Ep 170: Chatbot Automation and Conversational Marketing with Natasha Takahashi
Hey brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview. We are so excited to bring you this information and wanted to let you know that, Hey, there’s no sales pitch coming from anything that we do with this is all our value add to you and the community. However, if you are somebody who is looking for specific strategies on how to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and we offer a free call to everyone that’s interested in getting to know us and is willing to give us a chance to get to know them and share a little bit about what we do. So if you’re interested in taking us up on a free strategy call, you can do that at brand builders, group.com/summit. Call brand builders, group.com/summit. Call talk to you soon on with the show.
This is get ready for an amazing episode. This is like a mind blowing episode. This is one of these things that you’re going to go, Whoa, I can’t believe this exists and where the world is going and that this is a part of the future. I’m given a little special introduction here to my new friend, Natasha Takahashi. Because honestly the first four minutes of the interview we did together cut out for some reason. And so you don’t get the normal, like live real-time introduction that I usually do with my guests. So I have to recreate it here, but it was, it was mostly just like you know, the pleasantries a little bit. And then, you know, we captured the conversation, but I want to say this. So Natasha is somebody that I brought on who is a new friend who which again, you know, I don’t do that very often.
It’s usually something that really catches my attention. And she is actually somebody who caught my attention specifically because of her expertise. In fact, I would say she’s a great example of somebody who has defined such a specific niche for herself and her partner and their company, that they are starting to dominate and own a space. And they have quickly become one of the world’s leading authorities, if not the world’s leading authority on this very narrow, specific pointed expertise, which is chatbots also known as conversational marketing, which is an emerging technology and emerging strategy, emerging tool that I, I think that we think can be huge for personal brands. Now I also want to let you know that typically we don’t interview a lot of people on things that we’re not doing yet ourselves, but this is something that we’re exploring. We’ve known about it for a couple of years.
We’ve had our eye on it, had we not exited our former business a couple of years ago, we would have implemented it a couple of years ago. So we started a brand builders group we’re having to rebuild and retool and reload if you will, and get our feet underneath us. And so we haven’t yet started using chatbots, but we do do some manual versions of this, which I’ll talk about in the interview. So I just wanted to give you that context and background both on Natasha as a personal brand and just how it fits in and, and go. And yeah, she’s a great example of somebody that we’re giving our platform to, because she’s done a great job of carving out, you know, this uniqueness. And she really is an expert. So who is she? So technically she’s the chief marketing officer and the co-founder of ineffable marketing marketing which is an agency that does chat bot marketing, and they have built these chat bot marketing campaigns for over a hundred different companies and brands.
Several of them you’ll recognize ClickFunnels, mind Valley, digital marketer social media examiner. Those are really good friends of ours over there. Michael Stelzner Matthew Hussey. Billy Jean is marketing, you know, in a, in a, in a bunch of other ones, but Michael Stelzner specifically is someone that we know really well that we trust. He really knows his stuff and he doesn’t introduce or use vendors lightly. Which is one of the reasons it was, it was such a compliment for him to recommend us to his audience. And, you know, I’ve spoken in front of at, at social media marketing world several times. And Natasha has spoken at social media marketing world as well. So she, you know, is highly reputable and this, this company we haven’t yet engaged them personally, but I suspect that there will come a point here in the not too distant future that we will engage with them.
But I want to just to give you that context of how I met Natasha and what we’re talking about, chat bots, this is the automated, you know, when you go to a specifically Facebook messenger is where we started to notice this, right, is like you send an email, people may or may not open it. You said a texts. You know, you may annoy people if you do it too much, but chat bots, which happened through direct messages and it started primarily on Facebook messenger are extremely responsive. They have incredible engagement and open rates. It is, it is a great way to get your message to more people. But it’s a little delicate, right? Cause we’re automating it. And so we talk about a lot of that and I would very much classify this as an advanced technique and advanced technology and advanced tool.
This is not the thing that’s going to make or break your brand early on. You’ve got to build substance, but once you’ve got that, whew, this is a way to throw some fuel on the fire. And anyways, I think, you know, some of this may blow your mind. It definitely did, for me, it was, it was a lot of new information. So without further ado, that is my introduction. And now you will pick up exactly four minutes into my conversation that I had with the wonderful and delightful and extremely intelligent Natasha Takahashi. All right. So, so for those people that don’t know, like just to take it super high level, what is a chat bot? And you like, you, you mentioned Facebook, but then you said other places as well. So like, how should we, how should we think about chat bot in general? Like where are the places that this shows up and, you know, this is basically if I were going to summarize it, this is automating, this is creating automated, like marketing automation for DMs, more or less. Right,
Exactly. Right. And the way that we define chat bots is one-to-one conversations at scale, which has never been possible in history because even though conversations have always been a part of business, you know, somebody walks into a store, they want to know a little bit more, and then they buy something from you or they come back later on. Now we’re doing that at scale online. But the conversation part of it’s still hadn’t been scaled up until chat bots on Facebook messenger actually became available. So 2016 was when chat bot uses for marketing and sales really became a thing before that there were chat bots in other use cases, you know, there’s different apps that allow you to talk to them. You know, it’s a little bit more of an automated system that’s been going on since the 19 hundreds, essentially. But now with Facebook messenger, having led the way for Chapa automation from a business to user standpoint that is directly for discovery, for sales, for customer support, for retention of members, et cetera. All those use cases really started to blow up in 2016. And so when we talk about other channels right now,
This is totally new. I mean, this is, this is, this is like brand new stuff going on, which is why I wanted to talk to you. Cause I was like, Whoa, I think to what you just said, the reason I think this is so powerful, is it as one-to-one conversations, which most of you know, this is how I started. I started out going door to door when I was in college knocking on doors. And it was, it sucked, it was so painful and hard, but there was nothing faster than having a, having a one-on-one conversation with someone where I could take them from never heard of me to here is some money than a one-on-one conversation in a, in a 20, 20 minute window. And what you just said, Natasha, about one-on-one conversations at scale that are automated. I mean, I, I, I think this is a huge part of the future.
Absolutely. and to go back to your second question about the different channels, Facebook messenger, hands down is the best place, the most affordable, the most accessible place channel, if you will, to start out with regardless of business type or industry. And the reason is because all you need is a Facebook page, which ideally you are already utilizing for your business, right? You’re posting ideally a few times a week, engaging with people they’re using all the other wonderful features on Facebook, as well as running ads. And so when you attach a Facebook messenger bot to that page, then not only can people come to your page and just message you, but you can also leverage it for Facebook ads and use it in so many different types of campaigns and use cases. And apart from that in the Facebook ecosystem, right, in terms of messaging apps, we have Facebook messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. So just to bring us back for a moment, Facebook in 2019, announced that they wanted to create a way for all three platforms to talk to each other, they called it interoperability. So we’re going to just get technical for a moment and their goal with it.
Yeah. That sounds, it sounds like an expensive word. That sounds smart. Yeah,
It does. It does. And so their whole goal was, you know, with different demographics in an audiences preferring different channels. You may have, let’s say a mom who loves talking to friends, business, et cetera on Facebook messenger, but then maybe her, you know, 20 year old daughter loves only using Instagram, DM, maybe WhatsApp a little bit. And so they could talk to each other on their platforms that they love. So let’s say the daughter’s on Instagram messaging or DM. And the moms let’s say on Facebook messenger, she can message the Instagram profile of her daughter while staying on Facebook messenger. Daughter’s going to be on Instagram, DM, right. Messaging mom on messenger. But they’re going to have their own experiences in the platforms that they know and love.
And grandma’s on WhatsApp talking to her home girls over, over in Singapore about some, some investment deals and they can all be so they can all be chatting in their native, in their native platform. That’s cool. I’d never even realized that.
Exactly. And so Facebook has already rolled that out. Maybe some of you have seen that and you’ll see more and more of it, where on messenger, you might’ve gotten a notification or an Instagram that says, Hey, now you can talk to your Facebook friends here in this inbox. So they’ve already started the process, but the reason why, you know, any of you guys should give a crap about this is because that means that businesses who are currently set up on Facebook messenger will be able to leverage more and more of that automation on those other platforms. We’re already testing Instagram, DM bots and WhatsApp bots in private beta with Facebook. And that’s going to be rolled out to more and more businesses this year. So that long story short, you know, going back to my concept about choosing different channels, Facebook messenger is the Guinea pig. Like you should be on there yesterday because you can be testing out conversational psychology for your audience. Like what do people actually want to talk to you about? What are the use cases that will bring the most ROI to your business and all of that translate to any other channel in the future, SMS, Instagram, WhatsApp, et cetera.
Yeah. I mean, conversational psychology, like there’s the term right there of which, you know, those of us from the old school. Cause you know, I’m almost 40, which makes me like an old gray haired person in this industry now is, you know, this was human to human sales. It was actual like one-on-one like quote unquote, like hand to hand combat of persuasion. And now this is happening. And so before we talk about all the things that can do, I need to help you, I need you to help me get past a psychological block that I have, which is number one, it’s this idea of feeling like I’m pretending that people are talking to me, but they’re not actually talking to me. And so that’s number one. And then I guess just kind of like I mean the worry there, there’s like a couple of worries.
One is like, okay, I don’t want to mislead people to somehow make them think that they’re actually talking to me when they’re not, even though if I write it, it’s kind of like, I am, it’s the same thing. Like my assistant, my assistant has a set of responses right now that she’ll copy and paste as me. Cause it’s like, I literally that’s what I would type if I were there and then the other, but the other, the other part of it is is, is making sure that it doesn’t ever do something that I wouldn’t do that like, Oh gosh, I would never say that. So how do you, how do you, how do I get past that emotional, like roadblock before we get into the technical part?
Sure. And those are great questions that I think, especially for personal brands, really important to consider and think about links for the number, the first thing that you mentioned right around, ultimately you’re asking, you know, what should the persona of the Bot be, like, how should we position this? So that people think of this as a helpful automation, almost like a personal concierge to help them with whatever they need, rather than positioning it as this is Rory, you know, and I’m here right now, talking to you. It’s actually illegal in some us States to have a chat bot pretend that it is a human. So there are laws in place in the world that essentially prevent you from doing this anyways. And you know, it’s not super ethical to say I’m actually here when you’re not. So the way that we typically position this for personal brands is that we’ll say something like we’ll either give the bot its own persona and say, Hey, I’m, you know, Jennifer. Yeah, exactly. You know, I’m Jennifer, I’m, Rory’s personal concierge. I’m here to help you with whatever you need from brand builders group. Like let’s get into it. You know, which of these things are you looking for? Just as like an example, or you could say, Hey, this is Rory’s bot, I’m not here right now, but I did create all of this for you. And I’m excited for you to go through this experience so that I can serve you 24 seven, you know, insert other benefits that make sense to your audience. So those are the,
I think that’s really cool because I would, I, you know, like that’s how I think of even how I think of a funnel is like, I’m not here with you live, but it’s like, this is my brain. Like if we were having a conversation, I would be telling you the same thing you’re seeing on this video, which is not that different from a podcast or anything else. I guess
That’s actually a great analogy that I haven’t really mentioned in the past, but I mean, a hundred percent, you know, if you’re viewing anything prerecorded or pre-written online, that person’s not there in your life to you. So yeah. That’s a great perspective to bring.
I like, I like Rory’s bot plus I could give him like some awesome alter ego and he could be like way more confident than I am and like really smooth talking and like really handsome, exactly a smooth, smooth talker, but so, okay. All right. And then, so this is, this is Rory’s bot and then how do I go about doing this? Because when I think about a conversation, my mind goes to what makes a conversation a conversation is there’s like an infinite number of possibilities. The conversation could go. And how do I get my mind wrapped around the idea that we could actually structure a conversation somehow that would feel like a conversation, but still be scripted enough that you could automate it without me writing like a hundred thousand, like, do you use like a decision tree to do this? Or like, how do you actually map this out?
Yeah. So a lot of people will come at it from that perspective, which is why they get overwhelmed of like, there’s so many things that we could do with this. You know, me, if I’m a personal [inaudible] and I’m sure a lot of people listening to this feel that way as well, if they’ve tried to tackle this. And so what it comes down to is simplifying it down to one specific use case. Let’s start there that you want to start with. So if we go back to my original example of somebody wanting to, let’s say, come into your business, learn more and see if they can book a call with you or, you know, buy something low ticket to, to better understand know that your chat bot shouldn’t be able to do everything a human could do. It should be able to handle specific use cases.
And those expectations should be set at the beginning of the conversation. So let’s say that you are setting up a chat bot with one use case, let’s say one campaign that is going to help leads book calls. You’re going to qualify them. Let’s say for your coaching program and you are then going to allow them to book a call, or if you find that they’re not qualified, then maybe you send them to a lower ticket offer or something free. That’s one campaign, one conversation that you technically already have scripts for, right? If you got on the phone today and someone’s like, Hey, I am XYZ business owner trying to do whatever my goal is. Then you know, what should I do with you guys? And then you would have probably specific questions that you are already thinking of right now that you would want to ask them, what’s your revenue?
How much are you spending on ads, marketing, et cetera, how many people are on your team, whatever it might be. Those qualifying questions that you might even actually already have written out on, like, let’s say a discovery call form or something of the, like an application. And you put all of that into the conversation, keeping in mind to always give the person opportunity to speak. So it should very much so always be a back and forth, right? Of like you asking the question that, you know, you need to know the answer of the person sharing that and then saying, great, thanks for sharing that, going back and forth, back and forth. And then at the end, the expectation you set at the beginning of, Hey, I’m going to let you know what I think the best next step is for us in this relationship. Then you shared that at the end.
And technically you already have this all mapped out inside of your head. You just need to get it out into a conversation and going back to expectations, just one last thing to say here, because you know, you bringing up the concept of, well, there’s so many different things I could pull up and things like it say again, it all comes down to the fact that if somebody were to message you and say, Hey, tell me a joke, or like, I need help with this super random thing. You’re like, I’m not gonna help you with that. That’s not what we’re here for. And so in the same way, your bot should just be able to handle things like that, which is very easy to implement at like a minimum viable level. So you can just say, Hey, you know, I can’t help with that at the moment, but here’s what I can do. I can help you understand what the next step would be if we were to work together. Does that all make sense?
Yeah. Yeah. So I just, how many of those things do you, you know, like if I’m going to write out a script to go, you know, what’s your goal with your personal brand? What are you struggling with? Are you hoping to write a book one day? Did you know that we can help you with that? Like that’s a pretty straight path to a free call, but planning for the other stuff of like, Oh, they asked me for a joke. Well, you know, tell me a joke or they asked me, I guess, do you just kinda like have a set of templates? You walk people through that says, you know, you need to write something for this and you need to write something for that. And I mean, is that, is that a cell? And are there a thousand or are there like five?
So when you first start out, there will be more like five, because what you should build into your bot initially is what we call the fallback. And that’s pretty common language and conversation design, which is that if you don’t have specific triggers set up, like let’s say someone says a personal brand inside of your body, then you might want, that’s a little bit vague. Still. Let’s say something more specific. I want to work with you. Then if somebody says something like that, you can set up a trigger so that when someone messages you that then you would send a specific response. But if they sent hey, tell me a joke, plus a thousand plus other random things someone could send you, they’ll all get directed to this fallback that says all, you know, you can test a few varieties of that. Like, Hey, you know, I’m learning every day.
So I’m not smart enough to answer that right now, but here’s what I can help you with. Or like, Hey, you know what, we, we actually don’t help with that, but here’s what I can help you with. And just always letting people be able to reply to that and say, okay, then just kidding. You know, maybe I was looking for something else or no, thanks. Or they might need to talk to a human or go to your help center. So there’s always different paths to kind of take people through and just close the loop. But you should not feel any pressure to have, to have all of those different triggers available for the most random things. Like you’ll get that data in over the first few months of the chat bot running and you’ll know what you actually need to implement in terms of those triggers.
So how much of this is kind of like a mapped out decision tree. If they say this, you say this, or you ask them a question and it’s like, this answer goes here. This answer goes here. How much of it is that versus like artificial intelligence where you’re just basically like putting in, I don’t even know how that, is it artificial intelligence or is this more like a decision tree that you’re mapping out?
Those are two different levels of, let’s say chat bot, marketing slash conversation design. And so the AI level is something that we, from a marketing perspective, we add that on as a layer on top of the decision tree. So the decision tree would be a sales and marketing conversation, even customer support style conversation that we create inside of a specific chat bot platform for a channel like Facebook messenger. And then as we start to see the data coming in for what people are saying, as well as just like random conversations that aren’t related to this, because people can message your Facebook page, anytime about anything they want. So getting all that data, and then we can start to stack the AI on top of that. So it can make sure people are going to what they need to essentially, and it can answer more questions that maybe didn’t start in a specific use case that are, you know, just incoming questions or messages that don’t have to do with a specific campaign.
You start, you start effectively, you start with a decision tree, like you’re saying, pick one objective. Like I want to get more people into this funnel or more people to request a call or more people to click on this link or whatever. And you just kind of like write a conversation for that. And then after you’ve got data coming in, then you can layer AI on later. Exactly. Right. And, and, and in terms of the technology that you’re using to do this, cause I see this as like, you know, there’s a little bit of an emotional part here, which we talked about, and then there’s like a strategy part, which is the decision tree and the conversational. And then there’s the technology part. So is this, this is like drift, right? Like this is, these are our, what are the, is that, is that the tool like, cause there’s a tool that you have to actually use to integrate with Facebook to, to build all this out. Right. And there’s different ones. Does it, is there pretty much like only one that you’re using or they’re like three or like what are the, what are the industry best standards here? Like, does it, are there a hundred already or how many are there we really looking at?
Yeah, there are quite a few platforms available, but just like, there are a gazillion platforms available for email marketing and you’re looking at like five to 10 top industry, totally eating platforms, same thing here, there are a gazillion platforms you could choose from, but the tech stack for chatbots just looks a little bit different than email marketing, although similar aspects, like there’s some crossover for short. So for example, we will start with a no code Shopbop platform because we come at this from the marketing perspective. And at this point it doesn’t make sense to code your own entire bot. It takes a lot of maintenance. It’s kind of like managing a WordPress site, but like 10 X, you know, you’re having to update things all the time, et cetera. Whereas if you use a out of the box solution, so what we primarily use is called many chat and that platform allows us to build everything we need to, they manage all the development code side of things, but we can still customize on top of that and add custom code and things that we want to. So that’s one example of a platform that you could go to similar, like using, you know, infusion soft drip, et cetera, for email marketing, but you would have this dedicated platform for your chat bot channels. So that’s,
So I basically, if I set up a Manny chat account, M a N Y chat is how this is, I set up Manny chat, you know, I integrate it with my Facebook and then it pulls me into some interface where I’m going, if this, then that, if this, then that, if this, then that, and you basically just write it out.
Yes. So you can create the entire backend automation as well as the content that users would see all inside of there. It’s kind of like a CRM plus, you know, content slash campaign management platform.
Huh. And then are you able to S to basically like, look at all those conversations or export them after to like analyze and go, okay, here’s what happened here? This person, you know, all these people are asking this and we’re sending them to the wrong thing. I mean, does that
Definitely, there are a few different perspectives on this though, and also more advanced techniques. So when you’re first starting out, like you can be reading through all the conversations happening just to be searching for certain areas where maybe the bot dropped the ball, you want to adjust copy, or like, Oh, that actually was confusing. Right? So that’s kind of level one of just taking a look at everything. Now level two would be to actually attach an analytics platform. So that be another step in the tech stack. There are tools out there, for example, dashpot, that’s a D a S H bot, and there’s also a platform literally called bot analytics. And both of those allow you to plug in whatever channel it is, Facebook messenger or otherwise. And it’ll analyze all the messages coming in. So it’ll tell you literally everything that you would want to know, right. What’s the most common word someone is saying to the bot, how many messages are coming in every day and anything else in between. So, so there’s a lot of great data that comes from that, that then you can use to optimize your experiences. And one other thing that I’ll just add to this, because even though you didn’t directly ask this, I think it’s still a question.
I didn’t know what to ask Natasha. I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m doing. No, no, this is perfect. This is, so this is so like next level, we would call this phase three for us. Like, there’s so many other things you got to get right before you do this. Like, definitely. But, but, but like once you have your foundation and your principles set and like this can be something that can create exponential growth it seems like it feels like,
Yeah. And let me say that, it’s amazing. You guys have those two phases before you add on things like this, because when businesses are at, let’s say a phase one, as you guys define it and they try to add a chat bot into their business, it’s just not going to do a whole lot for them. Yep. They’ve got to have all those other pillars of their business there. They have to have an established business really in order to capitalize on this. So if you’re listening to this and you’re just starting out a chat bot can support you in a certain use case. Right? Make things a little bit easier for you, but understand you’re not going to get full advantage of a chat bot until you’re well-established.
Huh. Well, so you said, sorry, go back. You said you, the question you, that I should have asked that I didn’t ask that you were going to answer was what
Just around essentially transferring data between your CRM email marketing platform. Let’s say, for example, or if you use something else, active campaign Infusionsoft, and the list goes on there and something like many chat or your chat bot platform of choice. And so when you integrate those together, whether it’s natively, which is an option, and we don’t need to go down, you know, very logistical paths, but long story short, there’s a way for them to connect to each other. And from there you can pass data in between them. So that if somebody took some important actions inside of the bot, or maybe didn’t complete, let’s say a lead qualification form inside of the bot questions that you were asking, and you already send follow-ups in the bot, the user still hasn’t replied, well, maybe you send them an email and you can trigger that through, you know, your email marketing platform, but you can also just have all that data seamlessly integrated. So that then when it comes time to, like you said, pull certain data out of, like, let’s say you want to see all the responses coming in for those questions. When people go to book a call inside of the bot, you can put that not only just like a Google sheet, but also have that in your other platforms for your business,
You got Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp is this is different than a chat bot on your website or is it similar?
Great question because I know you mentioned drift earlier and I was going to get to this. You know, we’ve been, we’ve been going a little bit all over the place, but I love it because we’re covering quite a bit of ground that is all adjacent, right? And these are all questions that people have when they’re first is trying to figure out what the hell this is. So, so, so website live chat, which you can go to pretty much any website these days. And there’ll be a little thing in the bottom, which actually fun fact. Now, most of the big enterprises ever since COVID really hit the U S are all using a chat bot. So next time you go to literally any website, your bank, government websites, et cetera, you will see automated chat there, which is really cool. But historically that’s all been, you know, humans who will come online and actually answer things like with drift or with Intercom.
So the difference between using one of those widgets where you don’t know anything about the user before they tell you it, so you have to say, Hey, you know, I’m here to help you, but what’s your name? What’s your email. Maybe there’s other things that they need from you in order to help you as a user with Facebook messenger. What Facebook has enabled businesses to do is actually capture a certain set of information about every person opting in. So whether you message the page directly on Facebook, or you go to their website and opt into a little widget, that looks the same as like another website live chat, but it’s actually Facebook messenger, but it’s happening on that website page.
Yeah. You can take your Facebook messenger and basically put it on your site, correct?
Yes. And so the page itself for the business in this case would receive the first name, the last name, gender time zone, and language of that person who’s opting in based on their Facebook profile information. So that’s one of the biggest advantages is that unlike website live chat, you’re getting that information and that conversation will now follow that person because if they leave your website, well, guess what? They’ve got Facebook messenger on their computer, on their phone mobile app, right? And so you can follow up with them. They can follow up with you. And it just becomes a seamless transition. Whereas with website live chat, that’s the only website page. You can actually have that conversation on. And then it might get moved over to email if you’ve ever had that experience, but it’s not the same as it all being gone. Right.
And can you broadcast push a message once somebody has been chatting with you on messenger? Can you basically kind of like flip the conversation where it’s more like a text blast that you would like push out a notification or no?
Yes. There are some changes that have happened over the last few years that make it different from like just sending out an email campaign, like blasting that out. Let’s say to an entire list, there are certain rules now around when you can do that, what those messages, but long story short, it’s definitely a critical part of a strategy to monetize your messenger list because everyone who now talks to your page, as soon as you connect a platform like many chat, they now become a subscriber on your list. Just like somebody would become an email list subscriber. So you can definitely leverage them in that way to send out broadcast promotions, new content releases, launches, et cetera.
Yeah. I mean, the fact that you can integrate this with your marketing automation tool, either natively or third party, but the, that you can follow the conversation with them across multiple platforms that you can add AI on top of it, that you can incorporate analytics to, to pull all the trends out of this. You can strategically design these decision trees, however you want. I mean, this is fricking nuts, like, and, and, and it’s a conversation, a one-on-one conversation. It’s not, it’s, it’s totally interactive. It’s not like email. This is amazing. So anyways, y’all, so here’s what we want you to do. Of course you can go find Natasha Takahashi online. The school school of bots we’ll put links to that in our profile, but here’s what I would love for you to do is if you want to learn more about this, go to brand builders, group.com forward slash chat bots. And you can learn more about some of the stuff that Natasha is up to and her team. And we’re gonna, we’re gonna, w we’re gonna learn more about this and we’re gonna, I think we’re gonna see more of Natasha in their game cause they’re, they’re doing it, and this is a huge part of the future. So Natasha, any other last little thoughts that you would leave people with?
I think the biggest reminder is starting simple. I know it sounds stupid and silly, but as with anything in business, it really is the key to success with this to not feel overwhelmed, but to take what Rory and I just talked about and understand that just starting with one use case, getting a win there, proving the channel for your business, and then expanding from there and expanding and scaling to the moon. Whatever you want to do with it is possible, but prove the channel for your business first. And we’re happy to help you do that and get clarity on it. So go ahead and check out the link that Brody mentioned. Yeah, there you go.
Oh, totally.
My friends this stuff makes me feel like I’m so far behind, but it inspires me that there’s a lot to learn and a big future ahead, Natasha. We wish you the best.
Thanks so much. And thanks for listening.
Ep 169: Secrets to Selling the Go-Giver Way with Bob Burg | Recap Episode
I cannot tell you enough how much I love Bob Berg and specifically Bob Burg’s philosophies about sales. You know, it’s been, it’s been a couple of years, really, since I had a focused conversation with Bob and, you know, this interview that we did together, it just reminded me of how much I love him and in the go giver. Okay. So the book that he and John David Mann wrote, and John David Mann is going to come on, we’re going to get him on the podcast here at some point. But that book is probably one of my top five all time business books. And, and, and probably, you know, can I actually say this, I might actually be able to say this. I think the Go-Giver is my, my number two book ever written for salespeople. Like top two, the only other one would be well, how to win friends and influence people.
And then also augmented Dino’s greatest salesman in the world, but Go-Giver is right up there. Like if you are in sales and, you know, we haven’t talked as much about sales on this podcast. I mean marketing and stuff like that, but like direct, you know, sales, sales, sales, as we did in this episode, which I love, I mean, this is sales was how I started, like sales is where I came from. I, I did sales first and then was a speaker and then was an author and then was an entrepreneur and then was, it was a marketer. And the, the, the takeaways from this episode are so good. Like for me to come up with three, I actually really had to, to focus hard and, and, and narrow them down. Obviously this is the recap edition of the interview that we did with Bob Burg.
Obviously it’s just me no, AJ this week. And I’m actually, I’ve got a lot to say about this, so it’s okay because I just, I think people sell the wrong way and there’s so much out there about how to sell that I just disagree with. And, and I, and frankly, I haven’t done. And I think there’s been so many times in my career where I haven’t fit in as a salesperson because I was not willing to compromise my reputation or my integrity just for the sake of revenue and, and Bob, you know, that’s what Bob, Bob teaches to do it that way. And so anyways, so let’s give you, let’s just dive into the, the three takeaways before I just rant here nonstop. All right. So number one thing that he said, or the first thing that really stuck with me is in a free market, you have to realize that people only buy things because they believe it’s in their best interest to do so.
It’s really, even though that should be obvious. A lot of times it’s not obvious because you know, like I’ve, I’ve heard people say people buy because they like you and they trust you. That’s not true. People don’t buy because they like you and trust you, people buy because they think that what you have is good for them. And it helps if they like you and trust you, and they might not buy from you if they don’t like you and they don’t trust you, it’s going to decrease the likelihood that they will buy. But even so some of us will still buy things. If we believe it’s in our best interests, even if we don’t like the person now, not, not as often. Right. And that is somebody not liking you and trusting you is a very big barrier to have to overcome, but either way it’s, they are buying because they believe it is in their best interest to do so.
And so your job is to help illustrate that for them. And I wouldn’t even say that way, like when I, when I think of this and I’m so excited, y’all like I don’t think I’ve shared this with you, but we have an event called pressure-free persuasion that, you know, we’ve been working on here for a couple of years since we started brand builders group and we haven’t taught it live. And we’re about to, it’s coming up for the first time. And so I’ve been like diving into, you know, really the first time ever in our life that, that Aj and I have put our actual personal sales philosophies into a training program, and it’s going to be so killer. And it’s so online and on target with, you know, this interview. And it’s all about serving the best interest of the prospect. And it’s, you know, I say illustrating that because if they’re going to buy, you want to illustrate it.
But I don’t even know that illustrate is the right way. Cause that illustrate basically means that like I’m drawing it out for them and I’m showing them how that’s in their best interest, which is true, but it’s a level deeper than that to go. Actually, I’m not trying to convince them. This is in their best interest. I’m not trying to show them how this is in their best interest. If you do pressure-free persuasion, which is what we teach. You’re actually legitimately trying to figure out if what you have is in their best interest. And that’s a whole nother level. Like we actually believe that you shouldn’t always sell everybody and that the goal isn’t to sell everybody. And I know that, I mean, gosh, like we may not get hired for a sales training from a lot of people, but I believe you, you make more that way.
Like you make more sales by genuinely being interested in discovering if what you have can legitimately help the person not look like it can help the person not pretend to help the person not convince the person that what you have may help them, but that it legitimately and authentically, and truthfully actually serves their best interest. And nobody does that. Like nobody does that. Salespeople are. So self-centered they think about I’m going to make the sale. What do I need to say to convince this person? Like, what are the magic words that I can use to change this person’s mind? And it’s like, what, like what that is so manipulative, that is not what sales is. At least it’s not what we think of sales. Let’s just say this way. It’s not what pressure-free persuasion is. So we don’t, I guess, own the word sales, but it’s not how we do sales and it’s not how we teach you to do sales and how we teach our team to do sales and how we teach the personal brands that we work with. And that we coach to do sales. It’s actually going, can I really help this person really? And so it’s important to understand that that is the goal. That is the objective and what we’re seeking. We’re on a mission for truth. We’re not on a mission for a transaction.
You understand we’re on a mission for truth. We’re not on the mission for a transaction. The truth is, can I really help you? If yes, then you should buy. If no, then you should not. It’s not that I’m on a mission for a transaction, which is what do I have to get you to do to say, yes, that’s not, that’s not, that’s not how we roll. This is not how we roll. Right? So you know, again, it’s one reason why we got out of the sales training business because we didn’t want to have to tell every single person that they should make every single sale every single time. And that all that matters is your revenue and your sales and your numbers and that your, your worth is determined to how much your sales is. We just don’t believe that. So this is probably a defining moment in a defining episode, I would say about who brand builders group is and how we are different.
And we’re not trying to differentiate ourselves for the purpose of differentiating ourself. I’m saying, this is what we believe that not every person should be sold and that it’s not a game of winning and losing. It’s not on a mission for a transaction. It is on a mission for truth. And it is about the best interest of the person that you’re talking to. And Bob believes, and I love that. Like there’s, I spent my whole life in sales and I can count on less than one hand. The number of people who teach sales, who actually legitimately teach that especially, you know, Bob has, has had such incredible career. So that’s the first thing is make sure you realize that the only reason they buy is because they believe it’s in their best interest to do so. Number two, again, Bob said a lot of this, some of this I’m adding color in, but we’re aligned here. The target is not making more money. The target is serving other people.
If you aim for serving other people, money is a reward that comes like the reward comes in the form of money, but we’re not aiming at money. If I’m aiming at making money, then serving people is ancillary. And I may or may not do that because it’s subservient to making money. We have to flip that. We got to switch that we have to turn that inside out, serving people is the target money is the reward. It’s not that money is the target. And maybe we serve people and maybe we don’t, it’s it’s never about the sales person. It’s always about the prospect. It’s always about legitimately helping them. Now, some of you, you know, you may go, yeah, I’m done listening to brand builders group because you know, they’re not going to help me make money quickest. And you know what I would say, in some cases that’s actually true.
We may not be the people who teach you how to make money the fastest. But what I would say is we’re the people who teach you how to make the most money. The longest, because this is about reputation. We’re playing the long game and don’t hear what I’m not saying. I’m not saying you shouldn’t sell. I’m not saying you shouldn’t close the deal. I’m not saying that people don’t need help making decisions. They do. We will teach that and talk a lot about that when we get to pressure-free persuasion in the course. But what I’m, what I’m saying is that service is the objective. The money is the by-product of that. And term, it will happen, but you never sacrifice long-term reputation for short term revenue. We believe that you shouldn’t, but that’s not what most people who teach sales believe it’s the opposite. Most of sales is revenue at all costs.
Revenue is your worth. You’re as good as your last sale. Like, you know, it’s only the top producers who matter the most like it and it’s, and it’s going, we’re playing a different game. We’re playing a longer term game that we’re investing in reputation. We’re investing in trust, we’re seeking truth. We’re going after service. We allow money show up as a by-product of that. And yeah, that’s what we just believe so far. It’s worked out pretty good for us. You know, maybe we would have made more money. Maybe we would have made more money in our careers. I’m specifically speaking to, to me and AJ right now. But I don’t think so. I mean, it would be pretty hard pressed. I mean maybe, but even if we did, we don’t care because it’s not worth it. It’s not worth, it’s not, it’s never worth a compromise of integrity just to make more income.
It’s never worth a compromise in your reputation just to make more revenue ever. At least that’s not what we believe. And I don’t think that’s what Bob believes. And, and to hear Bob say, it gives me conviction. Right. And I’m just like, man, that that’s that’s, that’s it. That’s what we believe is different. All right. The third thing I want to highlight about Bob, which I love, which is his personal brand journey. And you know, if you, if you, how do you make money quickly as a personal brand? Okay. So let’s now let’s flip and go, okay, got it. Love service. Also need to make some money, right? Like that, that is true. Okay. Again, we were good with money. Like we love, we want money, right? It’s not like we don’t want money. We want money. We want income. We want sales. Okay.
I’m not saying we don’t I’m saying that’s not number one. Now let’s flip it and go, how do we make some sales? Like, how do we make, how do we make some money, man? And here’s what I, here’s what I want to highlight about Bob’s career and what I want to tell you. Well, before I tell you what this is, this is the third takeaway. Bob built his career on this. He says it in the interview. Bob built his career on this. Tom Hopkins, Brian, Tracy, Tony Robbins. They also all built their career on this. We have built our career on this ed Tate, who is a good friend of mine, who is a world champion of public speaking, built his career on this Mark Sanborn built his career on this. So many of the top performing highest income earners, most notable award winners in this profession built their career on this one skill.
And Bob mentioned it, and this is what it is. You learn to speak for free and sell at the back of the room, speak for free and sell at the back of the room. So many of the greatest teachers, speakers, influencers, personal brands authors, whatever you want to call them. So many of, of the highest paid speakers in the built their career by speaking for free and selling at the back of the room, because it’s a lot easier to get in front of the audience. If you don’t have to charge a fee to get there, right? Like now again, don’t hear what I’m not saying. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t one day charge a speaking fee, right? I am at a stage in my career where people pay a a pretty good bit of money, right? Like we’re, we’re not, we’re not rolling in Oprah dough or, you know, or, or Gary, Gary Vaynerchuk DOE, but we get paid a pretty good amount of money to stand in front of some pretty large audiences.
But how did we get there? I spoke for free 304 times, 304 times before I got a legitimate speaking fee. Now, does that mean I spoke, I never made money for my first 304 speeches. No, we built a multi-million dollar business speaking for free. We built an eight figure business speaking for free. This was how we started our last company, because it’s the same model that Brian Tracy and Tom Hopkins and Tony Robinson, Jim Rhodes, like it’s the same model that so many of the legends in this industry have used. You go speak for free and then you offer something for sale. And even when I say offer something for sale, like when you think about it, right? You, you know, our mind goes to like sell a book at the back of the room or sell a course. You know, it used to be like sell CDs or sell tapes, and then it was CDs and then it was DVDs.
And now it’s like sell a course and that all works. That that can all be true. But it can be selling tickets to an event we’ve done that we’ve, we’ve sold millions of dollars of tickets to events after doing free presentations. It could be selling but, but, but, but it also could be selling coaching programs, consulting services. If you’re a financial advisor, if an anybody in the professional services industry, you go speak for free. And, and when we say sell at the back of the room, there’s two types of offers. So we teach this in our revenue engine course, there are soft offers, which are offers that you make, which are for people to take the next step, but it’s not for money. A soft offer is like schedule an appointment or request a call. And then there are full offers, which are to the point of a financial transaction.
So, you know, come to the back of the room and give me your credit card. So that’s the difference between full offers and soft offers. Most of the money we’ve made in our career has happened from soft offers. Well, I guess I can’t say that because it, in a, yeah, I mean, in our last business, we made a lot of full offers. Like we actually spoke for free and we’ve closed in the back of the room now. So, so you go, how does this apply to me? Because if you’re a, if you’re a cosmetic surgeon or you’re an accountant, or you’re a lawyer, or you’re a financial advisor, or you do direct sales, or you’re an author, a coach, a speaker consultant trainer, all of us can go speak for free and sell at the back of the room. This is the fastest path to cash.
This is the single greatest, most powerful mechanism there is for monetizing a personal brand. Now, if you can get paid to speak and you can sell at the back of the room even better. And, and there’s a lot of delicacy and a lot of tact and a lot of nuance and a lot of tremendous skill and psychology for making full offers. You know, it’s very easy to come across as pushy and slimy from stage. If you’re making a full offer, if you’re asking a room full of people for their credit card, all at the same time, there is a lot to learn about how to do that, right. Something that we know a lot about it. And we teach, we actually teach that skill in world-class presentation, craft how to close a room full of people which is very different from one-on-one sales, which is what we teach in pressure-free persuasion.
But a soft offer is easy. Anybody can do it. In fact, here’s another distinction I want to make for you. The word speaking, right? You might hear the word speaking and you think of people like me. I stand on, you know, I get on these stages. There’s sometimes there’s tens of thousands of people in the room. Well, you know, that may not be what your daily life looks like. It probably does it like, there’s not a, there’s not a ton of people who do that, but the way that I built my career and we built our career and, and AIJ, and I have built our various companies you’ve been involved in is by speaking to small rooms of people between like a smallest three people. And it usually like three to 15 and going out and speaking. So you can, it’s not auditoriums and arenas full of people.
It’s not giant conference rooms. These are small office built, you know, office buildings and their chamber of commerce meetings. And they’re, you know, Kowanas clubs and rotary clubs and, and just a small company know pulling, going in and speaking at their weekly meeting. I mean, that’s how Tony Robbins sells all of their event tickets, or they used to the yeah, I say that not, not knowing Tony and not knowing much about their, their internal operations, but that is how they, they built their company. Cause that’s been the model, but here’s the other thing, not only is speaking, does it not require big audiences. It also doesn’t require in person audiences. Ah, they can be virtual audiences. They are webinars. What is a webinar? Right? People like, Oh, webinars, which they’re not new anymore. But 10 years ago it was like all the craze, Oh, webinars, what is a webinar webinars speaking for free and sound something at the back of the room.
It’s the exact same thing it’s been around for decades. That’s why it works by the way. That’s why we teach you how to do it. And we, that’s why we encourage one of your first funnels should be quote unquote, a webinar funnel. But if you’re not an information marketer, you know, you might not think of it as a webinar funnel. You might think of it as a free online training or a masterclass or a web class or a video or whatever. But it’s the same thing you’re giving value for free in the form of a video. And then you’re offering something for sale at the end, also going and doing podcasts too. Where is the same thing you’re speaking for free. This is how we launched brand builders group. How did we get our first dozen customers? Right? We went on podcasts and for free, when I speak on a podcast it’s for free, right?
Usually I’m not getting paid. There’s a couple of times that’s happened, but usually it’s like, I’m there because I have a relationship with the host or I want to, or I like what they’re up to, or they’ve got a great audience and you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But you’re speaking for free. And then you’re selling now in a podcast interview, you almost never hear full offers, right? You don’t hear very often because not many people would listen to a podcast if there was a full offer, every episode. Right? But what you do is you do a soft offer, you know, go request a call. That’s a soft offer. Here’s my Calendly link or go to my website. And there’s a lead capture, you know, or go to this landing page and download a free opt-in. Those are soft offers. They’re they’re steps towards a sale, but they’re not, they’re not all the way to the sale, but webinars, podcasts, you know, now there’s this you know, challenges are like all the craze like, Oh, there’s a challenge.
What does a challenge? A challenge is a Facebook group of people. It’s just the audiences inside of a Facebook group instead of on a webinar or instead of on a podcast or instead of in a live room and you go low, you go live, which is a video comes on and you speak for free four or five days, seven days, 21 days, whatever the challenge is. And then what do you think they do at the end? They sell, speak for free. It’s a lot easier to build an audience, get in front of an audience, be invited onto a stage. If you remove the barrier of, of a speaking fee and you can still monetize your time. So you’re speaking for free, but it doesn’t mean you’re not getting paid. You’re just not getting paid to speak. You’re monetizing your time still, but you’re doing it through either full offers or soft offers at the back.
And anyways, I, I know I’m harping on this, but it boggles my mind, how people miss this. And if you look at the brand builder journey, and I know, you know, we don’t do a lot of our own training here on the podcast, but when we teach the brand builder journey, if you go to our website we have this, you know, when you click on our process, we map out our brand builder journey there. And we have, we have 12 core courses. We divide them into four phases. So our curriculum is, is one curriculum divided into four phases. And each of the four phases divided into three courses. Phase one is finding your brand DNA, which is creating, finding your uniqueness, finding your positioning. And we get clear on who you serve. What is unique about you? What’s your position in the market and how do you make money?
Well then course two in phase. One is captivating content where we help extrapolate your uniqueness into a body of original thought leadership, frameworks, and intellectual property. We draw out of you, your expertise into a body of work that happens in phase one course, two captivating content. And then phase one course three is world-class presentation craft, which is where we take that content. And we prepare it for the spoken word. Now, some people say, well, Rory, I need to make money faster. And they go, I want to get to funnels faster. I want to do paid ads faster. I want to monetize faster and they’re, and they’re missing it, right? Like we do all that stuff too. You’ll get there. But the fastest way to monetize is to go speak for free. It is the fastest way because people get to sample you. You’re reducing the, the, the, the barrier of entry to get hired because you’re not, you don’t have a fee, right?
You’re making it easy for them to hire you. You’re standing in front of that audience, you know, or presenting live or virtually or whatever it is. And they get to sample you for free. So they get to trust you first. And then they buy for you. This is a skill you have to master, and I’m not saying you have to master the full offer skill. That’s a hard skill. There’s risk involved there for sure. There’s a lot of psychology, a lot of tact. And if you’re standing on a stage asking people to pull out their credit card, you definitely need to go through some serious training with us. Cause it’s delicate to do. It can totally be done. It’s amazing. Like you can, I mean, you can, you can sell tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars in a room and actually collect the money on the spot.
Super powerful, but verb that’s pretty advanced, right? And so there’s a good, there’s a good or chance. There’s a more likely chance that what you’re going to start with is soft offers, which is great. That’s still a measurable deliverable, you know, drive towards revenue. How many people requested a call scheduled an appointment downloaded my opt-in, you know, my, my lead magnet gave me their business card. That’s a proactive step in the sales process. Speak for free, give value for free serving others is the target. You know, it’s about them. It’s not about you all of these great, amazing, wonderful takeaways from the one and only Bob Berg, who is one of the few people that I can recommend unabashedly when it comes to, if you want to learn how to sell this is somebody that we are aligned with that we believe in. And that love. I mean, Bob has been such an encouragement to me over my career and gosh, the Go-Giver is just one of the best books ever. And you know, Bob does this pour into people, give first serve first help first and allow money to be the by-product that will inevitably show up sooner or later. Keep coming back here to the influential personal brand podcast.
Ep 168: Secrets to Selling the Go-Giver Way with Bob Burg
RV: (01:04)
One of my favorite books of all time is a book called the Go-Giver sold about a million copies and is written by the man you are about to meet who is a long-time friend of mine, Bob Burg. He coauthored that book and several others with John David Mann, who was also a long time friend of mine. And they turned it into a Go-Giver series. His, their newest parable is called the Go-Giver influencer, but Bob and I met, I believe through Zig Ziglar way back in the day. And that was how we got connected. And then we’ve just known each other over the years. He is a hall of fame speaker. He BB for so many great companies, even a former us president speaks all all over the world. And, and these days is, is more focused on just building up a community and impact and people from home in, in a world of COVID like we all are. And we hadn’t connected in a while. And so Bob, I just, man, I’m, I’m honored that you’re here. My friend, it’s good to see you. Oh,
BB: (02:10)
The honor’s mine were already one of my all timeFavorite people, which I believe, you know,
BB: (02:14)
I hope you know that.
RV: (02:17)
Well, I thank you. I, you know, it’s funny because I knew you personally, bef long before I read the Go-Giver, there’s, there’s a few of author friends that I have where it’s like, I don’t actually end up reading their book until years after I know them. And, and once I read the Go-Giver, I was like, Oh, now I know why we hit it off. We have such a shared philosophy. And for, for people that don’t know, haven’t heard of the Go-Giver you know, I certainly want to hear the story about you, how you’ve built your business in your personal brand. So what we talk about on this show, but I, I feel like it’s so interconnected to the message and the principle that you teach in your parables specifically, the Go-Giver. So can you like, just give us the, the, the premise and the introduction to what the Go-Giver concept is all about?
BB: (03:07)
Oh, sure. The, the basic premise, and it’s actually very simple one, and that is that shifting your focus and, and this is where it really begins shifting your focus from getting to giving. And when we say giving in this context, we simply mean constantly and consistently providing immense value to others, understanding that doing so is not only a, a more pleasant way of conducting business. It’s actually the most financially profitable way as well. And, and, and it’s important to note, I think that when we say that it’s not for some, you know, Wu Wei out there magical mystical reasons. It, it actually makes very rational, logical sense when you’re that person who can take your focus off of yourself and place it on making other people’s lives better, right. Helping them solve their challenges, helping them get what they want help helping to bring them closer to happiness.
BB: (04:09)
Right? However, that, that ends up working out through what you do. If people feel good about you, people want to get to know you, they like you, they trust you. They want to be a part of your life. They want to do business with you. They want to refer you and introduce you and tell others about you. So, you know, that’s really you know, where, where it comes from. And, but it has to be very genuine. It has to be authentic. You have to not, and I know you are, and, and I know the people you teach and who you coach and mentor are as well. It has to really come from a place of, of wanting to help, desiring to bring that kind of value to others.
RV: (04:50)
Yeah. And I, you know, I know you’re, you’re such a proponent of like the free enterprise system in general. And, you know, I think like what you said, there’s a heart part of this, of just being, you know, thinking about other people, which I agree with so much. And I’m so aligned on and was an area that I’ve, I’ve had to grow and continue to have to grow constantly and actively pursue. That brings a level of satisfaction and joy, but there is also a shocking element to this, that money somehow shows up as a by-product of this. Why do you still believe that? Why do you believe that? What other evidence do you have, you know, in, with your, the success of your own personal brand or other people that, that make you go, if you trust this, it will work
BB: (05:45)
Because it’s not something you have to trust on blind faith. It’s, it’s actually the only thing in a free market that’s ever been proven to work. Now let’s, let’s clarify when we say free, what we mean is no one is forced to do business with others. People do it on their own volition. Now this should not be confused with cronyism where, you know, as we know you know, whether big businesses, special interests, whatever, through their lobbyists on K street, basically by the influence of politicians to make laws and rules and regulations that benefit, that’s not what we’re talking about. That is not capitalism. That is cronyism in a free market. People only buy because they believe it’s in their best interest to do so. Right. But this is great because it means that that entrepreneur whose focus is on bringing value to others, right?
BB: (06:44)
Pleasing that other person, helping them get what they want. That’s the person who, you know, let’s put it this way. I used to sit when I used to speak at sales conferences, you know, back before the COVID days when we actually went places to speak at conferences, I, you know, I’d be sitting in front of a room full of all these salespeople. And I’d say, I know nobody’s going to buy from you because you have a quota to meet, right. They’re not going to buy from you because you need the money and they’re not gonna even gonna buy from you because you’re a really nice person they’re going to buy from you only because they believe that it’s in their best interest to do so. And in a free market, which all I guarantee you you know, you and me and everyone listening, watching this, we, this is how we operate because no one has to buy from any of us. Right. It, that’s the only reason why anyone’s going to do business with us. So there’s nothing that we need to have, you know, blind faith about if we don’t please that other person, if we don’t bring immense value to them, they’re not doing business with us.
RV: (07:46)
And how does that, how has that showed up in your career? I mean, you know, you sell millions of books between all your books. You’ve got all of these, you know, places that you spoke at. And I know you’ve spoken at some of the largest, I mean, you mentioned the sales meetings. I know it’s more than that, but specifically in the world of sales, you have spoken at some of the biggest and largest you know, kind of sales gatherings, you know, is that a philosophy that you carried into your career early on as a personal brand, and it helps you, or is this something you kind of learned along the way that amplified what you were doing? I think
BB: (08:21)
There are two aspects to that. And it’s a great question. One is I was very fortunate, very blessed to be born to two great people who they were all about bringing value to others. So I got to see that as an example, now, as I grew up and got into the business world, you know, I, I think I kind of lost my way for a while. And I was around people who did things in a way that probably weren’t the best example and in some word, but some weren’t, you know, and so I don’t know what if I was necessarily on the right track. I think for a while it became more. Now I always had a great product or service I was representing when I sold for other companies. So that wasn’t the issue. It was a matter of the focus being on myself and the sale.
BB: (09:09)
Okay. and I remember that I was in kind of a, kind of, I was in a sales slump and I came back to the office one day and I saw a guy there and a much older guy. He was not even in the sales department. I think he was in the engineering department. Nice guy didn’t say much, but he was one of these people and we’ve all met, you know that when, whenever he did say something, it was always very profound. Sure. And I think he saw me as sort of a Joe in the Go-Giver, which I would write about 25 years later with John David Mann. But I think he saw me as that young up and coming ambitious, aggressive, you know, nice guy, but whose focus was on himself, but not where it should be. And he said to me, can I give you some advice?
BB: (09:58)
Fortunately, I’ve always been a pretty good student when it comes to listening to people around me. And I said, absolutely, please do. And he said, Berg, he was a last name kind of guy. He said, bird, if you want to make a lot of money in sales, he said, don’t have making money as your target. Your target, he said is serving others. Now, when you hit the target, you’ll get a reward. And that reward will come in the form of money. And you can do with that money, whatever you choose, but never forget the money is simply the reward for hitting the target. It ain’t the target itself. Your target is serving others and Rory that’s when it hit me that great salesmanship is never about the sales person. Great salesmanship is never about the products or services as important as those are. Great. Salesmanship is always about the other person. It’s about the people whose lives you choose to touch with the value you provide. It’s the people whose lives are a little bit better just because you were part of it. And I think when we go with that attitude, which is much more like my parents’ attitude than, than the people who I kind of started to learn from, I think we go with that attitude. We’re nine steps ahead of the game in a 10 step game.
RV: (11:30)
Yeah. I mean, amen. It’s, it’s, it’s so good. And I mean, when I say go-givers one of my favorite books, Shaw, like I read a ton, I love it. And I’m telling you, this is like one of my top five all time favorite books. I mean, I think because, and it’s, it’s, it’s shocking to me, how rare you hear this message that you’re talking about, and particularly in the world of success, it’s all about achieve grind, hustle, grow. It’s a very centered message. It’s a very self-serving accomplish acquire, like, you know, grow your influence, grow your title. And, you know, I just am so aligned and believe with in the same that, that all of those things happen as a by-product of the number of people that you reach and the amount of value you provide. And I think it’s so, so eloquent. So, so tell us a story about the go giver. Like, did you, I mean, a million copies of a book is, is amazing. I mean, this is so few get there. How did you get the book deal? How did you meet John David Mann? Did this, did you guys like light up the bestseller list right away? Like, was it easy to write? It’s a parable, right. So did you, did you know you wanted to write a parable? Like what’s the, what’s the story behind the success of this book?
BB: (12:50)
I can answer those really pretty easily. At first it came about because years and years ago, I had a book out called endless referrals. The sunrise with network, your everyday contacts into sales. It was basically a book on business networking, creating relationships, really for entrepreneurs and salespeople who knew they had a great product or service, they were proud of it. They knew how much of the value it brought, but they, they didn’t necessarily feel comfortable with the process of going out into their communities and creating those know like, and trust relationships, right. That they didn’t know how to associate. I was a how to guide that’s what it was, but I’d always read a lot of parallels, whether it was books like OD Mandino’s greatest salesman in the world or Babylon.
RV: (13:38)
Oh, another good one.
BB: (13:41)
I’m just trying to think, you know, back in the the late seventies, early eighties, doctors, Blanchard and Johns, and I’m a one minute series and then friends of ours, like Chris Weidner and certainly John Gordon, and so many people who have these magnificent you know, books. And what I w I found is that, you know, I’d read these parables and always enjoyed them so much learned a lot in a very short period of time. I think, you know, as, you know stories connect on a deeper level than a how to book, don’t get me wrong. I love how to books. I read hundreds if not thousands of them. But I think parables connect on a different level. So I thought, what if we could take the basic premise of endless referrals, which is all things being equal, people will do business with and refer business to those people. They know like, and trust people have heard me say this for 30 years, probably they’re nauseated. When they hear me say that, by this point, I said, how could we take that and turn it into a parable? So I just thought, well, so what’s the, what’s the basic
RV: (14:47)
Trait.
BB: (14:48)
What’s the essence of a person who’s able to very quickly and sustainably create those those know, like, and trust relationships. Well, they’re givers, right? They’re always giving value. Their focus is on giving value. So that part was easy to come up with the title, but go giver. But it was, it was when I, when I, when John David Mann agreed to, to co-author it and be really the lead writer and storyteller, because he’s a genius I’m a how to write. But so what happened was John was the editor-in-chief of a magazine I used to write for, and every month I’d submit my column and he would write back. I’d never met him personally at that point. And it would always be just so kind and so fantastic and so, so much better than what it was. And he, but he was always very polite and humble and say, you know, is this okay?
BB: (15:38)
I put this here does this honor. And the running joke was that every month I’d, you know, write back and say, not only is it okay, you write my stuff better than I write my stuff. You know, when I came time for the book, John was the only one I wanted to write this with back then, John wasn’t well-known outside of his niche. Okay. Now this guy is the, the the co-op writer of choice. Whenever an agent or publisher has a celebrity, a CEO, a athlete that they right. But back then, very few people outside of his, his niche.
Speaker 4: (16:12)
Fortunately, I knew him. So I had asked him, so
BB: (16:16)
He was still busy though. And so one day he and his fiance now, his wife, Ana they were at her mom’s in on the West coast of Florida. They took a four hour drive. We, we had a three hour dinner and discuss the book and what we thought it could be. He he called me back about three weeks later and said, you know what, Anna and I talked it together. I think it’s a good idea. Let’s do this. So it really only took us a few months to write the story, but it took us 25 rejections over the course of a year from the various New York publishing houses to actually find the, the pub now along the way. And you know, of course, some of them were, well, we don’t need another parable. There’s already too many. Some, it’s just not what we’re looking for other
Speaker 4: (17:01)
Agent at the time. Yeah.
BB: (17:03)
Yeah. The McBride literary agency. And they were absolutely fantastic, but we always listen to what the, the publishers who said no, and we listened to what they said. And sometimes it was just, it just wasn’t the right fit or whatever. But other times they Al they had advice that that was really good. And so
Speaker 4: (17:22)
We kept on, you know, with chiseling it
BB: (17:24)
And improving it. And what we really did was improve the marketing package for okay. Because that kind of came up, you know, a whole bunch. And, and and finally, I think the 26th one, if I’m, if I’m correct, and that was portfolio of business, division of a penguin random house, they loved it. And I’ll tell you what, Rory, they have been the perfect publishing, supportive and knowledgeable, and, you know, you know, they’re rooting for it. And so it’s just been great. So it happened exactly when it was, when it was supposed to. But yeah.
RV: (18:01)
And did you have a big old lawn? Did you do like a big old launch? I mean, this of course is back in the days, mostly before, you know, virtual summits and funnels and lead magnets and all that kind of stuff, but, but did you have a big launch plan? Did you sell a bunch of units in like opening week or did it, was it kind of a slower build or like what, how did that happen?
BB: (18:25)
So for that, we, we did put together a really nice size launch. I, you know, I don’t really do those anymore when I have new books and I don’t really see, excuse me, them being as effective as they used to be. Although that might just be me also, because I also know there’s launches that do wonderfully well for people. So I don’t want in any way to say it’s a, you know, this or that, but but back then, you know, we, we did a, a really big launch, but also sold a whole bunch of books to different companies that were going to have me come in to speak. And I really lowered my feet to do that because we really wanted in the first few weeks to really have a big buildup a bit. Right. And and, and that helped, you know, get the book on the wall street journal bestsellers list pretty quickly.
BB: (19:14)
And we’re very fortunate because the early adopters of the book were not the people who really needed to read it the early adopters. Cause we, we received emails from many of them. They were simply people who were already extremely successful at huge organizations. They were the, this or that and said, what you guys wrote is just what I is, how I built my business. Okay. But nobody believes me. So they were getting our books to cut up, put through their organizations because you know how it is, the third party says it and it’s Oh yeah, well, of course. And you know, and so, so that really helped as well. So there were a whole lot of good things that came together at the, at the same time.
RV: (20:02)
Yeah. Well, that’s, you know, that’s one of the things that’s so powerful about being a speaker and publishers, you know, even today love working with speakers. Cause they know if you’re a speaker you’re going to be out in front of a lot of people and they’re going to buy books. And that was how we launched take the stairs. I mean, we were doing, doing deals with early clients to get them to order lots and lots of copies. And I was basically leveraging my speaking as a, as a carrot to get them to do it. And we generated a bunch of pre-orders that way. Did you? And, and for me, I wanted to be a, I wanted to be a speaker and kind of became an author out of necessity. And then now I kind of view myself as more of like an author, like more of a content creator than even I do a speaker. But how did speaking happen alongside is, did you, did you start speaking first and were you really successful as a speaker and then you kind of bolted this on, did they kind of grow together? Like what was, how did you get, how did you get your first speaking gigs and when did it happen in relation to like the Go-Giver?
BB: (21:06)
Yeah, so I was in, in sales of course, and then I was sales manager of that company. And I started after, when I was a big student of sales, you know, so I was, I was, you know, reading zigs books and Tom Hopkins books and, and getting the back then it was cassette tape albums. Right. and I, I was just a total student of sales and I went to a a seminar once and at the UN I bought the person’s tapes in the back afterwards. And in the back of his Syria, you know, the, the album, there was a page that said, if you want to make some extra money speaking and selling these tapes, call our office, which I did. And they taught me how to speak at all these places for free every civic club, group, organization, anybody that would have me in to do these 25 minute talks and then like, you know, a three minute commercial at the end.
BB: (22:06)
And then in boom. And so, and I did that for a couple of years and you know, sold a ton for them. And it was great training, but eventually I wanted to kind of go into my own with my own sort of things that were working for me that I put together. And, and and so I just, you know, I actually, I joined the national speakers association, which you and I are both part of it. You had mentioned about the helping you, you were inducted into the hall of fame, I think. Was it last year, two years ago?
RV: (22:36)
2019. I was, I went in, I think it was the year. Yeah. Just like just, I guess two years ago.
BB: (22:43)
Yeah. So congratulations. And I remember I was not at that convention, but I remember when I saw it, cause I opened up the thing to look to see who were the CPAs, which is the, you know, the hall of fame and I saw you and I said, Oh man, that is so wonderful. He so deserves it. That was wonderful. And and yeah, so so it, because at, at national speakers association, you know, you, you, who, who were there, the people who are successful have successful speaking businesses. So I learned from them how they did it. I’m a big believer, Rory that you, you know, that it’s not necessary. It’s usually not productive to try to create the wheel. Right. You invent the wheel, especially when it’s already been invented. I’m a big believer in learning systems. So long as those systems are congruent with your values I define a system as simply the process of predictably achieving the goal based on a logical and specific set of how to principles, the key being predictability of it’s been proven that by doing a, you’ll get the desired results of B, you know, all you need to do is a and continue to do you’re going to get the dessert.
BB: (23:54)
Right. So I learned from those who did it, and then at one of the meetings Randy Pennington, I remember, I don’t know if you know, Randy great, great guy. And he had said, you know, Berg, you really should write a book because it’s going to help you position your side. I didn’t want to why write a book? I was selling my cassette tapes up there, you know, doing programs and having a lot of fun, doing that. And and you know, doing pretty well for a couple of years, but, but he said, you know, it’s going to help you market yourself better. You’re going to be better position. You’re going to get higher fees. You’re going to, you know, so I did. And that’s when I wrote endless referrals and he was right. It was a wonderful marketing tool, but I’m like, you, I I’m like you. I started out as a speaker who wrote for utilitarian reasons. Now I consider myself more of a writer and content creator who’s who speaks.
RV: (24:45)
Yeah, it’s amazing. I mean, NSA, I mean, that’s where I met Zig Ziglar and Brian, Tracy. I mean, like just walking around the hallways, I mean, it’s incredible the people that you meet there. And that was such, such, such an important part of my journey. And then the other thing that’s interesting is the more that I am around these really ultra successful speakers and authors, almost all of us have a story about how we started our career at one point, doing speeches for free selling something for someone else who was career track or Fred Pryor, or in our case, we, we, our former business, it was our business, but that was how we started. We would speak for free. And then we would sell a ticket for like, I think Anthony Robbins, he sold tickets. I want to say for Jim Rome. And you know, there’s Amy Porterfield used to who today is like a big celebrity. She used to work with Anthony Robbins. I’m pretty sure, like, it’s, it’s amazing how, you know, national speakers association, reading books and then learning to speak by under kind of someone else’s tutor, ledger, umbrella is such a common, common,
BB: (26:03)
Isn’t it? Yeah. There’s a pattern there. Definitely.
RV: (26:08)
Yeah. Well Bob, where, where do you want people to go if they want, if they want to connect with you and learn about all the things that you’re up to and like what you’re doing these days.
BB: (26:17)
Yeah. Best places. Burg B U R g.com and pretty much everything’s there.
RV: (26:23)
See, that’s a whole level, like Oprah goes by just her first name, but just when your last name only that’s like next level.
BB: (26:31)
And it’s also, you know, what it is though, Rory it’s age, because I remember I, you know, I’m 63. So when the internet really kind of started to be out there a little bit, and it was just, there was a who I knew who said, and he was from the Silicon Valley and, and he called me and he said, bird, I want you to get Berg. This thing called burg.com. I said, why would I want something called burg.com? I’m never going to, he said, trust me on this one. He actually walked me through showing me how to get it, but a am I glad I did? But you know, again, this is back of that. I think that was the mid nineties or something late nineties or something like that. So it was age more than anything, more than anything else
RV: (27:13)
That is classic. Well, Bob, thanks for sharing these stories and thanks for your wisdom. And I mean, just at, you know, a career, as you mentioned now, a couple of decades have gone by of just promoting and teaching these simple truths that continue to be true and they’ll continue to be true. And you’ve made such a difference on our, on our industry and our profession and and just on the world, man. So we wish you the best.
BB: (27:40)
Thank you. Likewise, my friend and brother, I appreciate you.
Ep 167: How to Create a Viral TEDx Talk with Jennifer Cohen | Recap Episode
Without a doubt. This episode that we’re breaking down here. As a recap with of the interview I did with Jennifer Cohen is one of my top favorite interviews and episodes of all time. Why? Well probably because this is one of our clients celebrating such a huge, huge win, and it fires me up and makes me so excited and so proud and so honored to be associated with what she has done. This is why we started brand builders group. Welcome to the special recap edition of the influential personal brand podcast. It’s your man, Rory Vaden talking about that interview with Jen. And I mean, this is why we started this company, like like seeing our clients win, makes me so freaking happy. And we just are in terms of that right now, we are on a roll. I mean, we, we have two clients on the New York times bestseller list right now.
We had another client hit number four on the wall street journal bestseller list. We’ve had like three clients hit number one in their category on Amazon with their, those are specific to book launches. We have two clients that have gotten over a hundred thousand TikToK followers in less than a month. We have another long-time client who closed a $300,000 consulting deal. You, which he says is a lot based on his personal brand. I mean, we’ve got clients doing 30, $50,000 a month consistently. These are the clients we’ve been working with for a couple of years. And it’s like, it’s so amazing to see this happening for them. You know, because it takes time. I mean, we tell people it takes time. And now that we’ve been around as a company for couple of years, we’re starting to see all the, all of these managers, these early manifestations of work that these people have been doing for a couple years, like a year or two now it’s starting to hit and it started to get so exciting.
And, and this interview with Jen, you know, really represents that. And if you miss the interview, okay, what am I talking about? This is one of our clients who followed our PR hired us for very specific reason, followed our process, which is my first takeaway. Okay. So just, you know, to get to my three biggest highlights and takeaways, this is the first one, follow the process. Because she hired us specifically, she got an opportunity to do a Ted talk. She had watched us do work with one of her friends. She, she sat in on a private brand strategy session with one of her friends, Darren, shout out to Darren Prince, love you, buddy. And then, you know, hired us to help her with her Ted talk. And she followed the process, went out, did exactly what we, we laid out in terms of a strategy and she executed it brilliantly.
And now she has a Ted talk a year later with 2 million views like viral Ted talk. And so when you, when you break this down on top of just being like over the moon, proud and excited for her and just feeling honored to have had some part in this, when I think about for you brand builder, like what’s the takeaway is to trust the process, like the stuff that we’re teaching you. And I know not everyone who listens to this podcast is a client of ours yet, but, but even the stuff that we teach on the podcast, the things that were drawn out of our guests, they’re, they’re proven like the people we bring on the show, the reason we bring them on is because they have proven results in a certain area. And that is why we bring them on. Right? And that’s why if you go, Hmm, how come some, every once in a while, Rory will bring on like a stranger.
And sometimes it’s a client. And sometimes it’s like a friend of his from a long time ago. And, and sometimes it’s like a new it’s because we’re bringing them because each of our guests has a superpower that is proven. And if you follow the things they do and you invest in the long-term and you have faith, and you, you, you have the discipline to execute in the short term and the faith to persevere for a while. And, and this is what’s so exciting is like, it’s not even five or 10 years. We’re talking about a couple years, like a year or two down the road. In Jen’s case, it was a year. It was like one year from the date. She hired us to where she had 2 million views on her Ted talk. The whole window was less than a year was, was, well, it was about a year.
I was actually just over a year and her life has changed. I mean, listening to the interview, she’s talking about her life has changed. She’s gotten these flood of inquiries in her email. This is growing and she’s getting business opportunities because she followed the process and she was faithful to that and humble, right? I mean, she, and this is the tricky thing about, you know, Jen and a lot of our clients is, you know, how we can’t really take, you know, a ton of credit because the clients, a lot of the clients come to every client that we work with comes to us with like this raw material. And in some cases it’s, it’s pretty well polished. You know, some of our clients are, are very well known and Jen is already a, you know, a rock star, like she’s already a bad mama JAMA, like, but that’s part of the power is going.
She humbled herself to go, you know what, in this specific area, I think I could, you know, maybe use some help, you know, hired us, invested the time and then actually follow the process. And I think, you know, that level of is, is really important. It’s the people who succeed are the ones who are like humble enough to learn something and humble enough to follow the process and, and not think they’ve got it all figured out. And this is, you know, me included the reason I host this show, right. In addition to wanting to serve you is if you can’t hear is like, I’m learning like the, basically the Wolf, my plan as a host for the show is I’m trying to draw out all of the things that I want to know and that I want to learn so that we can learn together because there’s so many things that we don’t do that well or that we just know a little bit about or some things, I mean, we’ve got, we’ve got an episode coming up here about chat bots. You’ll, you’ll see when we get there, like, we have no clue what we’re doing. Like we, we just know enough to know we’re completely missing the boat on this. And, and that’s a characteristic and an attribute that I hope you embody.
Not because we want you to hire us, although we’d love that or not, because we’re saying you need to go hire someone else. But because that’s the, that’s an attribute of successful people that they’re humble enough to learn a process and follow the process. And, and Jen is a great, this is a great example of that. And, and it, it, you know, she deserves all the credit because she did it, she, but, but, but she followed this. And I just love that. And I, I wish the same for you. And, and by the way, those of you who are clients of brand builders, Kay. If you’ve been through our world-class presentation, craft training, okay. Whether you did that as a private brand strategy session, or if you came through that event or if you’ve gone through it in your one-on-one calls with our strategists, or if you’re, if you’re if you’re one of our clients and you haven’t been through it yet, but you have access to the recordings.
If you watch that world-class presentation, craft training, or if you’ve been through it, you can literally go watch Jen’s Ted talk, which we will put a link to her Ted talk. Well, we’ll, we’ll talk about the title in a second. You can go watch that training, like watch her Ted doc and literally reverse engineer and dissect, and you will see her applying to a T the modular content method and the message and the uniqueness and the problem and the framework and the S the S the, you know, the four parts of a story and the character development like, and the psychology of humor. Like, you’ll, you’ll see her literally following this. And that is one thing that is so exciting about her successes. It’s such a public display of you know, something that you can see. So clearly, like kind of like, you know, our fingerprints are our formula on it.
And so I’d encourage you to do that. If you’ve been through world-class presentation, craft is, is to actually go watch her talk and dissect it. You know, you probably should just go watch it anyways, cause it’s an awesome talk, but you know, no matter how good we are, if someone does involve the process, it doesn’t matter. And no matter, you know, how good we are, if somebody, if, if we can’t, you know, we can’t do anything like our help is worthless. If someone isn’t willing to be awesome and do the work. So it’s, it’s a weird thing where it’s like, we can’t really take any of the credit because they’re the ones willing to do it. And, and Jen, is this a great example of that, but it sure is fun to see the wins. And, you know, like I said, not just with her Ted talk, we’ve got some other massive client winds going on right now that are very public, which is awesome.
Follow the process. Okay. Second takeaway, which is something that if you’ve been through brand DNA, or if you hang around brand builders group at all, you know, we talk about all the time. One message, one message, one message. You have to have one message that cuts through with precise, like precision level clarity. You have to have one message, not if you have three points, the three points should be subservient to one message. One message. What do you want the audience to, to, to do differently as a result of hearing your Ted talk or your keynote, or going through your video course or your coaching program or your book, most people cannot, will not boil their work down to one instruction, one command, one, like the order, like deliver an order, deliver a command and make it one. If you have diluted focus, you get diluted results, but the more you boil it down and you hit people directly with it, this is my message.
Then they can hear it. They hear it multiple times. They remember it, they process it and then they’re likely to do it. And then the best marketing of all is a transformed life. So they’re actually going to go out and tell other people about that thing. And that is what you want. So one message that cuts through with precise clarity. Again, when you go listen to Jen’s talk, you will hear she is giving one specific repeatable command. And it’s super clear with my Ted talk, same thing. You know, my entire Ted talk is one message. Spend time on things today that create more time tomorrow. That’s it one simple idea. And specifically with Ted, you know, remember with Ted talks that the Genesis of Ted is ideas worth spreading ideas worth spreading. That’s the Genesis of the platform. So you’re, you’re looking for an idea, one idea to express, and it’s much better to spend 18 minutes developing one idea then, then to deliver 18 ideas and spending one minute on each, which is what a lot of people do, or they’ll do three or five or seven.
And it’s like, especially in a Ted talk one, you only have time for one, but, you know, we would say the same thing about a book and a keynote, of course. And she just executed that. So brilliant brilliantly. So you have to have precision level clarity. If you are not clear, if you are not clear in one sentence, what you want, your reader or your participant or your audience member to do after they’re done listening to you, how are they ever going to be clear themselves? Like if you aren’t clear on exactly what you want them to do, how are they going to be clear? And that boggles my mind, how authors and content creators can spend four hours talking about something and not be clear on the one thing they want people to go do. What’s the one thing you want them to do take the stairs, was do the things you don’t feel like doing.
That’s the whole book, the whole premise, the whole goal, the whole movement is around encouraging, empowering, challenging, inspiring people to do things they don’t want to do procrastinate on purpose or how to multiply time is spend time on things today that create more time tomorrow. It’s a, it’s a smaller idea expanded in a bigger way, not a bunch of ideas expanded upon in little ways as my mentor, one of my main mentors, Eric Chester used to say, Rory, it’s always better to say a lot about a little than to say a little about a lot, say a lot about a little than a little about a lot. So that’s key. And then the third, third big takeaway, which I wanted to actually color in a little bit for you because you wouldn’t have seen this, but, and again, this is just another shout out to Jen for her humility and her coachability and her adaptability and flexibility, which is kind of ironic for a woman whose whole Ted talk is about being bold.
Cause she’s all about it. And that is her life. And that is her story. And, and yet being bold doesn’t mean not being humble. And she just lived this perfectly is your title should be about the destination, not the vehicle, the title, the titles you use should be destinations, not vehicles. And, and this is what I wanted to color in for you because when we were working with Jen and we were talking about the title of her talk, there were several different renditions or concepts that came up that she was kind of presenting as like potential titles. And they were all around boldness, which is what her uniqueness is. For those of you that speak brand Miller speak from brand DNA, her uniqueness is his boldness. And it’s all about being bold. Well, the, the, what she did, the very natural thing, which is what so many people do, which is the mistake that, that I’ve made those of you that have heard me tell the story with procrastinating on purpose.
Procrastinating on purpose is a vehicle. It’s not a destination. It’s, it’s not a good title. It’s a bad title. It’s not a bad concept. It’s just a bad title because it’s a, it’s a vehicle. The vehicle takes you to a place, but your titles should be destinations. Multiply. Your time is a destination. That’s a result. That is that is a great title, which is why the Ted talk called how to multiply your time. Went viral, even though my book called procrastinate on purpose, which is exactly the same content that book doesn’t sell very well. Because of a bad title, we know the content is great because the Ted talk proves it. People love it. It’s not just good. It’s amazing. It’s it’s worth going viral. How come the book doesn’t sell? Because the cover isn’t clear, the cover, the title is marketing a vehicle instead of marketing a destination, you and, and, and the natural instinct of content creators of which I am.
The number one, like this is how we learned this. This was my greatest marketing mistake of my career is that I marketed the vehicle because I’m passionate about the vehicle. I’m passionate about the solution, but you don’t want to market the solution. You want to market the payoff of the solution, the result of the solution, you don’t market, the how to you teach the, how to you market. What shows up as the result of the, how to, you know, we say the destination, the results, the payoff, those are the things that you market as the title. And here’s several of her initial titles were like bold is the new healthy. That was one of the things that she wanted to call it. Well, healthy is a destination. So the word healthy could have fit as a potential title, but bold is not a destination like bold is a vehicle.
Bold is her is her mechanism though, the way to change your life is to be more bold, bold. His, her, how to, that is the thing you have to do to change your life. But when you do marketing, you don’t market. The thing you have to do to change your life, you Mark it. What shows up as a result of having done the thing you have to do. In other words, what, when you are bold, what happens? That’s what the title is. When you are bold, what shows up, what occurs, what change happens. That is what is the title? And you know, so she had a lot of titles around bold. The other thing that she wanted to do was potentially call the speech the 10% target, the 10% target. Now, when you listen to the speech, you’ll hear that the 10% target is her framework.
That was something we helped her come up with. We teach people how to create their own frameworks, right? Well, 10% target is a great name for a framework. It’s a terrible name for a title. Why? Because the 10% target isn’t clear. I don’t know what that is. And remember, and if you haven’t heard this before, or even if you’ve had write this down, right, like etched in stone from Rory Vaden, clear is greater than clever. Clear is greater than clever. Clear is greater than clever. Clear is greater than clever. The 10% target works for the name of a framework because you’re only talking about it to people who know what it is as you’re explaining it, but it doesn’t work as a title because it’s not clear. I don’t know what that is. I mean, when you hear the 10% target, your first thought is what is that?
That’s how, you know, a title sucks is if people hear the title and they go, what is that? That’s not what you want people to say. When they hear your title, whether it’s a Ted talk, a video course, a subject line of an email sequence or a book title. You don’t want them to say, what is that? You want them to say, how do I get that? Right? You, you don’t want a title to be confusing. You don’t want it to be curiosity invoking you want it to be enticing. And so the 10% target isn’t clear. So what did she call her? Her Ted talk. Right? So, okay. If it’s not bold and, and it’s, it’s not healthy. And the reason we eventually went from healthy, even though her background was like a fitness person, that’s like part of her past, but that’s not who she wants to be in the future.
Like, so the reason we, we went away from healthy wasn’t because the concept of healthy works as a potential title, healthy is a destination. It is something that shows it’s a result. You know, you eat like a healthy as a, as a, as like a, as a by-product of, you know, being disciplined. Discipline is a vehicle healthy is the destination. So healthy could have worked, but we’re trying to take repivoting her brand away from health, which is where she has been known historically. And we’re wanting to position her more as like a personal development kind of kind of a person, right? So that is why we went away from that. But the, the, so that’s, that’s why we didn’t choose healthy. And so what did she go with the secret to getting anything you want in life? That’s it, that’s the name of her talk, the secret to getting anything you want in life.
Doesn’t say anything about it. Doesn’t say anything about the 10% target, but it’s because that is, if you follow her formula of being bold and using the technique she teaches called the 10% target, what happens according to Jennifer? Anything you want, like, that’s what she is saying is you can get anything you want by being more bold. And by using the 10% target, which has asked for what you want 10 times more or less, I forget her actual, the exact verbatim of her message, but it’s been over a year and I can still remember off the top of my head, a big part of what it is, the secret to getting anything you want in life is not a fancy title. It almost feels like boring. It almost feels like you would go well, that’s been done. That’s an original, that’s generic. Doesn’t matter. It’s clear, clear is greater than clever.
I don’t want the 10% target and I don’t want boldness. I want to get anything I want. And I want the secret to getting anything I want. I mean, that is why it’s a great title. It’s just, again, like she was willing to surrender her predispositions about what she liked and what she kind of thought for the, for the, for the kind of proven structure behind going. This is why we do it without surrendering her identity without surrendering. You know, she’s not just blindly saying, Oh, I’m going to do everything you say to do. She weighed it though. Right? She, she weighed it proportionately and, and that really, really, really worked. So kudos to you, Jennifer Cohen. We’re so proud of you. We learned a ton from watching you and the talk is great. And you know, your story about Keanu Reeves is so memorable. And you know, you are now etched in Ted talk history as one of the the few, few viral talks. So thank you for letting us be a part of your journey and keep going, girl, we’re going to keep tabs on you. It will be exciting to see where it goes from here. That’s all we got for this edition of the influential personal brand podcast recap.
We’ll catch you next time.
Ep 163: How to Produce and Promote Your Self Published Book with Honorée Corder | Recap Episode
Let’s talk book launching
Welcome to the influential personal brand recap edition. Rory Vaden is your man. I’m here going solo tonight. AJ is not with us, but this makes sense for me to talk about because, Oh my gosh, I have been living
In book launch world the last
Several months. We actually have 2
Clients who are on the New York times bestseller list right now. I can’t I won’t tell you who they are, but we have been working in book launch mode and it’s a really apropos time to talk about this because just this year we have had so many friends launching books. So Donald Miller, I don’t, I don’t have his book in my hand right now, business made simple it’s actually up on my nightstand. And then You Do You, Erin Hatzikostas, Luvvie Ajayi Jones the professional troublemaker, John Lee Dumas, common path, the uncommon success, Mike Michalowitz this next, Jamie Kern Lima with a believe it David Horsager with the trusted leader and Victoria Labalme with risk forward are just a few of our, our friends, our clients, our colleagues, the people that we know really well, who are doing book launches right now.
And so as always, we’re living in this world of book launches. And so you know, technically this, this episode is a recap of my good friend honoree Corder that interview. And she’s just wonderful. I love her. I’m so glad that she is in Tennessee. We’re actually going over to her place for a crawfish bowl party that I’ve never been to one of those. My CE invited us to go, so we’re going to check it out. And I mean, she’s one of these you know, just like one of the Queens of writing and content and, and, you know, specifically like self published strategy and just orchestrating the whole thing at a, at a high level, a very advanced level. I think you know, like we had Chandler bolt on here, they’ve got you know, Chandler stuff is, is very much a process of, of kind of like teaching you how to do it.
And then Honoree’s is, is really more of one. If you want to just pay the money to have it done for you and done, right. That’s a big part of what her team does, both with the writing and the promotion of the book, which, you know, is a, is a big investment, but it’s worth a lot. I mean, it’s not uncommon that to start any company, any legitimate company, you, you typically have to invest, you know, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars. I think one of the things that’s amazing about a personal brand is that you can get out of the gate for a lot less than that. I mean, even a few hundred thousand bucks would be a, a very large investment into starting this, you know, this as a business, if it’s even separate from whatever your current business is.
And the book is a big part of that. I mean, a book is a, is a business. A book is a business you’re launching, it’s not launching a book, it’s launching a business when we tell people. So we have an event on this. One of our courses is called bestseller launch plan. That’s specifically around launching books. And we, in that course, we talk about how to construct a book proposal and what should be in a book proposal. And what’s the timeline of getting a book deal and who were the players and how does the money work and how do you negotiate? And then how do you actually launch the book? But one of the biggest things is to know that a book proposal, isn’t an outline for a book. It is a business plan for how you’re going to sell that book. And that was a big mindset shift and mental mistake that a lot of people make that you got, you got to know.
And anyways, so we just been living in the world of book launches here. And although, you know, Honoree was talking both how to write the book and, and things you can do for promotions. I just think this is all been all been, been, been coming up a lot recently. So anyways, I want to break down that interview. I wanted to give a shout out to all these amazing friends and clients and colleagues who are launching books right now. It’s a wild ride. And I, I’m actually not jealous so many people are doing it. It’s, it’s a, it’s an emotional thing. If you do a book launch, right? I mean, it’s a big deal and you need to prepare for it. Unfortunately, a lot of people call us when they’re like, I have a book coming out in 60 days, what can I do?
And it’s not bad. Like it’s not wrong to get that phone call. But I would say you’re very, very late to the party. I mean, especially if you’re, you know, to do a New York times bestselling book, y’all, it’s not something that you plan in a few weeks. It, it is, it is a few years legitimately in almost every case. It is at least a year. And it is typically two years, that’s just a plan to launch and you gotta have a lot of the relationships already in place before that. Right. So anyways, wanted to, to, to make sure that y’all know that. So let’s talk about just three quick takeaways from honorary as it relates to book launches. And the first one is about writing the book, and this is important. So many of us struggle with imposter syndrome. We think, well, I’m not going to write this book because someone else wrote a book like this, or someone already wrote a book on that topic.
And the biggest thing that, that really sunk in with me and I got clarity about, and it wasn’t exactly what Honoree said, but it, something she said, lock this down for me in my mind, which is, it’s not that what you will say is different from what somebody else has said. It’s how you say it. That is different. And that is why you should write it anyway. It’s not that what you say will be different, but how you say it will be different. Your stories are different. Your your case studies, your anecdotes, your illustrations, your frameworks, the whole context and wrapper for how you put it together is different. And that is what makes it beautiful. I mean, take the stairs is basically hard work. I mean, there’s not a more on original message or but, but we, we, we put it through the lens of our uniqueness of, of procrastination and discipline, and we have this great metaphor of take the stairs.
And anyways, I just, I think that’s really important because some people will only be able to hear it from you. They won’t be able to hear it. Like even if we wrote the exact same book, they wouldn’t be able to hear it from me. They would only be able to hear it from you because of your style, because of the way you look because of your age, because of your stories, because of your background. And that is reason enough in and of itself for why you should write it. You don’t have to write the book for the million people. You have to write it for the one person like for the one person who will get it because of the way you said it, versus the way that Tony Robbins or Brittany Brown Senate. Right? And it’s not that there one is better or worse being a best-selling author is just surely about reach it often is, is not even that much about necessarily the quality of the book.
I mean, in the long tail, that certainly plays a part, but most of the books that hit the best seller list hit it in the first few weeks, because there’s this huge launch. And that’s because the person has a lot of either direct reach or indirect reach, but whether or not you can hit a bestseller list should not dictate whether or not you write the book, what should dictate whether or not you write the book as if you have something meaningful to say, if you have a message on your heart, if it can help one person’s life. And if you have that inside of you that have, and you have that calling, remember we, we believe that that calling on your heart is the result of a signal being sent out by someone else. So write the book for the one, even if it’s not for the 1 million.
And even if what you say would be similar, how you say it will be different, and that is a reason to write it. So that’s the first takeaway. The second takeaway is super short and tactical, but Honoree mentioned this, you know, she said you have to have an advanced reader team. And I couldn’t agree with this more. This is such an important tactical thing that anyone can do is to have an advanced reader team of people who buy your book in advance and they read it. And then they’re able to give you reviews. Now I’m going to change this language a little bit, and I’m going to call it the street team, which I’m not sure who coined that term. Originally. I think of Michael Hyatt when I hear that term, because I feel like he was the first person that I heard talk about this in detail, but a street team or, or an advanced reader team is basically an excuse to justify selling your book before it comes out.
Right? Like a lot of people don’t want to hear about your book like six months before it comes out. But if you, if you, if you wrap it, if you change the positioning from, Hey, buy my book, which people want to do, like if I buy your book, I want the book to be here, like within a, you know, a few days or a week or two. And so usually the buy my book positioning has to sort of wait until, you know, a couple of weeks before launch, even your fans, you know, you try to get them to pre-order the book in advance. That’s really going to happen like one month in advance of the launch, but to build a street team and advance reader team, you know, an early access team, however you want to position it. Those are people that could buy the, buy the book two, three months in advance and read it and go through it.
And so it’s a reason to sell books in advance, which shows you, you know, the industry, they start clocking those sales. Now all those sales will count on week one. And that’s why most books that hit the New York times bestseller list or any of them, it happened in week one because all of the pre-sales queue up. They all count on that first week, but this gives you a reason to start generating sales, you know, a month, two months, maybe even three months in advance. Like as soon as that book is up for pre-order on Amazon, and you basically make the requirement for joining the advanced reader team, ordering the book in advance. Now they’re not going to get it from Amazon. So you got to give it to them digitally. And you gotta work that out with your, you know, your publisher, but most publishers are happy to do it.
If you’re self publishing, it’s not a big deal at all. It’s your decision. You know, you get them, you get them the manuscript in advance. So you develop this, this groundswell, this, this warmup act, this, this group of, of advocates, ambassadors that when your book comes out or the week before, like the first couple of weeks, they’re out there championing and like, you know, pushing it. And so you get the advantage of generating the pre-sales. You got legitimate people who are verified purchasers to leave reviews on Amazon, which is really huge and important. Then you can get a lot of reviews early on. And you have this whole group of ambassadors that are there to help you launch the book in the first week or two. It comes out like, you know, you know, the prelaunch week and then the launch week.
And then, you know, usually like the first couple of weeks after like the big, heavy weeks. So you got it, you got to do this. And it’s, it’s not that hard to do. Like you can figure it out. I mean, we, we of course talk about the details in best seller launch plan, but most of it is just knowing, Oh, I need to have this. And I need to build this as a part of my launch strategy. So that you have, you have, you have more than just you, which leads me to the last thing. And this is so important. And, and again, it’s a mindset thing and becoming a bestselling author is much more about it’s about a mindset first, like so many things. And you don’t have to be a best selling author, like, but if you want to be, then you got to pay attention to the stuff.
And what I would say is what, what I would recommend is that even if you don’t care to become a bestselling author, you should want as many people to buy your book as possible. You should want to activate as much of your audience as possible. That really is important. And you know, so this is, this is, this was the takeaway. This is what Honoree said in the interview. She said, there’s no such thing as self publish. There is only team publish. There is no such thing as self published. There is only team publish. And that, you know, inspired me to remind you this, this, this something that we say in bestseller launch plan, which is this there’s the, there is a total fallacy of a bestselling author, right? Like they’re there, like the author is one person. And, and there it’s an important person, right?
A lot of the ideas stem from that person and a lot, they’re the catalyst for the movement, but you cannot launch a best-selling book by yourself. It is about a team. You need a team of people you need, you know, PR people and social media people, and copywriters and web developers and, and, and ad specialists and marketing automation specialists and SEO people, and a publisher and a literary agent, you know, and editors and printers and distributors. And, and like, no matter, even if it’s super small scale, it’s, it’s a people, it’s a team. You fans, you need fans. Like it’s a team. And so thinking about it as it’s just, you, it’s the, it’s the, it’s the wrong way to think about it. You’re, it’s, it’s, it’s not even like you’re an author. You have to think of it as you’re a leader, you’re the leader of a movement.
You’re the leader of a message. Your you’re trying to create and cultivate an army of people to rally behind this message that you’re passionate about in this problem that you want to solve in the solution that you want to advance in the world. And it, and the book has to become bigger than just you. And it doesn’t mean your face can’t be on it. It doesn’t mean your title, your name shouldn’t be on it. It can be, but, but the mentality is I need to recruit an army of people to help me because none of us know how to do all these things. No one, none of us can, can write the book and edit the book and do the graphic design and do the printing and do the layout and get it, get it up on Amazon and, and drive the ads for it and send the emails and build the funnels and create the graphic, you know, ads for social media and do the posting and research the hashtags.
And it’s like, and that’s what being a best selling author is, is it’s, it’s a thought doing a thousand little things, right? It’s, it’s, it’s not one big secret that like, somehow they know that you don’t know, it’s, it’s, it’s activating a community of people who trust you and who buy in to what you’re doing. There is no such thing as a best-selling author, there is only a best-selling team. So build a team activated team and, and pull together a team to advance your movement. And that is a team that we want to be a part of. We want to be on your team. We want to be, we want to be part of the people who set the strategy for your team. And that’s why we work with so many of you. One-On-One every month in our coaching program. That’s why we’re here with the podcast every single week. It’s why we bring you these episodes and all the work that our team of brand builders group is all about. So thanks for allowing us to be a part of your team. Please continue to allow us to be a part of it. Listen to the interview for Monterey and come back next week, right here on the influential personal brand.
Bye-Bye.
Ep 162: How to Produce and Promote Your Self Published Book with Honorée Corder
RV: (00:09)
Hey brand builder Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview. We are so excited to bring you this information and wanted to let you know that, Hey, there’s no sales pitch coming from anything that we do with this is all our value add to you and the community. However, if you are somebody who is looking for specific strategies on how to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and we offer a free call to everyone that’s interested in getting to know us and is willing to give us a chance to get to know them and share a little bit about what we do. So if you’re interested in taking us up on a free strategy call, you can do that at brand builders, group.com/summit call brand builders, group.com/summit. Call, hope to talk to you soon on with the show
RV: (01:06)
Writing and getting books published and written and distributed and marketed properly is one of the biggest pain points that so many of you have. We know that and over the years, I’ve had an opportunity to interface with a number of different people who have different, you know, magical superpowers in the book, writing and publishing space. And today I’m going to introduce you to one of my favorites. She’s a longtime friend of mine. Her name is honoree a quarter and honoree, a first of all, she is worked very closely with one of my dear, dear friend, two of my dear, dear friends of Hal Elrod which many of you probably know she helped Hal turn the miracle morning into a whole book series. Honoree has written more than 50 books and not just with Hal, but lots of people, Phil Hellmuth, who was the world series of poker champion.
RV: (02:00)
Also one of our other dear friends, John Ruhlin and his book Giftology who we just absolutely adore John we’ve had him of course, on the show. And she just works as a strategic book coach to writers. And also, I would say a publishing specialist specifically for people who want to self publish and maintain all the ownership and the control and, and the rights, but to do it in a way that it looks and acts and feels and operates like a traditionally published book. So anyway, she just recently moved to Nashville. Well, not that recently, but a little bit recently and we reconnected and had to bring her to you. You’re going to love her honor, a welcome to the show. Hey, Hey, good to be with you. All right. My friend. So I want to start with the question of the, the, the writing process. Okay. So you’ve written 50 books. You’ve coached people through this. You’re teaching lots of people on, on the writing process. I feel like people get stuck at the blank page. Like they go, I want to write a book. I know I got a book in me. I probably got five books in me, but then they like sit down and it’s like, it doesn’t, it doesn’t come.
HC: (03:24)
What’s that Netflix I’ll do it later.
RV: (03:29)
So what do you, what do you, think’s going on there? What do we need to know about that stage in that moment and how do we kind of get ourselves past there?
HC: (03:39)
That’s a, that’s a great question. Thank you. And there’s a lot to unpack there. I think what people get stuck on is what goes in a book. Why am I the person to write a book? Other people have already written a book like the book I’m thinking of writing. Why should I write a book? And then how am I going to write it? How did I, how am I going to know it’s any good? And then once I’m done with it, what the heck do I do with it? Who’s going to read it. What if nobody buys it? So there’s a lot of static and a lot of head noise going on and, and without a process to follow. And without some clarity that they will stand to get stuck, even if they get past that blank page.
RV: (04:21)
Yeah. So let’s talk about the mental part of it then first, because I do think that that is that sort of self limiting belief of, you know, one I’m not smart enough, I’m not good enough or more of the imposter syndrome, which is like, well, someone already wrote that book. Like, you know, I already read that book. I mean, do you find that that’s a pretty big, a pretty big part of this and how do you, how do we get ourselves beyond that moment?
HC: (04:48)
Sure. So yes, someone has probably written a book about what you have knowledge and expertise around semi-colon however, comma, right? They, there is no book written in your words, from your perspective, with your additional experience and you are the messenger that only some people can hear. And I love to use the example of like Brene Brown versus Tony Robbins in the motivational space for the people. Lots of people stand at the, at the the stage and watch Tony Robbins and think that he’s the best thing ever. And other people think he’s too big. He else’s teeth are too big, right? He’s it’s too much for me. And other people think Brene Brown is just the most wonderful thing in the world. And other people think she’s too quiet and she’s not commanding enough. Their messages are not the same. They’re similar.
(05:48)
And you could say, well, it’s motivational, I’ve been motivated. I’m done, that’s it. And yet there is that other option, which is what you bring to the table, your experience, your expertise, your knowledge, and your words, your approach, your philosophy, how you connect with people. And that is not in a book if you haven’t written it. So I like to get people past that, well, who am I to write a book I’m not experienced enough or who cares, or there’s already a book out there contextualizing them and saying, hold on, you have something to offer. You must write a book. Right. And then helping them to figure out what goes in the book and where and why, and getting started on that process because, and let’s go to all the way to the end and you’ve been there and I’ve been there. You get that book for the first time and holding it in your hands. And you’re an author. It’s kind of the coolest thing ever. It’s worth all of the trouble.
RV: (06:45)
Yeah. Well, and, and you get the first comment from a reader or Amazon review that are like, you know, that’s, it’s so powerful. And, and I, you know, I, I do use myself as an example on this. Cause I go look, take the stairs more or less as a book that about hard work. There’s not many more on original topics that, or messages than hard work. And, and as a 20 something year old kid, when I wrote the book, I was like, you know, I, I felt like, well, what am I saying? That’s different. But it was totally from my lens. And I think the beauty of me being so young was I knew nothing else other than to write it from my lens. And I wasn’t old enough to have as much self-doubt I think as sometimes people get in their thirties and yeah, it’s you bringing you to the table, contextualizing you, no one else can do that.
HC: (07:36)
Right? No one else has your voice, your perspective, and all of the other things that make you, you, no one else can write your book. And so I think you owe it to people. I’m just going to throw it out there. You owe it to people to write your book. And I read, take the stairs. And I sent you a screenshot of all the tabs and notes and highlights of re reading the book. And I had read every other book on hard work. Yeah. Hard work is not a new philosophy, but your perspective and that phrase, Oh, I’ll take the stairs. I’ll, I’ll do the harder thing. I can do hard things. I do this hard thing. And it builds that muscle and builds on top of that. Some of that book has never left me. It’s stayed with me. So if you hadn’t been that 20 something year old kid going, all right, I’m going to write a book and you did it.
HC: (08:29)
Then all the people who benefited from it would have missed out. And so now I’m just, I’m not talking to you, right. I’m talking to your audience and the people that are listening and are thinking well, but what would I say that would be any different. It’s not necessarily that you would say something different it’s that you would say something different that you would say it in your way. And the person who would have said, why am I going to take the stairs? Why would you take the stairs when you were taking the elevator? Might hear another message, your message in a way that actually moves out and transforms their life. And you’re right. Then the thing that is even better than receiving that first book is receiving that first letter in the mail, or that first email where someone says, I read your book and it changed my life. It inspired me. I am behaving differently. I’m doing something differently. I’m believing more in myself. There, there are very few things that are more fulfilling than that.
RV: (09:22)
Yeah. That’s, that is incredible. And I, and I think another part of the fear, like, just since we’re talking about the emotional side of this, I do think there is this fear of like, well, I could pour my life into this thing and nobody’s gonna read it right. Or no, one’s gonna buy it. And then it’s almost like I have this, it’s almost like I have this public declaration that I’ve put out there that I want something to be successful. And if it’s not successful, then somehow it’s like this public reflection that, you know, my book wasn’t good enough and or something like that. And, and ironically, I think it’s, it’s it, when a book doesn’t sell, well, it is less often to do with what is written in the book and more to do with the promotional plan. And I want, you know, I know that that’s a part that you really kind of specialize in, is going okay, what are the things? So let’s say, if we get past the self doubt, we’re operating in what we would call our uniqueness, we’ll help people find their uniqueness. They create a great outline. They work with you or some, you know, somebody like you that helps them really like flush out and write it out. And, you know, we’ve got lots of people that we love to help. You’re one of them they get this book written, then what, what do they do to make sure that people find it
HC: (10:47)
Connecting the book with the reader is the $60 million question, right? How do you connect the reader to the book? And most importantly, the author and it starts actually with that blank page, with the questions that you’re going to ask yourself, when you’re putting pen to paper, the first one would be something like, where does the book fit into my business? And what is the purpose of the book in my business? What do I want the reader to do as a result of reading my book with taking the stairs, you want people to work harder, right? With you must write a book, which is my book. I want everyone to write a book. I want the right person to call me and say, I want you to help me with this process that they’re figuring out, where does the book fits into the business and where the book fits in with the author.
HC: (11:38)
And then everything else that you do actually is informed and influenced by the answers to those questions. How do people connect with you and how do they connect with you in their journey of reading the book? Do they like you more, as the book goes on and are you adding value to them? Are you helping them to solve a problem or capitalize on an opportunity or both? And then how do they, how do they come to understand if they’re the person that you could help beyond the book? And all of that is linked into the marketing
RV: (12:11)
Surgically. Even thinking beyond the book to going, let’s say I write an amazing book. I market it, I get someone to buy it. I, they actually read it. They get to the end then what? So it’s kind of like thinking about how does this direct and fit into your overall kind of business plan and like, not just your business plan, but how can you service that person at a deeper level once they’ve been through the book and how are you pointing them in that direction?
HC: (12:39)
Right? So the, the, the trick is, and there’s no trick, but the trick is right. The question that you want to answer is how do I serve the person? So they feel like in exchange for their time and money, right? The time they’re reading the book and the money they’ve spent on the book, that they are getting value, that the question of the book has been answered because you buy a non-fiction book. I read limitless by Jim quick, because I want to be limitless. So Jim had a big Hill to climb with me. I had a lot of questions about how to be limitless, and those questions were answered in the book. But at the end of the book, there were a lot of other ways for me to take my limitlessness to be even more unlimited, right. There were ways that I could connect with him.
HC: (13:27)
And those had to be built into the book too. So there were resources in the book and options for connecting with the author before someone puts pen to paper, or even while they are thinking about what those things would be, how am I going to connect with my reader? How can my reader connect with me after they’ve finished the meat of the book? What’s the next thing for them to do? What’s the next stage in our relationship? And what does that look like? And how do we connect those dots? I think we live in a great time when it used to be that an author was a person that you didn’t know where they were. You’d never, you would never hear them interviewed or talked to unless it was on the mic MacNeil, Lehrer report or something. Right. and now or Charles Cronkite, right?
HC: (14:15)
Like authors were unicorns that were inaccessible and now authors are accessible people and have to think of themselves as accessible and readers love to know their authors, authors that you like, we want to know who you are and we want to connect with you right. As readers. And so thinking about that as an author, as an aspiring authors, how can I make sure that my readers know that I’m not inaccessible or not a unicorn? And I want to be connected with, and here is who the, who the person is that I want to connect with the most.
RV: (14:47)
So let’s, let’s talk about Amazon specifically for a minute. Cause you know, I, I know most of, most of your experiences, like really kind of dominating this, the self-published world and, and helping people promote, what do people need to know about Amazon that they, like, what do authors need to know about Amazon? That we don’t know? Like what, what as a first time author is not obvious to us about Amazon, that it’s like, well, you really need to know this. Like, in order since Amazon represents, I don’t know what it is. Something like 50, 60% of all sales. I mean, maybe even more than that whatever the number is. It’s it’s a, it’s a massive percentage. What are the things you think most authors go? Oh, I didn’t realize that. I didn’t know that. I didn’t know I needed to do that. I didn’t know. I needed an update that I didn’t know. I had to like do this or that for Amazon specifically.
HC: (15:42)
Sure. Well, not UN find-able information, not information that you can’t find if you’re looking for it, but understanding how to engage Amazon as a retail partner when launching your book and marketing your book is very important. And understanding that if you know how to engage Amazon as a retailer, as a retail partner, they will serve up your book forever. If you can prove to Amazon that your book is profitable, Amazon wants to sell profitable things. If you’ve ever opened your email, or like maybe 12 times today, you’ve opened your email. And there’s a name something from Amazon that says, well, are you done reading this book? Because when you’re done reading this book, you should read this book over here. Oh, did you buy this thing? Well, people who bought this also bought that right. There is a way to engage Amazon as a retail partner so that you can have them serve up your book.
HC: (16:44)
And it’s not with ads it’s free. It’s just knowing the process, right. Of engaging Amazon in such a way that they say, well, take the stairs is a profitable book. And so we’re just going to keep selling, take the stairs. We’re just going to keep recommending, take the stairs. Honorary, read the book. And honoree is like these 1 million other people. And so we’re going to send this email to these 1 million other people that are just like honoring, because they’ve read all the same books that Andre has, but not take the stairs. So they’re going to email those people on your behalf.
RV: (17:15)
And you’re saying, you can do something, you can do something proactively as an author. What are, what are like, what’s an example? Or like, what are, what are some of those things that we go, Oh, I didn’t even realize I was supposed to do that. Or I could do that. Amazon seems like this ginormous, like faceless enterprise, like that I think is something I didn’t even think. Like, I don’t even feel that way that it was like, Oh, I can, I should be doing these steps.
HC: (17:42)
Yes. So there is three things. One is having an advanced reader team that consists only of your ideal reader. So assembling an advanced reader team of of the right size and the right consistency, right? Having the right people that are the ideal reader for your book, as opposed to I’ll, I’ll give you the thing not to do too, which is don’t launch your book to everybody for 99 cents because that will kill your book. So specifically launching your book to the exact type of person who would read your book. So not telling everyone about your book, telling a specific group of people about your book and engaging them in such a way that it tells Amazon, Ooh, people are going to like this book. And these are the type of people that are going to like this book. And then the two other things are cheating.
RV: (18:36)
So I want, I want to get the other two, but before we do this, so when, when you go like find the ideal, right? I mean, that’s really powerful. So number one, don’t try to just go. I want to sell a million copies that are 99 cents. And just like, you know, set the market. Like, this is what my book is, where it’s 99 cents. You do get, you know, some people do that for the bestseller thing. And you know, there’s some value, I guess, to some of that, but the w how do you find these people? Is that just like, go look on other books in your category and see who’s reviewing those and reach out and try to like, reach out to those people.
HC: (19:11)
That is a strategy, but that is that’s pain and suffering. And I try to avoid pain and suffering. So there’s, I’m anti pain and suffering in every, in every situation. Your ideal client, your past clients, people, you know, who read books like those books. I bet you could tell me five books that are like, take the stairs. I can tell you five books that are like the miracle morning for entrepreneurs with Cameron, Harold. Right? So we went and looked for who are the other books that are like this book, who’s read those books. And those are the people that I want. The people who are the ideal reader for the book are who I want to talk to about the book,
RV: (19:51)
Which if you have an email list and like you do a lot of the things that we teach at brand builders group, what we call the relationship engine and all this stuff. So you’re basically saying it is those people. I mean, those, it is those people, okay. They’re not, they’re not hidden. Yeah. And then it’s other, other podcasts like yours and other authors like yours and other social media people like, you know, posting similar content.
HC: (20:14)
Yes. If you’re marketing to everyone, you’re marketing to no one, you know, this better than anyone, right? Identify who your avatar is, your ideal reader, your ideal client, they’re all the same thing. And put a group of those people together to be your advanced reader team and curate them and help them to help you engage Amazon and other retailers as your partner in your book marketing.
RV: (20:35)
When you say advanced reader team, you’re saying, give them a copy of the book before it comes out. Why is that? So that they can leave reviews early on, as soon as the book comes out. So I have a
HC: (20:48)
Process that I have authors walk with. Like, this is the day that you do this, and this is the day you do this. And this is the day you do that. So that you’re engaging the, the algorithm of the engine, right. Of the retail engine in advance so that they know who to market it to as well. So it’s, it’s, it’s a little Ninja, you know, behind the curtain under wraps, keep it quiet. Don’t talk to anybody about it. I say that a lot. Sip it. Dot com. Don’t tell anyone you’re engaging the exact rate and perfect reader. I know, I know this from experience and I have to say it a lot. You got to keep it quiet, even though this is probably the thing, one of the top five things, you’re the most excited about, right? You have a new kid, your book, and you want to tell everybody about your new kid, but you just can’t for a little while. You’ve got to keep it under wraps and only talk to people about the book who are your avatar, your ideal reader, your ideal client.
RV: (21:44)
And if you get those, those people that go leave reviews, and they’re very either whatever, a verified purchase, those really help. So, okay. So that’s awesome. So I don’t need a million people to read it. I need to find like a core group of a hundred or 50 or whatever, like, and just get them to actually read it, co foster that audience, get them to support it, to leave, you know, share it with whatever start small. All right. What’s you said there were three things we’re running out of time.
HC: (22:12)
Yeah. The other two are quick. The other two are quick keywords. What are the keywords that people search to find your book? Identify, identify your keywords. And it’s not a word. So brand builders would be a key word. So if someone were saying, how do I build my brand? What’s the best way to build my brand. Each of those is a key word. So you identify the keywords that people would use to find a book like yours. And those become your keywords.
RV: (22:42)
You’re talking about, this is similar to search engine optimization for like Google, but you’re, you’re talking specifically in Amazon, correct? You need to select your keywords, but then, but like for SEL, I can. Yeah. Where do you put them on Amazon? That
HC: (22:57)
In, in the backend, in, in when you’re, when you’re publishing your book or when I’m publishing your book, I identify the keywords and I, I put them in the, in the, I do the publishing piece. But there is a, the dashboard, right. Where you would go to upload the book cover and the book files, they ask you, what are your keywords? And you put in the keywords and then the keywords match.
RV: (23:19)
Yeah. And that, see what’s wild about that is when you traditionally publish, you have less control over things like that. I mean, this is, yeah, you do. As you know, it’s, you know, there’s, there’s, there’s, there’s so many great things about traditionally publishing and self-publishing, it’s like one of these, these balances, but, you know, procrastinate on purpose mist, the wall street bestseller list. Not because we didn’t sell enough units because the book wasn’t categorized in the proper category that the, that BookScan and Nielsen and that the wall street journal picks up. And it was like, what, like where, who was supposed to tell us that like
HC: (24:05)
Who’s gonna lose their job today. Yeah. So that’s actually, the third thing is, are the categories your book has to
RV: (24:12)
Look at
HC: (24:13)
That is the third one. Look at you being all star student and everything category is the next ones are key. So advanced reader team in the algorithms getting, you know, the team and teaching the team and, and teaching the author gotta do everything. And you know, at the right time, right, you got to, you got to marinate the meat before you make them put it on the grill, right. The right thing at the right time, then you have to understand what are the keywords and what are the categories and how to change them, how to see if they’re working and how to make sure that you’re making the moves and how to make the moves at the right time. So, like I said, it’s a little bit art, a little bit science.
RV: (24:55)
Where does the CA is the categories of backend dashboard? I mean, I know it’s like monitoring categories. This is one thing. And there’s different ways to do that in different tools in your, hopefully your publisher kind of knows some of that helps you figure that out or, or, you know, but like once you, you’re saying that it’s actually like monitoring it and then going, let’s change the category of this book to put it somewhere else. You can just log in and do that.
HC: (25:22)
You can ask, you can actually send an email to Amazon and ask them to put you in certain categories. Otherwise, they’re just going to put you in categories. If you’ve ever looked at a book and it’s like, this is a book on dog-walking and it’s in the kitten legwarmers category, just because it happens all the time. It’s just because somewhere in, in, in the, the computer, somewhere in there, something got off and it went in the wrong, it went in the wrong. Okay.
RV: (25:54)
So basically you just need a note notify Amazon, say, Hey, can you move this? My, can you list my book in this other category? If you’re self published, if you’re traditionally published, your publisher has to do that.
HC: (26:09)
One would help. Yes.
RV: (26:10)
Yeah. Okay. And then keywords is the same thing, basically like there’s some, there’s a backend part of Amazon where you basically re similar to how you would do with like meta-tags and H you know, like H one H two tags on a website. There’s a, there’s somewhere in Amazon in the backend where you, this dashboard, is it called a dashboard? Is that what you’re
HC: (26:33)
I called the dashboard. Yeah. Let’s see. It’s, you’re just logging in. So it’s Kendall digital publishing, kdp.amazon.com is the, is the login is where you create your account. And so you create an account and you upload all the files and the information it’s where you put in the title and the subtitle and all, and the, and the book description. And you’re right. You have to have HTML and a call to action and making sure that the font sizes right in the spacing is right. Otherwise it just looks a little jeopar walkie on the, on the retail page. And all of those things factor into whether your book appears professionally published.
RV: (27:12)
I know, I mean, again, with procrastinating on purpose, for some way are tight. Our original book cover got uploaded, and it had this like weird glitchy thing on the cover. And there was like a weird splotchy looking thing. And it was like, how does this happen? Like, how does that happen? And it’s just like, somebody uploads a file that’s wonky or something, and yeah.
HC: (27:34)
Wonky or, or corrupt or something. And, and then you have to change it and you have to get to the right person to make the change and all, all the things there’s, my checklist has 487 things on it.
RV: (27:47)
Yeah. Well, 487 steps to success. You know, but you, you, there are small specific things like this, that Matt that really, really make a difference. That’s, that’s, that’s wild. I didn’t even know that about, I mean, I guess I, it made sense, but as a traditionally published author, I don’t actually have control of my keywords and categories. I have to go through with the publisher because it’s all in there. They control the dashboard for it. Right. I presume, although I’m going to ask, I’m going to have this based on,
HC: (28:23)
They have access to the same. They have access to the same. There’s this, there there’s might be a little more robust than what they let you know, the common folk have. The traditional publishers probably have something that’s a little more robust, but they definitely have keywords and categories. But the thing is, yeah,
RV: (28:38)
I got to I’m depending on someone else to do the work of updating it, versus I can’t just log in and do it myself, which is one nice thing about self publishing is you can like log in and update the thing. Yeah. So that’s, that’s, that’s part of the partnership of publishing. Really interesting. So all right. Well honor. So, so I got one more question for you before I ask you that, where do you, where should people go if they, if they want to connect with you? I mean, you’ve worked with Hal, rod, John Roland, Cameron, Harold. These are all these, those three people specifically are close, personal friends of mine. I know you’ve done a ton with Hal and you know, we want, if someone wants help, like actually writing a book and, and I mean, I know you teach people to do it, but you also will do it with them. Where should they go, go find you and say, Hey, I found you on brand builders podcast, or like, where do you want them to go,
HC: (29:42)
Go, just go to my website, honorary quarter.com and send me an email, send me honorary honorary, quarter.com or go to my website and do a, a form and send it over. I get those. And Megan is my assistant and she will, she will get you on my calendar to discuss if this would be a good fit. I love it. I love it. And when you get your rights back on your books, call me you talking to me. Yeah. I’m talking to you.
RV: (30:14)
Oh, well, we should talk. We should talk off, we should talk offline about some things. But the okay, so Andre quarter.com. We’ll put a link to their honorary honorary quarter.com if you just want to email or and then, so the last little thing that I just I have for you here is you know, coming back to this mental side of things. Yeah. The fear that it won’t be good. The self doubt that I’m not smart enough, the imposter syndrome that someone else has already done it I guess, is there any last thought you would have as it relates to this emotional block? Because over time I’d become more convinced that the disk, the barrier between a mission-driven messenger, which is we call our audience mission-driven messengers. The primary barrier between a mission-driven messenger and actual published book in their hand is a whole set of emotional challenges that are much greater than the logistical challenges. So is there anything you would, you would say to that person who knows they should write a book, but they’re struggling to get their own, you know, pass some of their own beliefs?
HC: (31:37)
Probably a hundred things. So I’ll try to come up with a few that are impactful for right now. The first one is you have done something difficult in the past that you were unsure, you could succeed. So go back to those wins that you’ve had in the past and revisit them go to the people who know you the best, your encouragers, your coach, your mom, your therapist, your best friend, and ask them what they think. And when they encourage you, listen to them, they are right. Right. They know they have a line of sight to something that you cannot see. And also you do not publish a book by yourself. I mean, unless you crazy.
HC: (32:19)
And I must be crazy because I’ve done it myself a number of times, but for yourself and by yourself are different. And I have not ever published a book where I didn’t use a graphic designer to give me a good cover and the editor, or more than one editor to go through and make sure that my message was strong, right? So you’re going to need a proofreader and you’re gonna need a copy writer, and you’re gonna need this advanced reader team of people who are gonna read your book and tell you that what you have done is, is a beautiful thing. And writing a book really is a team sport. And so engage the right team of people, make sure that you do use an editor and make sure you do use a graphic designer who does understand book covers and that sort of thing.
HC: (33:05)
And once you have your team around you, you will feel less fear and less reticence that you might be running a marathon for the first time, but you got a coach, right? How many miles do I run today? Do I do strength training? Do I do yoga? Like, what are the other things I need to do? Listen to the other people that you have around you. And then also find some other people that have written books and have gone through the process who can give you some words of wisdom and say, Oh yeah, I felt fear too. And I’m going to add one more thing. And that’s what you touched on it before, when you said I was a twenty-something kid and I wrote, take the stairs. When I wrote my first book, it was kind of like, okay, I’m going to write my first book. I didn’t have that monkey mind either. I didn’t have those self doubts because I honestly didn’t think anybody was ever going to read it. So who cares?
HC: (33:57)
Right? So if you put the pressure on yourself of like, I have to write a book and it has to be a New York times best-selling book and, and, and ad, right. If you make it really hard to feel good about the success of your book and really easy to feel like a failure, you’re already starting behind the eight ball. So just give yourself easy wins. Oh, I’m going to, I’m going to sit down and come up with an idea for a book. Okay. I have an idea. I wonder if I could flush it out with an outline, let me come up with an outline. Okay. That’s a win, like, make it easy for yourself to feel good and make it really hard for yourself to feel bad, not just in book writing, but in life. But in this instance, let’s focus on the book writing so that the fear side and recognize that you’re not doing it alone. And there are a lot of books out there. There are a lot of inferior books in there, a lot of superior books and it’s okay, this is your book. And you get one spin around the rock, right? You better leave something for people to remember you by
RV: (34:58)
There. It is some, some Ninja secret, undercover, whatever you said, confidential tips just, just between me and you and a few tens of thousands of listeners on the podcast podcast. But it’s all about, who’s going to take action on it. I mean, that’s, that’s, that’s it. So Honoree, so good to reconnect with you, my friend. And thanks for sharing some of your wisdom. We wish you the best. I know we’ll be staying in touch, especially now. You are a Nashville neighbor, so all the best to you.
HC: (35:36)
All right. Thank you so much.
Ep 155: SEO Secrets for Personal Brands with Neil Patel | Recap Episode
One of the things that I love about podcasting and being a podcaster. I mean, I enjoy being the guest, right. But I really love being the host because I love being the student. And what’s amazing about podcasting is the people that you meet like Neil Patel. Okay. This is welcome to the recap edition. I’m breaking down the interview that I did with Neil Patel. I’m rolling solo tonight. I’m filling in for a CEO, mamma AJ, who by the way, quick shout out to those of you, those of you out there momming hard. I mean, momming is no joke. It is, it is unrelenting, right? The work is never done. It never stops. You’re never caught up to babies. Always need ya. And just for those of you, if you’re listening and you are a mom, man, we see you. We see you. So I am filling in for mama CEO AJ tonight.
And back to what I was saying, getting a chance to meet people like Neil Patel through your podcast. I mean, what an amazing honor. And I think, you know, it’s one of the things that’s so cool about this industry. I used to be in w when I was coming up as a speaker, I spent a lot of time in comedy clubs, and I quickly realized that speak comedians, the culture for whatever reason is they don’t, they don’t help each other. They view each other more like competition, at least in the comedy clubs that I, I went to, but, but speakers and influencers and thought leaders, there’s just this, this air of, we want to help each other. We’re open, you get to meet each other. And, and the more years you’re around, the more amazing people that you made. And so what a great time to interview Neil Patel, some of you maybe don’t know who he is, but he is pretty much the godfather of SEO.
I mean, one of the, one of the, truly one of the world’s thought leaders and most recognizable authorities on search engine optimization. And so getting a chance to chat with him was really, really fun. I’ll obviously go back and listen to the interview, and I’m going to give you, I’m going to give you my three biggest takeaways, like always, but that’s, that’s kind of a bonus takeaway and brand builders. One of our courses and events is called podcast power. And we talk about, you know, how the mechanics of launching a podcast, how to run them, how to grow them, how to get great guests. And, and one of the things we say is that one reason just in and of itself of why you should do a podcast is because of the extraordinary networking opportunity. And this certainly was, was that for me in every episode, I mean, it’s amazing the people that we get to meet, but in terms of the tactical takeaways, and this was a super duper tactical topic, you know, search engine optimization for personal brands.
And for us, this, for those of you that are members of ours, you know, that this falls under phase three course, one high traffic strategies, which is where we introduced the introduced search engine optimization. So we, we kind of tell our clients, you know, this is something you shouldn’t really worry about until you’ve got your stuff built. And, and this is more of like the icing on the cake than it is the cake itself. But over time it can be the real game changer. So it’s a SEO, typically is not one of those things that you make a lot of money with short term, or you don’t drive a lot of traffic short term, but it’s like, long-term wealth. It’s not like a get rich quick. This is, this is the longterm wealth building part of personal branding and is super, super critical.
So here’s my first takeaway, which boggled my mind, because you got one of the most advanced thinkers in the world on SEO. And what is his number one tip? What is his number one, if you know nothing else, you know, I asked Neil Patel, if you have, if you know nothing else about SEO search engine optimization, what is the one thing you must do? And I thought he might say keyword research. He didn’t say that. I thought that he might say you know, site loading speed. He didn’t say that. I thought he, he might say links. He didn’t say that the number one thing that he said, keep posting content, keep posting content. The most advanced, one of the most advanced thinkers in the world on SEO sharing his number one tip, which is keep posting content. This is it. Y’all like how many people do you have to hear it from before you, you buy in to this idea of, of what we call the content diamond and the relationship engine and all the systems and strategies that we teach of posting every single week, weekend, and week out and breaking that content apart, repurposing it, pushing it in to as many places as possible, and just pumping your content and your ideas out into the universe as fast as you possibly can because you reach more people and it drives everything.
It drives speaking, it drives book sales, it drives followers. It drives media interviews, right? Like it drives your email list. It drives your recruiting and, and it drives your search engine optimization, keep posting content. As, as Neil said, it is a few things done with discipline consistently over a long period of time. I mean, it’s take the stairs. I mean, this is it. It just, it keeps come. It always comes back to the fundamentals. And I think it’s like, we get so star struck or we go chasing, you know, we’re like chasing stars trying to find this, you know, this magic pill and the secret potion and the hidden formula. And, and th the truth of success is it’s right in front of your face. It is obvious. It is basic. It is simple. It is fundamental. And the biggest personal brands in the world just deliver week-in and week-out on the fundamentals.
Meanwhile, everyone else is wasting time looking for some hack or some secret pill or, or some, you know, trick that it just isn’t the core of, of how it’s done. And, you know, have to CA had to highlight that. Cause that’s what stuck with me. Like that’s what stuck with me is every time I meet these top top level influencers, how they always just bring it back to the fundamental. So keep posting content, keep pushing your ideas out there, produce it as fast as you can, and as slow as you have to. So, you know, if you can increase the speed, do it, if you can’t that’s okay, just start with what you have, do what you can and put as much content out there in the world as you can, but keep posting content and your search engine rankings will climb as a result, second tip, which was very tactical and this one was more advanced, right?
So if you’re looking for the like, well, what was the, what was the, you know, what was the real technique or the strategy? I thought this was super helpful as he said, start narrow, but do it inside a big market. So go after narrow terms, I would summarize this as go after niche terms in broad topical areas, right? So for example, I mean, personal branding is, is, is that’s a pretty niche term still. But you know, even anything with personal branding is probably niche and marketing is a very broad topic. There’s a lot of search volume there. And specifically what he said is when you start start with any term that has more than 500 searches per month and an SEO difficulty rating of under 40, all right. So I thought that was handy because there’s all these different tools. You know, he mentioned his tool Uber suggest we use that.
We use Google, Google, Google has its own search console, where can it has its own goop, the keyword, I think it’s called the keyword tool that you can use. And we use a plugin, a Chrome plugin called keywords everywhere, which is amazing. And it costs a little bit of money, but it’s amazing for what it does. And, and you know, we’re always kind of going, Oh, well, how many, how many is the right? Like, what’s the right difficulty to go after? And what’s, you know, what’s enough search volume that it’s worth doing, but not so much that, you know, you’re going to get squashed by competitors. And so I thought that was, that was super practical start with any term that has at least 500 searches a month, which I interpret. And I, you know, he said explicitly is that if it’s less than 500, it’s almost not worth optimizing for that term.
There’s not enough traffic. There’s not enough people searching that term every month for it to be worth your time to kind of optimize for. So go for something that is over 500, but less than a 40 on the difficulty ranking. So it’s, it’s like a term that is searched, but it’s not super highly competitive. But what that will do is that allows you to kind of draw in traffic and start building site authority and start building your email list, which helps you grow more traffic. And if you do the stuff that we teach in the relationship engine, like set up your RSS feed, that’s automatically emailing your new subscribers. Every time you post a new blog or a new podcast to your blog, then you’re, you’re, you’re starting this upward snowball like this upward spiral. And I think that’s, you know, that’s super powerful.
And then he said after a year, after a year of doing that, you can start targeting terms that get more like 5,000 searches a month and have more of like a difficulty of 60. But, you know, he doesn’t have any like magic FAC, like other than that, which is still pretty basic. There’s not something stuck, some Ninja voodoo trick that he does. That’s like magic potion. That, that, that works. It’s consistency. It’s some basic fundamentals. Do some keyword research, you know, be mindful of, of the topics that you’re writing, but put out value and put it out, put it out consistently. But you know, that, that rule, that’s a handy little rule. So 500 go for at least 500 with a difficulty of 40. If you’re just starting out, if you’ve been, if you’ve been posting consistently for longer than a year, then go ahead and start going after terms for 5,000 with a difficulty of 60 or under.
But, but I w I would say, even if you’ve been, you know, blogging or, or podcasting, or just posting content to your blog specifically, which is, you know, another kind of underlying part of this, which is why we talk about, you know, we love social, social media is important, but social media is like very short term. Everything long-term is web, which is your blog. So you need to like, take, make your, make your blog, the home, the headquarters of your digital footprint, make your, your articles and your, you know, specifically text, right? The, the, the, the crawlers, the search engine, like bots, these crawlers, they can crawl text easily. Whereas video and audio, it’s, it’s not, it’s not as crawlable. It’s that technology isn’t as much there. So it’s like, what, how much text can you get on your site? And specifically that usually lives in your blog.
So when he says, if you’ve been blogging longer than a year, go after search terms with a volume of 5,000 or more, I would say, make sure that you go back and optimize all of your, your, your earlier posts first, right? So, because if you, even, if you have more than a year’s worth of content, let’s say 52 articles. That’s what, that’s, what we teach people to do is one, one every week. Even if you have more than that in the past, make sure you go do the work of optimizing every single article before you start playing more aggressively, because you need those. If you have a bunch of articles, but they’re not performing, then your site isn’t really getting the traffic or building the authority to compete for the higher volume search terms, the more competitive search terms. So make sure that you’re optimizing for the lower ones.
Now, if all of this, it sounds like garlic and like another language to you. Number one, I would encourage you to check out our high traffic strategies event, where we teach, you know, search engine optimization Google ads, Facebook ads, affiliate marketing, influencer marketing, and you know, kind of a little more of these advanced, but that’s why it’s in phase three. I mean, this is a phase three event for us. It’s core it’s course, one in phase three, but if the, if the standard brand builder curriculum, our standard curriculum is a one curriculum that’s divided into four phases, and each phase has three courses. This would be number seven out of 12, just to give you a reference high traffic strategies is number seven out of 12. Now we actually have more than 12 events because we have some other ancillary ones as well, but our core curriculum is 12.
And we teach this in number seven. So I’m saying that to point back to going, Hey, optimize your posts. And if you, you know, if you’re all brand new to this, you know, the basics of how you optimize any page. Okay. So, so first of all, is you want to, you want to do some keyword research, figure out what, what terms do I want every single page or every article on my site, top two to rank for. Right? And so you, you be deliberate about that, figure that out, and then you want to optimize that page by including those terms, if you can.
Ep 154: SEO Secrets for Personal Brands with Neil Patel
Hey brand builder Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview. We are so excited to bring you this information and wanted to let you know that, Hey, there’s no sales pitch coming from anything that we do with this is all our value add to you and the community. However, if you are somebody who is looking for specific strategies on how to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and we offer a free call to everyone that’s interested in getting to know us and is willing to give us a chance to get to know them and share a little bit about what we do. So if you’re interested in taking us up on a free strategy call, you can do that at brand builders, group.com/summit call brand builders, group.com/summit. Call, hope to talk to you soon on with the show.
So excited to introduce you to someone who I think is one of the top thought leaders in the world today in his space. In fact, AGA was asking me you know, she’s like, I know I’ve heard of Neil Patel. And I said, well, he’s basically the world’s top thinker on SEO search engine optimization, as well as a number of other, you know, digital marketing related initiatives, which we’re going to talk about today. If you have never met him, he is a New York times bestselling author of, of a called hustle. He hosts the marketing school podcast with his pal, Eric, it’s a fantastic podcast. It’s super short every day. And they you know, the cover of variety of different topics. I’ve, I’ve been listening here in the last few months, pretty much on on repeat, but he also is the founder of a company called crazy egg and a tool, a tool called crazy egg, which we maybe will talk about.
And then Uber suggest which some of you, even if you don’t recognize Neil, you’ve probably used Uber suggest, which we will talk about. So anyways by our mutual friend, Jay Baer’s who connected me and Neil, welcome to the show. It’s good to meet you. Thanks for having me. Yeah. It’s rare that I have people on that. I don’t know personally, but even though you are just meeting, you know, I’ve been I’ve been a fan of your stuff for a while and I thought your expertise, clearly it would be relevant to our audience. And I, I want to start just right inside of search engine optimization specifically for personal brands. And I would say, you know, a lot of our audience, you know, they know what search engine optimization is, but they easily get overwhelmed by it. They’re not highly technical people that most of our audiences more mission-driven messengers is what we call them.
And you know, of course the 2080 rule says that, you know, 20% of your activities will return 80% of the results. If I’m a personal brand and I’ve got like a, a blog, you know, or a podcast, what do you, what are the what’s kind of the 20%, you know, the fundamentals of SEO that today, like in the current time, I need to make sure I’m doing this with my site, with my posts every week. And if it’s like, if I just do these few things consistently for the term, it’ll work out. Maybe not like the most Ninja stuff, but like, what’s the core fundamentals I have to nail.
So the big one is just posting content. You know, the, the biggest thing that you find is people posts or content or two. And then they’re just like, Oh, this is a lot of work. You gotta be consistent and you gotta keep doing, and you gotta do it for like a year, literally a year. And you gotta be consistent like three times a week for a year. And if you do that, you’ll start seeing results. But what most people don’t realize is, is stuff on the web. When you post content it’s hit or miss, whether it’s an image on Instagram or a blog post, or a video on YouTube, it literally is hit or miss. There’s no guarantee that just because you think it’s amazing and it’s a hot topic it’s going to do well, and people have to play the numbers game. Now it doesn’t mean you put out crap. You just have to try to put out high quality stuff each and every single time and you’ll get your hits and misses. But that’s the biggest thing that people make a mistake on is they’re not consistent. And with the consistency also comes time, right? You have to be patient. You can’t just have it happen in two or three months, or you have that.
And so does this happen? I mean, does that mean even you where you, you know, you know how to optimize a post, you put something out it’s still like, you still have a lot of posts that don’t don’t hit. They don’t go that well, even if they’re optimized. Well, I mean, is that what you’re saying? Even, you know, at your level that you bump into that
All the time. I have stuff that misses all the time, even if it’s well optimized and stuff, it still doesn’t do well. It’s hit or miss. It really is for so many people. And they just don’t realize that the next thing that you have to keep in mind too, is when you’re doing this, you gotta do your keyword research. See if you want to build up a brand, let’s say you’re a doctor or a real estate professional, or a book author. And let’s say, I’m writing a book on, I don’t know losing weight. If you look at the keywords and losing weight is a lot really popular and searched a lot, probably do well because it shows that people are interested in that. On the flip side, though, if you want to be known for, I’m trying to think of something super vague right now, if you want to be known for
Motivational speaker, how about that?
Because a big market, but if you want to be known for a clubhouse marketing tactics, clubhouse is blowing up with a problem with clubhouses. It’s still small. Even if you dominate your brands only going to be so big, you know, and you look at trends, people like, Oh, there’s growth hacking. Now this is a cool term. And all this, a lot of these terms, and these buzzwords are still not as popular as the major categories like losing weight is a massive category. I don’t care who you are. There may be some new thing like Asahi or something that you can eat or drink that causes you to do better. But in general, if you end up going after big categories, popular keywords, in essence, it’s much easier to build a brand than if you go after small category.
I mean, this is kind of reminds me of like, you know, on shark tank, they’re always trying to determine like, what’s the market, like, what’s the total potential market market addressable. Yeah. The total addressable market. So it’s really similar, but so, so let’s, let’s go down that for a second. So let’s say you go after losing weight, which is not super niche and there’s a big market for it, but then on the flip side, I go, well, yeah, there’s definitely a huge market for, but there’s a lot of competition. Like I’m, I’m never gonna rank on the top 10 pages organically for a term like losing weight. So is it, is it better to go after broad terms that have mass appeal, even though I white link much lower or do I want to go at like a very specific term, like with with an individual post or something that it’s like, I really want to get, you know, using infrared saunas to lose weight you know, it like, well, how do you balance the, like the big total addressable market with like the competition and being able to like own a keyword.
So you want to first go after how to lose weight with these red infrared saunas, and then you want, you want to go after how to lose weight by intermittent fasting, right? We’re getting super specific. And then in general, as you do that in golf, a lot of these little terms, and you do that for like six months and you keep doing it for another quarter, then you do it for another year. So after that 12 month Mark, you’ve gotten a lot of traction on these little terms, then you want to go after the bigger terms.
Interesting. So it’s so, and, and you’re saying, so you’re kind of like start narrow, do it consistently, but, but narrow inside of this kind of big umbrella.
Exactly. So you can start narrow in a small market and then be like, I’m going to go abroad because that doesn’t work because just the market’s too small. You want to start narrow in a big market that you can easily expand, you know, and still be an expert because you talk about how to lose weight through intermittent fasting, or dieting, or how to lose weight for men or women or exercise that helps you lose weight in your stomach exercise that helps you lose weight in your arms. And you get super specific. You’re still known as someone who teaches you how to lose weight. So you’re still branding yourself that weight loss expert, but you want to focus on all the niches, cause they’re just not competitive. You just want to go from day one saying, I want to be this person that teaches you how to lose weight, period. Well, you got another million people that you’re competing with, so good luck. But if you start in these little niche and then expand yourself, it’s easier to build the brand.
And would you use whatever the, whatever the big market term is like lose weight in this example, would you, would you say that every, each one of those kinds of individual micro focus posts, are you still including that term? So it’s like the big, the big mothership term that you’re going after. All of the small posts are also indexed for that same term. So it’s like your S your overall site is attacking this big.
Yeah. I, I don’t do it on purpose, but it happens naturally. Right? So, cause if you’re talking about how to lose weight in your belly, you’re mentioning like losing fat, which is another word of losing weight, right. Or losing your love handles. That’s another example of losing weight or getting toned up. But Google is like at the source. And a lot of these platforms are like the sources and dictionaries where they understand what you mean. And they understand there’s all these different variations because they understand user behavior. So yeah, you, you want to focus smaller and then expand upwards. And that model works extremely well. And when you’re using tools like Uber says to do your keyword research, you just type in the term, like how to lose weight. It’ll tell you all the segments that roll up into how to lose weight. So that way,
How about that for a second? Cause I wanted to mention Uber suggest. Cause I think actually my guess is actually a large part of our audience. Doesn’t actually know of that term. I bet probably about half of them do, but what is Uber suggest? How do you use it? Why do you use it? And like, you know, if you’re just hearing about it the first time, like, what do I go do there?
Sure. So you just go to Uber, suggest.com or you can just Google, Uber suggests it will land you on a, it Ford’s to the Neil patel.com website. And on that page, you just put in a keyword related to your space and it’ll tell you all the keywords, how hard they are to get traffic for, to build your brand for how popular they are, how expensive they are, if you want to run ads against those keywords. And it’ll also tell you all the longer tail terms, right? Like how to lose weight through intermittent fasting. That’s a longer tail term, multiple three, four word phrases. It’ll tell you all the longer tail terms that are popular, that convert well and are easier to be known for and get results quicker from.
So yeah, we’ll put a link to that, of course, in, in, into the show notes, but Uber suggest is where you go. And then the other thing you can do too, right. As you can look up what some of your competitors are, are doing as well. Right. So you could type in their domain and it’ll kind of tell you, these are the terms that they’re indexing for, like more or less. Right.
Exactly. You got it. Right.
And so coming back to the competition thing and I just want to make sure I’ve got this pegged is, is going all right. So if there’s a highly competitive term, then it’s kind of like you do, what do I do? I aim at that highly competitive term? Like if there’s a lot of volume around it or do I, do I go for the term where it’s like, there’s, you know, 125 searches a month, but it’s you know, it’s, it’s a much less competitive term. And what I kind of hear you saying is it’s like both, it’s kind of like you create individual pieces of content to go after the small ones while you sort of position your overall site and content to kind of go after the big ones, is that the right way to think of it
I’ll even be more specific at first, start off with the terms that get at least 500 searches a month, which will tell you that aren’t competitive. And there’s this score called SEO difficulty. SEO difficulty tells you how competitive it is. So any number under 40 is less competitive. So go after terms, I have at least 500 searches a month. That means they’re popular, somewhat popular, but not that popular, but popular enough and have a SEO difficulty score of 40 or lower. And as you do this after a year, you can start targeting terms that are getting, you know, minimum of 5,000 searches a month or whatever number you want. And you can target terms that have SEO difficulty score of 60 or 70 or under. And you may find terms in between that are like, Hey, there’s this term that gets 17,000 searches a month.
And the SEO difficulty score is 20. That means this is a great keyword and no one’s going after it. Right. And if you feel that it’s really relevant to your space and you can convert people off that term because it’s related to what you do and what you want to brand yourself on, go for it. But the big thing is, is you want that minimum bar 500, because 500 searches doesn’t mean you’re going to get 500 people to your website. It just means 500 people are searching for it. And the reason I say 500 is remember, even if there’s a term like how to lose your belly fat people may also type in belly fat weight problems. They may also type in belly fat weight, all similar terms. So what you’ll find is even though that term only had 500 searches, you’ll start ranking for all these other random terms that you didn’t think about. So it actually adds up to more over time.
Well, I think it’s super helpful to have the, like, you know, those minimum thresholds, that’s just super helpful to have the practicality, the specificity of that. And then, you know, w when, when yeah, I mean, I, I guess when I think about going after these things, like when I think of SEO, somehow, I feel like I’m missing it, right? Like I go, well, I know to do keyword research. And I know for every single post I’m going to, you know, I’m going to pick, there’s like three key terms I’m gonna, I’m gonna target at with this post. And then there’s some overall terms. And then it’s like, Hey, I’m gonna make sure my title tags are updated. You know, like my H one tags, I’m gonna make sure the meta description has, you know, is updated. I’m gonna make sure the URL it has in it. The name of the terms, which if I usually, if I have a title of a blog post and then I just post stuff, is that it? I mean, is that, is that it? And it’s basically just that times, consistency times time,
You also need to promote too. So when you post stuff, you need to share it on the social web. If you’re linking out to people within your articles, email them, letting them know that you linked to them, like, I may email you, or we know I, we may email Jay saying, Hey, Jay, even if I didn’t know him, Hey, Jay, linked out to you in my article, check out here, hope you like it. If you enjoy it, feel free to share it. Like little things like that, we’ll get more buzz. So then that way it does better. But those are the two things that you can easily do share it on your social. And second is, is email the people you link to and ask them.
Yeah. Yeah. And that’s, but that’s, it, it’s basically, you know, do the, do the fundamentals, right.
I’m not the smartest person by any means. I’m just consistent and I’m willing to grind it out while other people are quitting.
Well, I love that. And I mean, I think that the other thing that’s interesting about this, you know, it’s just like most of what we’re talking about today would have been true five years ago. I mean, it’s, we think of it as like it’s changing all the time, but what you’re saying is like most of the fundamentals here actually aren’t changing that much. It’s, it’s basically just doing it consistently. Okay. Can you tell us, Oh, go ahead.
I believe that it’ll work in the next three, four years now. I don’t think much will change for this exact strategy, right? To build your brand because you have to remember just, if you don’t go viral on the web, who cares, you know, most people don’t like the guy drinking cranberry juice, right on that longboard, which is actually a cool video. And good for him for doing that. But people always will type in how to lose belly fat on Google or whatever sector you’re in and trying to build a brand there’s always problems or queries. People are asking just like, you may ask the Lesco Alexa or Siri, a question. It’s the same thing that some people use Google. And that builds a brand it’s just consistency over time. And people continually finding stuff. You don’t have any kids. These days are probably like how to improve my three shot jumper. Right? Like when it comes to basketball or anything, it’s just like very specific. Yeah. People get very specific. That’s what the traffic is around the web. And when you get specific people like, Oh wow. You know how to solve my exact problem. You’re an expert. That’s how you build a brand.
So this was a perfect segue. I was going to you about voice because that is the voice search Alexa and Google and, you know, Facebook like that, to me, does feel a bit like a new frontier that’s emerging in terms of more and more people are just asking Siri or they’re, you know, just saying, Hey, Google or Alexa, whatever. Is there anything that we need to be doing now to prepare for that forthcoming trend? Cause it seems like the data is pointing to that more, there’s more and more growing search happening through those voice. I don’t even know what you call those, but those voice activated search
How much you actually have to do. So these devices are already figuring out how to pull. The biggest thing that you can do is one, make sure your website loads fast. Cause they don’t, if it loads slow, then it’s going to take them forever to crawl your site and get the data. And the second thing is use schema, markup, schema markup. If you just Google for it, there’s these tools provided by Google that just help you with it. And it just ensures that these devices, when they’re crawling your site, they can easily understand what your website is about and the text.
Yeah. that is the schema markup thing is a new thing that I didn’t realize just basically telling Google, this is a table on blank, right?
She’s been more specific. This is a question. This is my restaurant rating. I have 4.5 out of five stars. That’s what that means. These are reviews. I have 112 reviews. So when you get super specific, it allows Google to know what each individual site, because having the word reviews can mean multiple things. Using schema markup to say these are reviews on my restaurant, on my product, on my course, on my coaching services, right. That gets very specific in schema markup. There’s also something called question and answers. This is a question, a question B could be what is personal branding? And this is the answer. The answer is personal branding is you probably know that one better than me. Right? So getting super specific, like it that’s what schema markup is. It’s not really changing how your webpage looks or anything like that. It’s just your code. So that would, Google can more so understand what you’re trying to push out and these voice search devices love using it.
Yeah. Interesting. All right. So if we’re doing schema markup and we’re doing meta descriptions and we’re doing keyword research and all that stuff, the voice, the voice tools are using the same mechanisms to, to index stuff. So we’re okay. We’re okay there. Okay. I want to turn for a second to CRO conversion rate optimization. Cause this is something that y’all do. You created a tool that is like one of the industry, best tools crazy egg. Can you tell us and, and for our audience specifically, you know, a lot of what we will teach them to do is, is, you know, basically is let people sample your expertise for free, which often happens by way of an online training or video training. And so usually there’s some type of a registration page that people are coming to like a squeeze page to capture a name and email address. And these are pages where the conversion rate matters tremendously, especially if you’re driving paid traffic. I think heat mapping is something that a lot of people still don’t know about indu and crazy egg is that tool. So can you talk about like, what is heat mapping? What is crazy egg, and then specifically, how would we use it or what would we be looking for to optimize a certain, any specific page?
Sure. So if you’re building a personal brand, you may click emails, you may have articles that help build your brand. Like we discussed. You may be some products. Eventually if you’re a doctor trying to get people to buy your supplements or schedule appointments, or if you’re a fitness trainer, getting people to schedule some coaching sessions with you, whatever it may be, what crazy egg does is like you’ve mentioned heat map. It shows you where people click and where they don’t ones. If you found out through a crazy act test, everyone’s clicking on this image of yours thinking they can buy it, but the image isn’t clickable, you can then go and fix that and make it a link where they can buy or ones. If you have the sales page that sells them on your services or your newsletter or your digital products, and then majority of the people cause crazy, we’ll show you in the heat map as they’re scrolling, what portion of the page are majority leaving ones? If they leave after scrolling twenty-five percent, but all the good stuff where you’re selling them is that the very bottom in the last 90%, then you know that, Hey, I’m not getting people down there. I need to adjust the copy. It shows you how someone’s navigating. So you can see where they’re getting stuck. Like if they’re reading an article and you notice that everyone’s leaving after a certain paragraph, well maybe you said something in there that they don’t like, or they don’t believe in and you can go in and fix it.
So you’re basically just, it’s, it’s almost like it’s kinda like a video camera to what a video camera might be to like a grocery store where you see like the path people go through the Isles is kind of the same thing, but for your website to see where the cursor moves.
Exactly. Like if you see that everyone at a grocery store is picking something up from the very bottom shelf in an aisle, and it’s the most popular area, but they’re not picking the suffer from the middle and you probably should move the products at the very bottom in the middle and the stuff in the bottom. Right. And that’s what crazy we’ll show, show you where people are spending their time or attention. Even with the page, it’ll show you, the elements are spending most time on because sometimes people scroll and skip a lot of stuff and they get to the meat. And if that’s where they’re spending their time, well, then you can just get rid of all the stuff in the middle and just put the meat higher up. Right.
So it was basically just observing their behavior and then just saying, what are they wanting? What they doing? And then just trying to give them that, make it easier for them to get to what they’re wanting to get to or what they’re spending time on. And then taking away the things that are making them leave or, you know, bug out or whatever. I mean, it’s pretty simple. Is it, is it super technical to incorporate heat mapping into a website? Like how do you, I mean, is it, do I need to like hire a programmer?
You just paste this piece of code on your website or install a plugin, like you’re going to solve the WordPress plugin or Shopify plugin, whatever it may be in your case, on the seeming more WordPress. And that’s it, it does it all for you automatically. Wow.
I love it. I love it. Neil, where should people go? You know, I already mentioned, you’ve got the marketing school podcast. You guys are covering all sorts of interesting little topics and things there. You’ve got your book, the crazy egg, Uber suggest, anything, anything else that you would point people to in terms of how they can just connect with you and follow up with more what you’re doing?
You can find all my [email protected] from my social profiles, to my blog, all the tools, all that stuff.
Awesome. Well yeah, I know we didn’t really talk that much about how you built your personal brand, but I, I really also holds you up as an example of someone who has dominated the space, just given tons of value. Give, give, give, give, give, and just over time, you know, more and more. It’s just like you, you have built such a strong reputation, so thank you. Oh, you’re welcome. Thanks.
Ep 147: Exactly What to Say to Sell High Dollar Offers with Phil M Jones | Recap Episode
We are back with a recap edition of the influential personal brand podcast. Talking about one of my favorite things to talk about, selling. One of the reasons I love to talk about selling is because everybody does it wrong. They either don’t do it, or they do it wrong. And I have some very pointed philosophies about the right way in the wrong way to sell. And I have to say, you know, this, this interview with Phil M Jones, who I’ve never interviewed before. I was so happy about we met, I don’t know, you know, several months ago at this point, but we haven’t been longtime friends. I’ve heard about him. And there’s a lot of stuff that is taught on the profession and the art of selling that I flat out disagree with that I don’t like that I, I don’t subscribe to and that I don’t follow.
And that AAJ doesn’t believe in that we don’t deploy with our team. I think we sell in a very non-traditional way. I would, I would call it a much more modern way than how most people sell, which is just, you know, it’s not about all the tactics and the pressure and the, you know, just pressure. Let’s just call it, leave it at that. And so getting to talk with Phil was great because I was so impressed at how much we aligned philosophically on a topic that a lot of times just don’t align with people on. And so anyways, it’s a fantastic interview of, of course he has that wonderful accent to listen to, and you know, make sure that you, you go back and listen to it, but I want to give you my, my highlights is always getting to play the role of student here, listening from Phil who’s, you know, done has helped so many people.
And, and he’s got a great thing going with exactly what to say. And I think a lot of these things were reinforcements for me because I don’t really talk sales that much anymore. Not, not like direct tactical, like one-on-one selling, but that was, that was where my upbringing came from. I mean, that was how I started in business. I mean, I, I started going door to door. I mean, it doesn’t get much more like old school hardcore selling than that. I mean, in terms of dealing with the rejection and, and whatnot. And so I love this, and it’s been a long time since I’ve, I’ve talked about this and, you know, we have an event coming up you know, a new curriculum that we’re developing this year that is on sales specifically in selling high dollar offers, because we’re realizing that gosh, all of our personal brand, you know, clients need this help of, of what to say and, and how to have a one-on-one conversation that leads to a credit card.
And so we’re diving into this more, although we’ve left it alone for, you know, the last few years. And so it was great, you know, to, to do this with Phil and, and just walk you through my three, my three big takeaways, obviously you may have noticed AJ is not here today. So I’m filling in rolling, rolling solo. You got the, you know, I’m your, I’m your guy for today, which is a shame by the way, because AJ flat out is the single greatest salesperson that I have ever met. She is extraordinary. And she is so client-centric and, and so service centric and, and is just the epitome. I think of all things of what a great professional sales person should look like. And she outsold all of the top salespeople that I’ve ever known and ever been around. And so at some point we’ll have to get AJ back here to do an episode.
Maybe we’ll do a special episode on selling or maybe I’ll just interview her, her because it’s, it’s, she’s incredible. Well, but anyways, to break down the takeaways from Phil M Jones and who I really enjoyed learning from here they are. So number one and all of these, by the way, all of these are mental. And that’s what I have found this to be true about selling in general, the reason that people struggle with sales is not because of technical training. It is because of mental conditioning, their mind doesn’t think of it, about selling in the right way. And all three of these takeaways for me, kind of fall in suit with that. So, number one, and this is a mindset thing that you got to realize if, if you’re the sales person, no is not the enemy. Indecision is the enemy.
Somebody telling you no is not a bad thing. No means it’s not a fit. No means we don’t have a match. No means not right now. No means this, this, this, isn’t what I’m looking for. All of those things allow you to move forward in a powerful way to know what to do. Next indecision is the enemy in decision is what keeps us stuck in decision is unacceptable. Both for you and get this for your prospect, right? If somebody tells me no, I can move on. But if someone tells me, maybe I am stuck, I am not moving forward. Like I can’t move on. And, and I, you know, I, I can’t move. I can’t move onto something else. I am literally just stuck until they make a decision, which means I’m playing cat and mouse. I’m chasing them down. Right. And so many salespeople are afraid of the word, know that we do everything that we can to avoid the word.
No. And instead we set ourselves up for maybe. And what I would encourage you to do is set yourself up to hear no so that you don’t hear maybe a yes is good. Like a, yes is great. A yes is what we’re going for. Yes. This is what we want, but at no is fine. I know it’s okay. I know it’s not bad. I know is not the enemy, but in decision, Ooh, indecision is no way. No indecision is not good. Indecision is not acceptable because not only does it keep you as the sales person stuck, right. I don’t know whether to like celebrate and get this client activated or to, to, you know, close up shop and move on and go find someone else I’m like stuck in this limbo. I can’t move forward, but it’s not just about you. It’s and more importantly, it’s not about you.
It’s about them. It is a disservice to allow someone to tell you, maybe it is a disservice to them. Why? Because they can’t move forward either. Right? Like if they tell you, yes, it’s like, great. Let’s do this, right. If like, you know, just to use us as our company, brand builders group, as an example, since that’s a frame of reference, right? Like if someone says, I am ready for personal, I want to take my personal brand to the next level. I’m ready to grow. I’m ready to monetize. I’m ready to like build my speaking career, launch my book, you know, whatever, become a bestseller. Right? My Ted talk, like build out my digital marketing system and they go, you know what? Brand builders, I like you, I believe in you, I’m on board. Let’s do this then. Great. They can move forward. We can move forward.
That’s exciting if they say no, right. If they go, Hey, you know what? I don’t think you’re the right firm for me. Okay. No problem. You know what this, you know, I’m not going to, I’m just not going to move forward with my personal brand at this time, period. Okay. No problem. You know what? I’ve decided to do some, do something else fine. But if they say, you know what, let me think about it. That is terrible because that means they’re stuck. They’re not moving forward. They’re there. They’re not moving forward with us getting into action mode. And like, let’s do this. Let’s go. Or they’re not moving forward with someone else. It’s like their dream isn’t moving forward. Their dream is stagnant. Their dream is stuck because you have allowed them. The indulgence of that’s no good your job. And then this is, so then I’ll say this is a second tech.
So the first takeaway is realizing no is not the enemy, right? No. Is an inevitable byproduct of getting to yes, no happens because not everyone is a perfect fit for what you do. No is a necessary part of, of the process. But, but maybe is no good. We don’t want maybe yes, yes is great. No is fine. Maybe not good. Keeps them stuck. Keeps you stuck. Which leads me to the second big takeaway from that chat with Phil, which is just the way that you think about what you do is sales. If you, and here’s what it is, I’ll give you the takeaway selling is about helping people make smart decisions. That’s the way that that’s the way that Phil said it. Helping people make smart decisions. I would just say selling is about helping people make the right decision for themselves, not for you, but either way.
It’s about helping people make decisions. Why? Because people need help making decisions. That’s why like people struggle with procrastination. That’s why I wrote my take the stairs book. Like procrastination is something that we all struggle with and, and take the stairs was all about helping people overcome it. Because even in our own life, we naturally default to inaction. I mean, we live that the escalator mentality is pervasive it by subconscious. It happens automatically. We default to inaction. So in order to help someone change their life in order to help someone get something different in order for somebody’s life, to be better than it was, they’re better tomorrow than it was yesterday. There has to be some change in action. And my job as a salesperson is not to take something that they don’t want and use magical words to convince them they should get it.
That’s not ethical persuasion. We believe in ethical persuasion that isn’t ethical, taking some convincing somebody to get something that they don’t want, or they don’t need is unethical. That is taking advantage of them. That is using the psychology of influence. It’s using the principles of persuasion in a negative way. We are not on board with that. I don’t care how much commission you make from it. We’re not a fan. We’re not on board. And our sales team knows they better not sell anything to somebody that isn’t a fit for us because that’s just not what we believe in. But we do believe that people need help making decisions. They need help navigating uncertainty to arrive at a place about what is good for them. And sometimes that means they, you need to look them right between the eye and you need to tell them to their face.
You should buy this because it’s the right decision for them. Not for you. It’s all about them. It is helping them in a standing in service of them, standing in a place of helping them achieve their goals, their best interests. That is what ethical persuasion is all about. That is what we believe in. But, but know this. It’s not an excuse for you to WiSci out as a salesperson. All right. Sometimes it means it. Sometimes it does mean pushing them a little bit and saying, this is a good thing for you. You’re saying you want this, right? You’re saying you have a dream of inspiring millions of people. You’re saying that you want to make money to have a lifestyle business, teaching what you know, and doing what you love. You’re saying that you believe that we have answers for it. Then you’re telling me that you have the money. Let’s do this. Let’s go. You need to do this. That’s different than, than, than talking them into something that they don’t want, but people need help making decisions.
I would say that as a professional salesperson, your job isn’t to be a pro a smooth talker. Your job is to be an expert listener. And it is to help people figure out what do they want? What do they need? Where are they? What’s the gap between where they are and where they’re trying to go and help them make a good decision. And if that decision does not include you or your product or your service, you should be okay with that use, you should be willing and be okay with people telling you no. And in fact, you should not want the wrong people to tell you, yes, you should not hope for the peop the people who aren’t the right fit to give you money, because that doesn’t help you. What you need is the people who are the right fit to give you money, because they will take action.
They will do the thing that you have because it’s an alignment with what they need. And so they will get results and they will, and it will work and they will be grateful and they will be happy. And they will refer you people. What you don’t want is just a bunch of people you took advantage of because you talked them into it. That’s not what you want. Even though in the short term, it’s like that pays you money. That’s not really what you want. That’s not how you build lasting reputation. So what you’re looking for here is mutually agreeable outcomes, which is, you know, I think that’s the term that Phil used mutually agreeable outcomes. And I hundred percent agree. That is what we’re after now. Sometimes people, you know, sales, like sometimes the customer will talk you into doing stuff you don’t do.
We’re not a fan of that either, just because we can do it doesn’t mean we should, like, we’re not a fan of selling a custom solution to every single person. Right? We have some offerings and it’s like, if our offering isn’t a fit, even though you need our expertise, if it, if you want it in some other way, like we don’t do it. Then, you know, like brand builders, we do one-on-one coaching. Like that’s like our lane, we do it. You know, we have our events, which, but those are a part of one-on-one coaching. And even at our events, our events are so small because we put people in round table groups, they get one-on-one coaching at, in their round table groups. So like, one-on-one is what makes us as a part of what makes us unique. So, you know, there is a range of acceptability of which we will kind of bend and flex, but at some point it’s like, you offer, you have what you have.
And people either are a fit for that, or they are not. And if they’re not, you gotta be okay with that. But it’s mutually agreeable outcomes, right? What works for you as the provider, right? Like this is what you have to offer. And then it’s like, what does the client need? If that’s a match, we have a win. If it’s not a match, then it’s disjointed. It’s disconnected on either side and it should be a no, right? Like we don’t believe that you should try to sell every single person you talk to necessarily. We believe that you’re looking for the right fit. You’re looking for the right match. Because just because you can sell them, if you know, on the back end, what you deliver, isn’t what they need. Like, you’re, you’re gonna win in the short term, but you’re going to lose in the long-term.
So help people make smart decisions. We’re looking for mutually agreeable outcomes. It’s, it’s more like we’re looking for a match, right? It’s almost like dating. It’s like, we’re looking for compatibility more than we’re looking for manipulation or conviction convincing. Or, you know, even though we talk about like with digital marketing, we’re always talking about conversion. That still should be a win-win. It’s not about magically taking somebody who should be a no and turning them to the, yes. We don’t consider that a victory. What we consider a victory, right? It’s not a win, lose thing. If sales is a win lose, like I beat you. I got you. Right. That is not what we believe in that is not ethical. Persuasion. Sales should be a win-win thing. It’s right. And not even that, it’s really just a win. If it’s a win for the customer, it’s a win.
Right. But there’s no way the customer ever loses. And then that’s a win. What, what is the right thing as what is the best thing for them? If that happens to include us, then that is awesome, right? Like we’re of course we’re excited about that. But our job is not to coerce people. Our job is to serve people. Our job is to help them make decisions. And if you can flip that switch in your brain, you won’t have call reluctance. You won’t have fear. There is no fear when the mission to serve is clear. You only feel fear when you feel pressure to convince somebody of something. Well, you know, if I have to convince you of something against your will, that’s combative. That is confrontational. That is conflict. Yeah. There’s, there’s pressure there. But if all I have to do is serve you. Right.
And it’s like, I’m bringing you food. And it’s like, do you like it? Yes or no. If so, here it is. If not, no, you don’t. It’s like, there’s no personal rejection in that. It’s just service. Like that is a big, an important switch. And then the third takeaway, which if you didn’t, you got to listen to that interview with Phil all the way to the end, because at the end we got into like some very specifics about marketing. Like you know, we’re talking about keynotes specifically. And I mean, to, to his, to his brand, he gave some really great one-liners of exactly what to say and, you know, selling yourself as a speaker. So this would apply. I think this was what we were talking about selling high-dollar keynotes, right? Because Phil and I are both in a, in a pretty top tier keynote fee range, but this would apply to selling a high dollar coaching program, selling high dollar consulting, selling any high dollar offer, selling high dollar or you know, medical services, right?
Like any, any high dollar offer. And, and here’s what, here’s what he said. He said, remember when you’re selling a speech, because that was the context, it’s not just about selling your content. It is your content plus their circumstances. And I would probably modify that ever so slightly. I would just say, it’s your content applied to their circumstances, right? Like that’s a part of what the artful selling is specifically with it. Anything that’s like information marketing related or thought leadership related or con you know, consultancy related is it’s not just, Hey, I’m, I’m an expert on blank. It’s, you’re struggling with this. And here’s how I think my expertise would apply. It’s more like we’re working together to, as a team, to help in a, in a partnership to help me apply, you know, what I’m doing to your situation, to help your people again, it’s, it’s like we’re working together for your benefit.
That’s what selling is. It’s not me convincing you, that you need what I have. It’s it’s me working with you to figure out, can we take what I have and make your life better? That’s the difference that is ethical persuasion. And I would say that is professional persuasion. Like that is what the best elite sales performers on the planet do because they get so many referrals and they have so much reputation. Like you become a top producer, not just by being a great producer for one conversation or one year. It happens over time because you develop a reputation and a confidence and an air for knowing like, I know who should buy and who shouldn’t. And I am a consumer, like I am consultant. I’m trusted. I have expertise. Not only in what I do, but expertise in helping people determine about whether or not I’m the right fit for them.
And that takes time. So it’s your content, your expertise applied to their circumstances, right? To their it’s, to their goals, to their dreams, to their future. It’s not about you. It’s all about them. That is what ethical persuasion is all about. And that is how you take the pressure off yourself. There is no fear when the mission to serve is clear. So next time you’re in a high dollar selling situation. Make sure you’re not thinking about what you want and your commission. And are you saying the right thing? Just focus on service. That’s all we’ve got today for the into influential, personal brand podcast recap. We’ll catch you next time. Stay tuned.
Ep 146: Exactly What to Say to Sell High Dollar Offers with Phil M Jones
Speaker 1: (00:07)
Hey brand builder Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview. We are so excited to bring you this information and wanted to let you know that, Hey, there’s no sales pitch coming. Ufrom anything that we do with this is all our value add to you and the community. However, if you are somebody who is looking for specific strategies on how to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and we offer a free call to everyone that’s interested in getting to know us and is willing to give us a chance to get to know them and share a little bit about what we do. So if you’re interested in taking us up on a free strategy call, you can do that at brand builders, group.com/summit. Call brand builders, group.com/summit. Call. Hope to talk to you soon on with the show.
RV: (01:04)
Sales is something that I love. It’s something that I spent my life doing knocking on doors as a teenager in direct sales, of course my mom was in direct sales and the first company, if you don’t already know this, the company that AIJ and I built was an eight figure sales coaching company. We coach salespeople how to sell after 2018, when we left that business, we’re no longer in the sales training business. And over the last couple of years, I have started following a gentlemen that you’re about to meet named Phil M Jones. Phil is one of my favorite experts in the world of sales in the world right now. He is the author of several different books, but the three kind of, I guess, flagship books are called exactly what to say exactly how to sell and exactly where to start.
RV: (02:05)
He has sold close to a million over over 750,000 copies of these books. And so he serves as both a resident expert on building a personal brand, and we’re going to talk to him about how has he built his own brand and sold so many books. But also we’re going to apply his expertise to the process of how to sell for personal brands. Because Phil sells consulting, he sells keynotes and he teaches organizations like Microsoft, Virgin, Atlantic pampered, chef DHL Volkswagen, ADT, Isogenics he teaches companies like that and those people how to sell. And so since we became friends recently, I was like, buddy, I need to get some free sales training for all of our peeps on the podcast. And he agreed. So welcome to the show, Phil.
PMJ: (02:59)
Hey, it’s a pleasure To be here, always good to chat. And hopefully we can share some things today that are useful to our listeners.
RV: (03:05)
Yeah, buddy. You know, I I know that you and I, you, we’ve only, we’ve only really, I think had one encounter where you and I are in this kind of non-paid mastermind of off a group of authors. And that’s where he mad. Of course we share Jay Baer as a mentor. I think he’s a mentor to both of us in a very dear friend, but you know, at brand builders, our audience is what we call mission-driven messengers. So we’re after people who are more about making impact you know, it’s not that they don’t want to make money, but what I’m, what I love about the stuff that you teach is it feels like it’s less ego. It’s less, it’s not about lies. It’s not about manipulation. So how do you think of sales? Like what, like when you think of just the word selling, how would you describe it? What do you think about it? Cause obviously your philosophies are resonating deeply with the world in terms of the way you think of selling.
PMJ: (04:10)
Okay. So how do I think about selling? Well, Phil Jones dictionary definition of what selling is, is, is firstly earning the right to make a recommendation. So, but break that down real simple. And it means you should never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever suggest to anybody that they should buy anything. Unless you can say these words first and the word you should look to say, first of the words, because of the fact that you said, because of the fact that you said blank, blank, and blank, then for those reasons, my recommendation would be blank, blank, and blank. Like that’s how you earn the right to make a recommendation. If you do the work before the work, it’s putting yourself in the position that this is the ultimate solution to other things I think about from a sales point of view.
RV: (04:52)
So just on that, that, that, that, to that, to me, that tees up listening, right? Like in order for me to be able to say, because of the fact that you said it means that I must have first asked questions, correct?
PMJ: (05:06)
The answer to suggesting that if you have not done the work to get into a position where you can say that, then you haven’t done the sales job, right. Too many people think it’s about embellishing, a product or service with features and benefits. Hoping one of them might stick. What you’re better to be able to do is to uncover true needs analysis, to see if there’s a genuine fit and then move yourself into a marketplace at one, there’s another ingredient though, that goes into being great on the ethical side of sales. And it’s understanding your job description and your job description is really one of being a professional mind to make her other people think no is the enemy of yes. Yet in the world of sales, indecision is the enemy not, no is people stuck in maybe. And if you can find ways of being able to actually move more of the right people who were stuck in, maybe choose you as opposed to somebody like you, or to choose you as opposed to choosing to do nothing. Then that’s where you get the ability to be able to fast track your success. So we are either decision catalysts or professional mind maker offers.
RV: (06:12)
I love that. I mean, that’s a total reframing of just what the enemy is and the real part part, you know, that reminds me of like, you know, so my first book take the stairs. People often ask, well, you know, which, which was overcoming the psychology of procrastination and helping people be disciplined in all areas of their life. And, and people said, what’s the connection of that between sales? Like, why do you have this company about the teacher’s sales training in your book is about helping people be more disciplined to take, because I said, well, it’s the same problem of inaction. It’s getting someone to take action. And in a sales conversation, I love that. It’s like, it’s not that they’ll tell you no, it’s that they won’t tell you anything. They won’t make a decision. They just, you live stuck in this world of maybe which takes a lot of pressure off of you as a sales person. I feel like, like, if, if, if, if knows the enemy, it feels like in order for me to win, I have to get them to say yes, but if they say no, then I lost and they won. But if indecision is the enemy, it’s like, we can both win.
PMJ: (07:16)
Right? And if you can help people make smart decisions that are mutually beneficial over the test of time, like people talk about great salespeople as being able to sell sand to Arabs or ice to Eskimos or any of these cliche sales sayings that have sat around for 30, 40, 50 years is that doesn’t wash in today’s as well. You sell somebody, something they don’t need that they already have in abundance. So they have no useful purpose for off to the transactions involved. And you, my friends are a crook, right? Like that, that is what exists there. What we’re looking to be able to do is to create mutually agreeable outcomes that go on to me, that your promise outperforms, the expectation that was delivered at the time, the promise was made yet still. We want them to choose you for that promise and not somebody else.
RV: (08:03)
So how do you, you know, like I think a lot of people that are listening, there’s a lot of technical training to sales. That’s, you know, we’ve spent a lot of time with teaching people. I mean, and that’s another reason why I love what you do is literally you teach people exactly what to say. There’s a, there’s an extraordinary sales as a technical skillset is a whole world of study. But I find that most of the people who struggle with sales, it’s more of the mental part that they can’t get their mind wrapped around. It’s like, I don’t want to be the slimy, whatever car sales man or, or pushy sales person. So how do we get our mind wrapped around this idea that in order for me to monetize my personal brand, I have to learn how to sell. Even though my initial response is like, eh, I don’t want to be a salesperson. Like, what’s the mental part of that
PMJ: (09:01)
When you’ve been around salespeople, that chunk right, is just type that, that stereotypical sales person I’m going to reverse the interview for a second. And I want you to throw some adjectives at me that would describe a stereotypical salesperson.
RV: (09:16)
Yeah. So pushy, manipulative, dishonest, disingenuous over promising over exaggerative like, I don’t know [inaudible], but if it is a word
PMJ: (09:31)
And we have to make out words to talk about made up people, right? So here we are. In that situation, you are seeing a very clear vivid image of somebody in your home. And everybody listening in is jumping to their version of that same name. What if I now ask you to read your mind and not those that describe a stereotypical salesperson, but instead attic teams that would be used to describe a professional sentence? What words would we got there?
RV: (09:57)
Well, it’s interesting, you know, if, if you took out, if you just said professional, like if you drop the salesperson, if you just said professional on purpose. Okay. So if I thought a professional salesperson, I don’t know. I mean, I, when I think of the word professional, I think of like educated, articulate, intelligent, you know, I think of like doctors, lawyers, CPAs, but, but I still, if you add Salesforce and I still think of like, you know, still a little bit overly persuasive, a little bit, it’s more just like sly and how they’re, you know, kind of influencing. But, but the word professional makes me think of an advisor of like like like I go to my doctor for answers because they’re an expert. That’s how I think of just the word professional by itself.
PMJ: (10:50)
Right. And I think even in that one example, I changed one word and you changed all the words you saw a different picture. When you thought about a professional sales person, first is a stereotypical salesperson. And that’s part of the starting point is we have to decide that we are not the devil like that has to be that we understand that that exists in a percentage of the way that people sell yet. That doesn’t have to be the way in which I’m going to do it now, often in my work, I love that.
RV: (11:21)
There’s only like just changing the way you’re thinking, like changing the way you define yourself to go. Like, yeah, some people are that way, but that’s not what I’m doing.
PMJ: (11:28)
Right. And love that. There’s a simple way of even being able to analyze this is people often ask me, you know, what’s the difference between manipulation and persuasion. Yeah. What’s the difference between the two that difference in my mind is easy. So integrity. Like one is with integrity and one is without integrity, right? That’s the missing dish that exists is you can persuade somebody with integrity and therefore your open to deal with the consequences of that persuasion, you are prepared to run the distance with what happens. The other side of that persuasion. If you manipulate somebody, then chances are that you’re not going to have the integrity to be able to deal with the consequences because you’re too busy now manipulating someone else. So if you have integrity in your actions, being persuasive is what people want in their life. What people want is people to help lead the change.
PMJ: (12:18)
You’ve got thousands of people to plug into your work that are passionate about leading the change. What I would say is if you’re not prepared to dive into the conversation with the lives of the people that you’re looking to help change, then you ain’t that passionate about it. Talk about it. But like, if you care about saving people from burning buildings, I don’t want to read your article about saving people from burning buildings is find a building that’s on fire and go get someone out of it. Right. And that would be my advice back to many professionals. I see in these times that we’ve lived through through 20, 20, early 20, 21 is people are claiming to be an expert on a thing yet their expertise could be remarkably helpful for the world that exists right now. And they’re not bringing that help to the world now being paid for that help. Isn’t a bad thing. It’s actually just the sign of the applause of a job. Well done. It’s another way of keeping score. If you’re good at what you do, people should value that. You’re good at that. Well, that do, to me that they’ll pay you more than the next guy or girl that’s doing that thing.
RV: (13:17)
Yeah. Well, and I, I mean, just that, that, that idea that you were talking about a moment ago hits me really hard, where it’s like, if you really want to take the money out of it, even if you go, if you really exist to solve a problem, you should never be afraid to pick up the phone and talk to somebody one-on-one about that problem. If you, what I heard you say is if you’re not willing to do that, then you’re not that passionate about reading the world of that problem. And you’re not that passionate about helping people that have that problem. That’s powerful.
PMJ: (13:51)
And it’s also true, right? And sometimes that’s all it is. Let’s just hold a mirror up on it. Now what you might find out is that you’re scared. You might find out that you’re lacking skills. You might find out that you’re so fricking confident in 85% of what it is that you do, but you’re missing the 15% over here, which is the skill, which means that all of a sudden, you’re like, I don’t want to come across embarrassed. And that’s what stands a lot of people back from being able to dive into meaningful conversations, because they’re fearful of the unknown, just like everybody is in any environment. Many people who’ve grown to be an expert in something wants to feel like they need to have that expertise in everything later, right? Rookie mode is the best place for us to go for growth here. I also think about a sales conversation though, is if you move it from being a I win or I lose, and instead define a series of levels of success, where level one is I show up and I give a good representation myself and my company level two is I managed to build rapport with this person, find some common interest level three years.
PMJ: (14:57)
I can create a genuine opportunity. I can now only judge my success or failure as if a genuine opportunity presents itself. So my job is to explore. Is there a possibility of a genuine opportunity in this phone call? Ah, I can show up for that as opposed to, can I sell my high ticket coaching program, right.
RV: (15:17)
So yeah, totally different. It’s totally different. And, and, and to me you go like, if you’re there to serve the person’s need, if they don’t have a need, you didn’t lose. If, if, if they had a need and your solution, wasn’t the right fit for them. You didn’t lose. If they had a need and your solution was the right fit and they needed to take action, but you couldn’t get them to take action because they were scared or they had reluctance. Then that’s a loss for both of you.
PMJ: (15:51)
Right. But it’s not happening to you, but you learn getting better from that through reps, not from, you know, thinking about it, worrying about and getting hung up about it, you know, getting up, having to go and then waking up the next morning and thinking, what should I have done differently? And then carrying that experience the next time.
RV: (16:09)
Well, yeah. Reps and education. I mean, that’s, that’s the thing, right? It’s like, once you get past the mental block here and you go, you do need professional sales training. Like you do need to learn this. This is a, a skill and it is an important skill. If you’re an entrepreneur or you’re a personal brand, or you’re a marketer like anybody who wants to build a business, like you have to learn to sell. And there is a skill set there that’s learnable. And if you get like, once you get past that mental block, you go, okay, great. Like I need to get, I need to get some of Phil’s books. I need to go through some brand builders training. I need to go to any anybody else who teaches sales and go teach me what to do. And then you, you just deal with it and you learn it like anything else.
PMJ: (16:53)
Right? And if you learn that you’re developing a skill set to help people make smarter decisions, as opposed to I’m learning a skill skillset to help sell my thing. It shifts the intent. And now all of a sudden, the decision for you to, to work towards mastery in this era of salesmanship, isn’t that your working towards mastery in something that is working for the enemy,
RV: (17:20)
A men. Okay. Love this. So now question for you at the intersection of both building a personal brand and your expertise around sales. So you do a lot of speaking too, right? So like when you sell yourself as a speaker specifically, I’m talking about speaking, do you think that is more of a marketing function or is that more of a sales function to get, to get speaking gigs?
PMJ: (17:58)
And in terms of getting speaking gigs, there were really only two areas that generate speaking gigs more than anything else. One is I’ve seen you speak and I’d like you to speak at my event. The other is somebody has seen you speak and think that you might be a good fit for them, right? Those two things trigger more success in the speaking world than any other thing. Even if that somebody is a Bureau agent or that somebody is, you know, somebody referring you in from elsewhere, the influence of other people’s perspective, the things that you can do from a marketing point of view, to create more of those conversations without you being present the crate, I saw you, I heard you, I listened to you a bull. Like any of those moments that say you might be the fit are all marketing activities that I would have classed as pegs in the board. There are two things to focus on as well though, that when we come to creating speaking opportunities, because not only do you want the speaking opportunities, so you want somebody to have an idea on how valuable you are as a speaker.
RV: (19:02)
Yeah. That’s a whole different conversation. Yeah.
PMJ: (19:08)
150 gigs at one pay a dime, right? Like that’s not necessarily what people are looking for, or do you want high fee paid speaking gigs? If you want high fee paying, speaking gigs or high revenue opportunity platforms to be on to then speak to those, you need pegs in the board. What are the pegs in the bullet that you need that different for different people, but you need a quantity of quality picked in the board. Best selling book might be one of that. You’re known by a lot of people. You have heavy reach on social. You’re seen as a trusted expert by an accredited group full of people. You’ve got reps and experience that mean that you are a trusted provider of these services where the huge rich history of high levels of performance, like these roles in marketing activities that needs to be done.
PMJ: (19:52)
So even getting into the game where the sales part comes into play in a speaking point of view, his final mile, and probably not even final mile or final 10 meters of final mile. And this is the part that I now do the most work on is say that if I’m in the shortlist of two, three, four, five, what do I do to mean that I went in that short list and unfair number of times, and the things that I can do to do that is one provide sales tools that deliver levels of certainty to my customer. And those would be examples like how do I prove that I’m easy to do business with, through the wind, the bid calls, some of that is providing resources. Some of that is just having a support staff that are easy to do business with. Some of it is sending a LinkedIn connection request to everybody.
PMJ: (20:50)
Who’s going to be on the pre event planning. Cool. Before I get to the pre event planning call saying that I’ve done some research, right? These are all things that showcase and I might be different to others. The next part is the conversation itself and the conversation itself when you’ve got an opportunity to win a speaking gig, is that I do believe that nobody can sell you better than yourself. I have an agent, I have bureaus that rep me, et cetera. And I think they’re great for positioning and also great for positioning of fee. But for final mile decision, they’re looking to employ your services. So they want to get an experience of you and what you’re about, and not necessarily your content, but your content plus their circumstances and how you might join those two things together. So here is almost a structured exactly what to say formula for speaking inquiry. Oh
RV: (21:47)
Yeah. Brilliant.
PMJ: (21:49)
So is speaking inquiry comes in, what two things do they use? Typically, every inquiry ask if you, one is, are you available date? And two is, yeah. So how do you respond to that? Well, most people respond with yes. And what’s your budget, right? Which just leaves them into this dark hole of despair, or they blindly shoot a rate card across, across the fingers. Here’s my play by play alternative. Firstly, I’m going to check the date and I’ll check the day and I’ll say, good news is the dates available enough place to hold on our calendar. Right? So there’s a date, things switched down and I’ve also given some level of intent that I’m taking their interest as intent. And my next question is the killer question, which is what is it about me and my work that makes you think I might be a good fit for your event, zip it, and they’ll watch them sell you. Well, we had Rory Vaden last year. He crushed it. I asked him somebody who could build on our ideas that might be out, it’d be a good fit. And he said that you would be his number one pick. I will just happen to my confidence if that’s the thing they say next, or they say love is browsing Google. When we looked at a hundred videos and yours was one of the top three, like, what am I doing? I’m earning context.
PMJ: (23:15)
And that context is valuable to me for two reasons. One is now I can start to see the world through their eyes. Two is my confidence is growing because of the fact that I can see the world through their eyes, all in one question, listening, and then building on the answer that comes next. I still need to position fee. Here’s how you position a valuable fee is you create a problem that is bigger than your price.
RV: (23:38)
And right there, I’m going to pause the interview and say, if you don’t think you’ve got something to learn from Phil M Jones, at this point, you probably are realizing that you do and the power of why we had him on this show. Like, I mean that question, what is it about me and my work that makes you think I’d be a great fit for your event? Main, this is the kind of tactical stuff that he does all day, every day, not just for selling keynotes, but for selling consulting for selling coaching. So your high dollar course, like whatever it is. So Phil, where do people need to go? If they want to find you and follow you and learn more about exactly what they need to say.
PMJ: (24:22)
Well, the first thing I’d point [email protected]. I’d like you to see that we’re a product of the product of putting pegs in the board of proving that we’ve got reps behind everything that has to do with the personal brand. So it comes to the website. I have a nose around and see what you can learn from just seeing how we set our stall out. If you want to connect further, you’ll find links to all the social channels. You’ll find contact forms. If you want to buy books and you cannot find my book exactly what to say, that’s my problem, not yours. So tell me where you couldn’t find it. Then that’s an issue I need to address. But wherever you look to buy your books, you should be able to find mine pretty straightforward.
RV: (24:57)
I love it. Well, we will, of course, link to Phil M jones.com. The direct places you can buy the book and feel social on the show notes and on at brand builders, group.com in our podcast area. Of course, bill, brother, this is awesome. We’re aligned. I love what you’re talking about. And I just thank you for being here and we wish you the best,
PMJ: (25:20)
Absolute pleasure, my friend, and yeah. Good luck on the show. And maybe we’ll pick up the other side of that conversation at some point in the future. We’ll just tease it out there forever.
RV: (25:29)
I like it. I think we can have a few more chats about this. All right. All the best. See you soon.