writing Powerful Advertising and Marketing Copy from One of America’s Top Copywriters. In it I have all the psychological triggers, I have all the various axioms and techniques and things that people don’t realize.

This goes beyond the original book, Triggers, which is now out of print, and this one, this particular book has all the psychological triggers and all the axioms and the techniques and also a lot of examples of ads and how you can create that slippery slide and how you could link very easily and all those very helpful things. It’s called, again, The Adweek Copywriting Handbook and you can get it through Amazon.com, it’s sold throughout the world.

My biggest thrill is getting letters from people who have read that book and said that they started a business as a result and they owe their success to—oh, I’ll give you a beautiful example of this. My friends over at Google, they ran a promotion and they got a response and then this one guy read my book and he rewrote the ad and they ran it again and they got triple what they normally would have gotten. As a consequence I gave a lecture there, I spent three days at a seminar teaching them how to write really good, great copy.

So these techniques work and they work very effectively and The Adweek Copywriting Handbook is I would say the book to get.

I’ve written several other books, one is called Advertising Secrets of the Written Word, it’s pretty close to The Adweek Copywriting Handbook, although The Adweek Copywriting Handbook is a little bit more recent.

I’ve written a book called Marketing Secrets of a Mail Order Maverick, that’s print advertising and how I used that to build businesses and sell product.

Then the final one is, let’s see, I forgot the name of it, TV Marketing Secrets, or something like that, it’s all about my experiences on television, both in the UK and infomercials and all over the place.

That’s about it, I’ve written several books, a couple of them are out of print and I’m considering reprinting them because we still get demand for them.

I just want to thank you Joey, for giving me the opportunity to share some of the ideas with your audience and any way I could help, please feel free to provide them with my information, I’d be happy to respond.

Joey Bushnell:  Again, thank you Joe. Wherever the listeners are listening to this, there will be links to Joe’s books on Amazon. Joe, do you have a website or anything like that where people can kind of, not necessarily find your books but just find out more about you? Is there anywhere they can go for that?

Joe Sugarman:  I think it’s—I’m so far behind on this area—but I think it’s JoeSugarman.com

Joey Bushnell:  OK.

Joe Sugarman:  Yeah, that’s about it but if you Google me on the internet, you’ll find out a lot of information and one thing, you can’t keep things private on the internet, but you’ll find a lot of good information about me on the internet.

Joey Bushnell:  Sure, OK. Joe, I just really want to thank you for the time that you’ve given me today and for the brilliant information, it’s going to help the listeners. Please guys, go out and buy the books as well because they’re really in depth and they’re really going to help you out. So Joe, thank you once again.

Joe Sugarman:  Thank you Joey, I appreciate the opportunity.