Lesson 1:

The Electrifying Power Of
"Magnetic Marketing"

In this 7-part course, I'm going to give specific, usable, 1-2-3 marketing strategies that apply to any product, service, business or sales career, that you will see results in your bank account within 21 days or less. I’m going to give you one complete strategy you can use exactly as I describe it to you at the end of this course, that you will be able to go and apply and I can make a virtual certain bet that none of you in here are using it exactly as I will describe it to you, but that most of you can. And again, you will be able to see results in your bank account in 21 days or less as a result.

So we’re going to do some real practical stuff. I am here to make you money.

There are a couple things I like you to know about me before we get rolling. One: There are a lot of what I call the "pretend experts," the folks who sell only in their memories, run businesses only in their nightmares, and now traverse the globe telling people how to do what it is that either they never have done. It's a whole lot easier to write a book than it is to do it. Or, that they did so long ago that it just no longer matters.

I only make speeches about 50, 60 times a year. It’s only one-third of my life though. Two-thirds of my life is like yours. It’s in the real world, dealing with customers and clients who eat their young every Monday morning, real marketing problems, and everything we talk about here this afternoon will be reality-based, not theory-based.

Do You Hate These Things Too?

I have two hate lists for you that pretty much summarize where we’re going to go in this course. If you run a business and you sign your name on the dotted line on all the checks, then one of the key things on your list of things that you hate should be being what I call an "advertising victim." When I say that, you should get a mental picture. That’s when you get the big, black checkbook out and you sign one of those checks for some kind of advertising expense, and you hand it to some kind of advertising salesperson, and you have no earthly idea whether you made a good decision, bad decision, when you’ll know, how you’ll know, if you’ll know.

I had to test that kind of uncertainty when I spend my money. Bet you do, too. Going to show you how to eliminate it, how to make every dollar you spend promoting your business trackable, accountable, measurable, and come back to you quickly in multiples.

If you  sell for a living, number one on your hate list should be cold-call prospecting grunt work. My friend Zig Ziglar would call that warm-approaching. If he and I agreed on everything, one of us would be unnecessary. I just don’t see anything warm, friendly, fuzzy, happy, pleasant about this process of trying to talk to people who at least emotionally, if not physically, are backing away from you as fast as you are moving towards them.

I grew up in the Midwest, where we have coal mining. And to me, cold prospecting is like coal mining. It’s dirty, filthy, ugly, smelly, sweaty work best left to people who earn minimum wage with brawn, not maximum wage with brain.

So regardless of what you have done before this course, as a result of what we do in this course you should never cold-prospect again as long as you live. I’m going to show you how to eliminate it from your existence and change the way you attract your customers or clients.

"How To Go From Annoying Pest To Welcome Guest"

One quick story to set the stage for where we’re going to go, then we’ll roll up our sleeves and get to work. The story gets us acquainted and sets our direction.

I live in Phoenix and I guess you have heat kind of like ours. Our license plate slogan is "but it’s a dry heat," and it is. Just like a microwave four months out of the year. And it’s important to this story. If you haven’t been, just take my word for it, there is no hotter place in North America than Phoenix in July and August.

I travel a great deal, 200,000 air miles or so a year. But I do have an office, I do have a staff. Even when I’m home though, I tend not to go to the office. I find it disturbs the staff. So generally when I’m home, I stay at home. And one of the things I do is I catch up on consulting calls with my clients on the phone.

So several Julys ago, I’m home alone, a weekday afternoon, everybody’s out of the house, I’ve got the house to myself, I’m at the kitchen counter. I’ve got a pitcher of iced tea, I’ve got a client on the speakerphone, I’m intensely involved in a conversation with my client when someone uninvited, unexpected, and in fact unknown to me, begins to ring the doorbell and bang on the front doors of my home with earthquake intensity.

You work for a real living. You’re not home during the day. But if you stop and think about it, the options of who can be at your home on a weekday afternoon, uninvited, banging on the door is pretty slim. It’s a pest. Not sure who it is.

Back in the recession years, we knew because all the Jehovah witnesses and Avon ladies carpooled. But now it can be all sorts of people, but it’s a pest.

So I did what you do with pests, I ignored it, confident that if sufficiently ignored it would go away. It didn’t. I’m ignoring, continuing my conversation. He’s ringing and banging, ringing and banging, ringing and banging. But finally, I’m right. After ignoring him for a sufficient length of time, he gives up and leaves – ever so briefly.

He goes around to the rear of my property, he climbs over an eight and a half foot high masonry wall with shards of glass embedded on the top to discourage this method of entry, comes down past the cactuses, the shrubs, the pool and the spa, and he’s now on the patio deck, immediately behind me. He can see my back to him through the panes of glass on the doors on which he is now banging with incredible violence.

This is, by far, the most annoying pest ever. But I’m like the most stubborn guy ever. So I keep my back to him, raise my voice to carry on my conversation. We have the contest of wills that seems to last an eternity. Finally, he wins. I can’t handle it anymore. I turn around to deal with the most annoying pest ever. It turns out the reason he’s there is my entire backyard is in flames!

We set a record that year, 15 straight 120-degree days, and everything a little dry, brittle. My guess is some imbecile driving through the community flipped a cigarette butt into orbit and it picked my yard, but I’ll never know. But literally, everything but the water in the pool is on fire. This good Samaritan, who thinks I’m an idiot, which is arguable by now, is there trying to save my house.

Now, here’s what’s instructive. Here’s what’s useful.

At that precise moment in time, he went from being the most annoying pest to the most welcomed guest ever to visit the Kennedy household in 15 years, because he was there with just the right message at just the right moment in time. In this case, "Call 911 stupid, I’ll work the hose."

Now, the reason it’s instructive is because know it or not, acknowledge it or not, like hearing it or not, the vast majority of the time that you try and communicate with your marketplace, present, past or future prospects, clients or customers, you are categorized as a pest, not as the most welcomed guest of the day, week, month or year. And I’m here to tell you that if you discover how to change that – I call it addressing the first square on the marketing game board – if you change that, you automatically change everything. Everything else suddenly gets easy if you become what we call a "welcomed-guest marketer."

Let me give you two quick examples. I have two friends in this business. You would know one or both of them, maybe. I won’t tell you their names. But one is a sales trainer. And if you’ve ever had the joy of being locked in a three- or four- or five-day sales training boot camp, then you’ll appreciate this. He teaches 365 different ways to close a sale, presumably for people who would like to improve their effectiveness at doing so. And whenever I see him, the first thing I always ask him is whether or not he’s found one yet that works, because it would seem to make the other 364 superfluous. It’s less tapes in the box.

But other than that, here’s my contention. If you want to increase your conversion percentage, if you want to close more sales, you don’t do it with a new magic seven-word manipulative phrase you pop out of the box at the end of the process. You do it from the beginning of the process. And if you become a welcomed-guest marketer, as we’re going to talk about, then your closing percentage goes up without improving any of your sales skills whatsoever.

My other buddy is in the time management business. He sells – some of you have them probably under your seats or out in your cars – the really big, honking time management systems. If you’ve got a small car, you’ve got to strap it on the roof when you drive around, which is why they come with solar calculators. They recharge while they’re up there.
These things usually have 56 color tabs and 86 colored pens, and it takes an hour and a half to learn how to use it and it comes with a videotape. As near as I can tell, it takes an hour and a half a day to use the system to manage the time that saves you an hour a day.

But if you like those things, that’s fine. My contention, though, is if you want to improve your personal productivity, you don’t necessarily need a new leather binder. Instead, what you do is become a welcomed-guest marketer so you spend all your face-to-face time only dealing with people who have sought you out and are predisposed to do business with you in a competitive vacuum.

So that’s what I’m all about. That’s what I do for companies and organizations. Every time we do it and we build a new marketing system, we cover three main issues. We deal with three steps. I’m going to run you through them very quickly in lesson 2.

Click here to go to lesson 2