Joe Polish: Selling Past Barriers (Part IV)

If you’re waiting for the right time before you can implement something, you’re going to be waiting a very long time, because the right time never shows up.

Yeah, there’s a lot of things I discover whenever I ask people why they do something or why they don’t, if you really listen. Part of the thing was really listening to what your client’s saying.

There are two types of things that you’ll hear: things that actually will make sense to address, to do something with, and that would apply to not just one person, but many people; and then there’s other things that will come where someone has some individual request that would make zero sense whatsoever, in terms of trying to make it happen in your business or to address it, because it’s only for this one person. “Joe, I really would like you to have a bubble machine at the conference or something, because I really feel comfortable when there’s bubbles flying around, and maybe an ant farm in the corner.”

Of course, I’m exaggerating. But we all occasionally have clients that will have requests that wouldn’t make any sense. So, I’m not saying you should listen and address every single thing that people tell you. But what you should listen for is what are they really saying. Really, why are they not buying? What are their barriers?

Because at the end of the day, I really want anyone who buys anything from me to be super-happy, to feel like we understand them, that we’re addressing, to the best of our abilities, helping them.

We have one person that just sent me a Facebook message, that made $15,000, like a week ago, from one idea he got from listening to a single episode on I Love Marketing, let alone immersing someone in two days of training and stuff.

That’s why, in the carpet cleaning industry, by taking people through the process, I’ve created millionaires. And it’s simple because how much is an idea actually worth?

One of the greatest things that I loved about doing it, though, is it allowed me to actually see how much, in my own mind, my own brain, comes up with the same excuses that other human beings come up with, as to why not getting off my butt and doing something.

There are times where I will not want to actually do something that’s going to take me out of my comfort zone.

I’ve got a pretty awesome entrepreneurial library. I’ve got a giant swipe file of 5 drawer file cabinets filled with multimillion-dollar sales letters. I’ve got massive, thick binders filled with every single fax back and forth between me and Bill Phillips before email was the thing back in the late 1990’s, on how he built EAS, through all of the consulting we did, from $60-million to $200-million.

I’ve got amazing stuff. People come over here, and they’ll see all of this. They’ll see I’ve read over 1,000 books, they’ll go into my conference room that has that library just filled with books, and they’ll look at all of the binders I’ve got in the archive room and all of the videos, and they’re constantly like, “Why do you go to any seminars? You’ve got all of this stuff!” My response is always, “Well, for one, it’s a different sort of learning environment for me. Secondly, it keeps me up,” meaning it keeps me in a good state of mind. It keeps me engaged.

For me, I literally not only attend school by going to Strategic Coach and doing the things that I do, and going to events that I do and hiring certain people, subscribing to certain things that I subscribe to, but I also create my own schools. That’s why I Love Marketing, in a lot of ways, is kind of a self-created school that me and you use to continually talk about and remind ourselves about the types of marketing strategies.

People that have not listened to the very first episodes of I Love Marketing, I would encourage you to do that. I think you can pop on any episode of I Love Marketing and learn something, no matter where you start.

The original ones, where we actually explain how we started this, was me and Dean were on a phone call, and the conversation I had with Dean was like, “Everything we just talked about, imagine how valuable that would be if other people heard this, if they actually were able to eavesdrop in on the conversation we just had,” part of our original strategy, which we’ve now been very successful with.

Right before we started recording, you told me, “Yep, now the episodes of downloads per day on I Love Marketing – every single day – is now hitting right around the 2,500 downloads a day mark that people are downloading I Love Marketing.”

So, we’ve got just thousands of people listening to us right now. This all started from, “Hey, what we just talked about with each other was really good stuff. What if other people heard it?” Part of our thing was, “Let’s do it in a way to where even if they never buy anything from us, they’ll still find our conversations really valuable.”

You know, as an aside, what you just said, cryogenically, they don’t call it frozen, but they call it suspended. I actually did. That was one of the most interesting marketing consultations I’d ever done, was for the company Alcor, which is in Scottsdale, that actually cryonically suspends people after they die, in the hopes that they will bring them back to life later in the future, when technology and science would allow someone to do that.

I’m not going to go totally into this, right here. I will suffice it to say that we had this meeting with all of the people on the board, and we’re having dinner, and I was introduced to that. It was very weird.

But it’s interesting to see how people that have been very smart, very successful, re-purpose stuff. But it goes to show you that the American public, if you teach them how to actually do what it is you’re doing versus just do what it is you’re doing to sell a particular product or a service, it doesn’t mean that it’s easy to sell how-to stuff.

A lot of people will come to our events or something, and I always love saying that everyone always does the arithmetic, but no one does the subtraction. They just count how many people are in the room and they just assume that all of these people fell there out of thin air and we get to keep 100% of the money.

Stay tuned next week for part five.