Speakers And Seminar Marketers
“Spill The Beans”

Pamela:  This is Pamela Yellen and I’m the CEO of the Prospecting And Marketing Institute, Inc.  I’m a speaker, trainer and consultant, specializing in working with financial services professionals and dry cleaners.  And I’ve been doing this for about nine years. 

I’ve experienced a lot of increased income and revenues as a result of using Dan Kennedy’s ideas, especially in four key areas.  I’d say one would be in the area of increased product sales, back of the room and otherwise.  Secondly, being able to cut back on my days on the road by actually about 80 percent.  I do just a few of the dates that I used to do several years ago, but I’ve actually managed to increase my income at the same time significantly. 

In addition, I’ve learned a lot from Dan about how to offer high-priced seminars and boot camps to my clients and to hold them wherever in the world I want to, instead of having to travel somewhere to do it.  And also, being able to create my own speaking dates, rather than competing for the dates that other people, other speakers are competing for.  And now, I would say 99 percent of all my speaking dates are ones that I’ve created myself.

So I’m 100 percent sold on Dan’s ability to be able to help people like myself in the speaking, training, consulting, etc., business. 

On this tape, I’m going to be interviewing by telephone a number of different speakers and experts in various fields who’ll share with you how they have grown their business by using Dan’s strategies and expertise.

My first interview is with Ron LeGran.  Ron is the founder and major shareholder of a now publicly-held company that’s focused on using Dan’s techniques to find and keep customers, and they operate throughout all of North America.

In addition, Ron is considered the country’s leading expert on making money in real estate by buying and selling houses.  And he has done that with more than 1,300 houses as of right now.  Ron, welcome.  Welcome, and thank you for giving us some time this afternoon.

Ron:  My pleasure, Pamela.

Pamela:  Is there anything else that you think would be helpful for the listeners of this tape to know about your business and how it’s evolved and how some of Dan’s strategies have been helpful for you?

Ron:  Well, I, like you, started a few years ago just trying to teach people what I had learned.  My speaking career also spans North America and Canada.  And I’m out quite a bit speaking and I, like you, also get to choose where I go nowadays because of learning the business and learning how to get people to come to you and not you have to go to them and do things their way. 

Frankly, I’ve been in it now probably, I think, 10 or 11 years.  Dan’s become a pretty important part of my life.

Pamela:  What are some of the ways in which you’ve used Dan’s expertise?

Ron:  Well, I started out using him to just basically teach us marketing.  I’ve learned so much from him over the years, it’s just an education that’s invaluable.  It’s created millions and millions of dollars worth of revenue for us.  I guess maybe I met him eight or nine years ago, when we asked him to do some copywriting for us.  He did that and that worked out well.  Then I asked him to do our first infomercial for us.  Gosh, I can’t even remember what year it was.  A lead-generator thing.  And that worked out really well, as well.  And over the years, he’s done a lot for us.  In fact, I’m a Platinum member and I go out three, four times a year to sit around the table with some of his other Platinum members just to be able to sit in that group to learn from him and the others that he’s taught.  It’s been a valuable resource.

Pamela:  What do you think you’ve learned from Dan about copywriting and marketing that would be different from how you see the way most speakers tend to market themselves and the kind of copy that you see them writing?

Ron:  Just one thing – it works.  Dan taught me how to get people to take action and spend money, not just write stuff that looks like it ought to work but doesn’t.  Plus, I’ll be the first to tell you, over the years, I’ve wasted an awful lot of money experimenting with stupid stuff that didn’t have a chance of working because I violated the basic fundamentals that I picked up from Dan.

Marketing is marketing.  Sure, it’s always changing.  But still, the basics are always the same.  And if you go out there and you don’t even have the basics, you don’t stand a prayer of ever succeeding.  Dan is to me as to what I am to my students.  I’m the guru in real estate.  As far as I’m concerned, he’s the guru in marketing.  It’s just so foolish to go out and try to learn this stuff on your own, when somebody’s willing to teach it to you for peanuts.  I just can’t believe why somebody’d want to spend years in the school of hard knocks doing it the hard way.

Pamela:  Exactly.  And then you have all the testing, the cost of testing various marketing pieces and marketing strategies, and maybe trying to tweak them a little bit here and there.

Ron:  And most people will never survive the tests.  They’ll quit and do something else.

Pamela:  Exactly.  It’s probably the biggest reason why most people who don’t survive in this business leave the business.  And it’s also probably the reason why a lot of the people in this business are plateaued at where they’ve been income-wise and revenue-wise for years.

Ron:  That is correct.  Compare it to the cost of the education, compare it to ignorance.  The cost of education is always… ignorance is always higher.  To try to learn marketing on your own is like trying to push a rope uphill with your nose.  It just doesn’t make any sense.  And your chance of failure is much greater than your chance of success if you just don’t learn the system.

Pamela:  Absolutely.

Ron:  Can you imagine going out and opening a McDonald’s without going to hamburger school first?  You won’t last long.

Pamela:  Now, what about direct mail?  You use a lot of Dan’s direct mail concepts, as well as what he teaches you about copywriting for direct mail.  What are you promoting via direct mail?

Ron:  We promote just about everything we do by direct mail, from an inexpensive lead-in course to free previews, to workshops, to our high-priced boot camps that we do on the backend.  Direct mail is a part of everything we do.  In fact, Dan is the guy that taught me lead generating.  And I fought him on that for several years.  Who wanted to take the time to go generate leads, do all that work.  Why don’t we just go sell them direct?  The only problem was there just wasn’t any foreplay there.  It took me about five years to think of that and I don’t know how many hundreds of thousands of dollars.  But lead generating is almost always cheaper.

Pamela:  So now, when you use lead generating to get people to raise their hand and say, “Hey Ron, I’m interested in what you have to offer, tell me more,” what do you see to be the primary differences in results?

Ron:  The cost of getting the customer.

Pamela:  Okay.

Ron:  The failure rate is so much higher when you’re not talking to people, when you’re not preaching to that starving crowd.  It just costs so much more, in most cases. 

Now, there are some times when that’s not true.  But I’ve just found it so much cheaper to go generate leads and deal with folks who want the information, instead of trying to make unmotivated people motivated.

Pamela:  And have you seen a difference in your closing ratio, too?

Ron:  Oh, absolutely.  The biggest difference is in the cost of marketing overall. 

Pamela:  Okay.  What about you mentioned high-priced seminars.  What are you currently charging?  What kind of high-priced seminars do you have?  How long are they?  What do you charge for them?

Ron:  I have a three-day boot camp that we charge $2,500 for and a five-day boot camp we charge $5,000 for.  And I do several events focused on teaching people the business of buying and selling real estate, so they can do it the right way and knock about 10, 15 years off their learning curve.  And we’ve pretty much got that whole industry covered with any training that anybody would want.  And that takes a cycle of events over a period of a year or so.  You go learn, you come back, put it in force, you learn, you learn some more.  It’s just like marketing.  You learn a piece of it at a time, instead of trying to eat the elephant, one bite at a time. 

Like marketing, the good news is you get to earn while you learn.

Pamela:  Very true.  As far as these seminars that you’re charging $2,500 and $5,000 for, what’s a typical attendance at those seminars?

Ron:  The three-day events have about between 100 and 200 in them.  And the five-day events usually cap out about 200.

Pamela:  I’m bad at doing math in my head, but I know you’re making a lot of money in three and five days doing that.  I would suspect that at the same time, you probably are doing some pretty significant product sales in those seminars?

Ron:  Oh, absolutely.  Pamela, I would never take the stage without some kind of a product sale going on.  Some people take objection to that.  Personally, I don’t care. 

Pamela:  Right.

Ron:  But as far as I’m concerned, when you know the product you’re offering is of top quality and will serve the people buying it well and it will make them a lot more money than it costs if they use it, frankly, not to offer it to them would be a sin, as far as I’m concerned.

Pamela:  Exactly.

Ron:  Who would want to go to learn something that excites them and not have the information available to them or the follow-up support to make them succeed in that?  What are franchises all about in this country?  They have the system in place.  And I do the same.

Pamela:  Well, if you don’t mind giving us a ballpark figure in terms of what you might typically do in terms of product sales at one of these three- or five-day events, above and beyond the fees that people are paying for them, what would that come to?

Ron:  Well, first of all, I need to point out that I don’t get a dime from this.  I’m just a lowly paid salaried employee at SDI.

Pamela:  Okay.  So what does your company take in?

Ron:  I don’t really know, Pamela.  It depends on the size and type of event and how far down the funnel they are in the system.  Obviously, the more they come to our events, the more they know the power of them and the more money they make, and the less it matters how much they spend.  But gosh, the sales per head at an event like that could typically run anywhere from a couple hundred dollars a head to $600 or $800 a head.

Pamela:  Well, that’s terrific.  I’ve worked for years, frankly, trying to get my back of the room sales figures up.  And I’m now running around $100 a head, I understand is fairly high for the industry in general.  But obviously, you’ve beat that many times over.

Ron:  You have to know that I’ve got several high-priced events.  And sometimes, if you’re selling them as a package, it’s not hard to get that dollars per head up.  You also need to know that spouses are invited free to my event.  So please don’t sit there and multiply 200 times 5,000 because it won’t work out right mathematically.  And also, my folks are invited to come back free for a whole year, anytime they want, to that same event.  So there’s a lot of repeat in there, too.

Pamela:  Great.  One thing that Dan says that I really took to heart and which I think goes against the grain of what many speakers think, is that you’re doing a great job if you get a standing ovation at the end or everyone comes up to you and tells you what a terrific job you did and how you’ve changed their life and you’ve touched them.  But Dan says, and I totally now agree with this and I bet you do, too, that the real test of how well the audience received you and what kind of impact you made on them was how willing they become to reach into their own pockets and buy more of the materials that you have to offer, so they can get better at what they’re doing.

Ron:  I couldn’t agree with that more.  They can be applauding on their way back to the table.  And it’s a good feeling to know that your services are really needed out there.  And obviously, I get a lot of accolades for that, because we’re making millionaires around the country and what we teach works.  And frankly, if that’s not the case with what you’re selling, you probably ought to be thinking about something else.

Pamela:  Absolutely.  And if you really believe in what you’re doing and the products and services you’ve developed for your markets, and you’re not promoting them aggressively, you really are doing a disservice.  You called it a sin, and that would be pretty accurate.

Well, Ron, is there anything else you might tell people who – I’m sure there’s a lot of people out there – they’ve heard about Dan.  Maybe they get his long sales letters in the mail all the time, going, “What is this crazy guy up to?”  And they’re considering maybe coming to one of his speaker boot camps or getting a program of his, but they’re still skeptical.  Is there anything, any advice you’d give them?

Ron:  Pamela, I don’t even know what he charges for his boot camp anymore.  And frankly, I don’t really care.  I could spend several thousand dollars a year with Dan, fly clear across the country, and I don’t have to do that.  I even take my staff with me.  And there’s a reason for that.  Because in the long run, it’s a very inexpensive expenditure.  In fact, it costs so much more not to take action.  And if I wanted to learn the speaking business or the direct marketing business or the direct media business, I would go to Dan Kennedy.  Like I said, he’s the guy as far as I’m concerned.  You want to learn how to buy and sell a house, you come to me.  You want to learn how to get people to respond in any aspect of marketing, he’s the guy.  I don’t care what he charges.  It don’t matter.  Compared to what you’re going to make off it, it’s irrelevant. 

Pamela:  I totally agree with that.  I really do appreciate your taking the time this afternoon and I thank you.

Ron:  Well, it’s been my pleasure.  It’s always fun to talk about making more money, and I’m certainly glad to do anything I can to send anybody who’s interested to Dan, because I know he’s going to be a benefit in their life.

Pamela:  Thanks.  I’m speaking now with Lee Milteer.  Lee’s been a speaker since 1980 and has spoken throughout all of North America and Europe.  She’s president of Lee Milteer Associates, which focuses on career development strategies. 

She has been retained repeatedly by some major, major corporations, including Disney, AT&T, Xerox, IBM, Ford Motor, Federal Express, some incredible credentials.  She shared the platform with everyone from Zig Ziglar to Norman Vincent Peale, to Steven Covey. 

And she has a best selling audio and video tape.  A couple best selling audio and video tapes that are endorsed by companies such as Nightingale-Conant.  She’s the author of three books.  Her video seminars are distributed through the Mind Extension Universe Network, which reaches 350 of the top Fortune 500 companies and major universities.

She’s been a regular guest on TV and radio shows, including Sally Jessy Rafael, Montel Williams, etc.  These are some pretty impressive credentials, I guess.  Why would a person with those incredible credentials need someone like Dan Kennedy to help them?

Lee:  I’m glad you asked.  I went into business in 1980 and promptly starved for several years.  I happened to hear about Dan Kennedy through another member of the National Speakers Association.  I borrowed some money, went to Phoenix, Arizona to the first National Speakers Association meeting, and went to Dan Kennedy’s seminar for speakers.  He had, at the back of the room, asked anyone who wanted to meet with him to sign up and I did.  My meeting with him truly not only saved my career, but changed my life in the sense of even though I got a lot out of the NSA and I enjoyed it, dealing with Dan gave me more specific usable things with my personality, my talent and my background that I could actually use to market myself. 

Frankly, had it not been for that meeting with him and consulting with him, 18 years later, I really don’t think I would have made it in the business because I really didn’t know what I was getting into in the beginning, as all of us can attest to.

Pamela:  What are some of those meaty, specific things that Dan helped you implement that were so right for you with your personality and your strengths?

Lee:  Well, first, he really encouraged me to use my own personality and strengths and experience and stories versus probably the habit that every speaker has had, which is emulating Zig Ziglar or someone else famous. 

Pamela:  Right.

Lee:  He proved to me how important it was that my own experience was valuable to other people.  I think some of the things that Dan has given me as nuggets of gold is the fact that if I didn’t create product, I was not going to make it in the business.  That it was really nice to give a great speech and that the true goal was to help people, that the product had to be there as a reinforcement. 

I don’t mind telling you, he probably had to nag me for several years before I actually had the courage to do it.  It was a very scary thing, putting something on tape or putting something on paper.  It’s like who am I to do this?

But Dan was very encouraging, supportive and very specific on “Here are the things that you have to do.”  I guess one of the greatest things that I can contribute to Dan is him proving to me that just giving a great speech would not automatically sell products.  You also have to be very skilled at your presentation in presenting those reinforcement materials to your audiences.

Pamela:  So you got some very specific ideas from him on how to structure your sales presentation, back-of-the-room sales presentation, to get some decent sales out of that?

Lee:  Absolutely.  He would listen to some of my presentations and probably after rolling around on the floor and dying at the time, would then give me – for me – very specific things.  “Okay, you can say this, you can do that, you can present it this way.  Here’s how you can use overheads.”

So looking back on that, these are very basic things.  But certainly 15, 16 years ago, they were all new to me.

Pamela:  Right.  Right.  There’s still a lot of speakers in the Association who either do fairly poor in the area of product sales or virtually nothing in the area of product sales, either because they haven’t created the products and/or they don’t know how to sell them from the platform.  And frankly, they end up working themselves to death that way.  Between the travel and everything else, if you can’t maximize the back-of-the-room sales, you’re really not going to have a long-term retirement-type situation with this without killing yourself.

Lee:  Well, Dan did teach me that passive income was a very good thing.  And that I needed to have a goal of how much passive income would be coming in every year.  Before I met Dan, I had absolutely no passive income.  And now, I can honestly say that over half of my income today is passive income. 

Pamela:  That’s terrific.

Lee:  It’s left me in a very good place in my life.  I don’t have to now take speaking engagements that are going to kill me or I don’t want to take.  I have built up books and tapes and videos that continue to work for me, even when I’m doing nothing.

Pamela:  Right.  Right.  A lot of the speakers I’ve talked to probably do about 10 percent of their business as passive income and 90 percent is what they do out there on the road.  Obviously, this gives you time to have a home life and have a life, period.

Lee:  Also, because I have a background in radio and television, he helped me specifically to be able to market, on radio and television, my products.  Doing radio shows and giving 800 numbers out. 

For instance, I did a big national show in Canada for three years.  And it was him that pushed me to negotiate with those people that I get free interviews to promote my own product with my own 800 number.  And it has to be very specific.  In my first six-cassette album, which was called “Coping With Change:  Life Strategies For The ‘90’s,” which was done in the beginning of the 90’s, I had just completed it.  I went to Canada, I was on the show.  I was on the Deany Petty Show for one hour.  I had five minutes left.  I was on the show to literally promote a seminar I was doing in Canada and she never set me up for it.

So here I am, the clock is ticking, and I’m sweating that she’s not in any way setting me up for this.  And suddenly, I just reached down, picked up that six-cassette album and gave a three-minute blurb about it and my own 800 number.  I just had the courage to do that.  And we made $100,000 from that show.

Now, let me tell you how amazing that was, because we had one line in Toronto.  It didn’t even have call-forward or call-waiting or any of that.  If the line was busy, people had to call back.  So that is a pretty amazing thing.

Pamela:  That is.  That’s astonishing.

Lee:  It really was, because Dan had encouraged me.  “You have to have the courage to go out and do what you believe in.” 

So I can honestly say if it weren’t for Dan Kennedy, I wouldn’t have been successful in this business in the way that I feel I am today.  He is a brilliant man.  Again, let me say that his information is usable.  It’s not airy-fairy, “That’s for somebody else.”  He really has always tailored his information to my specific personality, talents and abilities, which I totally appreciate.

Pamela:  Absolutely.  I think that’s really key, because I’ve done a lot of consulting with people who really have only one way of doing things.  And if you don’t do it their way or you don’t like it their way or it doesn’t fit for you, they have no other suggestions.  I’ve always found Dan to be very flexible in that regard, too.

You, like me, used to travel over 100 different cities a year.  How is that different for you now?

Lee:  Thank God!  I actually was a subcontractor with Career Track back in the 80’s and I did well over 100 cities a year.  And frankly, for the six straight years I did that, I had no life.  No personal life.  It really took a toll on me.  And Dan, at the time, was very encouraging to me to do this, to establish myself, to get the experience, to make a name for myself.

But then, as I consulted with him through the years, then he started saying, “Okay, you have those credentials.  You’ve done that.  Now you need to go be charging a lot more money, work a lot less days for a lot more income.”

Pamela:  Was he able to help you make that transition fairly quickly?

Lee:  Yes, very much so.  Because he helped me do marketing letters that we would send out to clients.  He specifically helped me on follow-up techniques, things to get my staff to say.  You know, a lot of important things like verbiage.  If they say this, you say that.  If this is a particular problem this is how you get around that problem.  Particularly the problem, because right now I work in the corporate world.  As you and everyone else knows, there have been people who have totally abused their privileges of selling product in the back of the room, which has sort of messed it up for many of us. 

So a lot of times, as soon as we go into negotiations with a big corporate client, what happens is they’re immediately saying, “We don’t want you to sell in the back of the room.”  And Dan has been very good at helping me how to get around that, how to negotiate with that, how to offer them things that would make it more attractive for them to see the benefits of me offering reinforcement materials to the information that I am sharing with their group.

Pamela:  Let me ask you this, as just my way of summing things up here.  What advice would you give someone who has maybe heard about Dan, been aware of him, maybe gotten some letters from him in the mail, and they’ve been reluctant to bite the bullet and go to one of his boot camps or get involved with some of his marketing ideas?  What advice would you give to them?

Lee:  My advice would be that it just is an intelligent move to go to someone who is established in a field that you want to be in, to learn from their expertise.  I know that whatever money over the years that I have invested in Dan’s advice has paid for itself hundreds of times over, hundreds of times over, that in the beginning of my career, wondering around, spending a lot of money on things that weren’t productive for me or creating income for me.  Going to someone like Dan who truly knows his stuff, probably more than any other professional speaker I have ever met in the 18 years that I have been in this business – and I do feel very fortunate that I have worked with some really powerful, successful people.

Dan’s advice to me has just hit bulls-eye.  It’s been on target.  It’s been right.  And not only is he bright, he has such a great sense of humor that you enjoy learning.

Pamela:  Yes, that’s true. 

Lee:  He has this wonderful, crazy outlook on life that just makes you… it also puts things into perspective about your career.  He puts things into perspective such as, “You can’t win them all.  But you have a niche and you need to promote yourself in that particular niche.  And it’s okay if the other guy wins once in a while.  Don’t even take it personally.”

Pamela:  Right.

Lee:  He’s just down to earth.  I know he’s going to hear this.  I really think Dan Kennedy is brilliant.

Pamela:  I totally agree.  And not just in theory, but in practice.  That’s the difference.

Lee:  Absolutely.  I invite anyone who has any qualms about him whatsoever, to call me.  I’m in Virginia Beach, Virginia.  I’m Lee Milteer.  I’m in the book.  I’m totally willing to tell them, in detail, just the great success I feel like I have enjoyed.  And he also believed in me, and that was a very important thing.  When you’re very insecure, have someone who is clearly brilliant believe that you have talent, that makes a big deal.

Pamela:  Well Lee, I know you are a very busy woman and I really appreciate your taking time out to talk with us today.

Lee:  My pleasure.

Pamela:  I thank you so much for that.

I’m now speaking with Bill Brooks, who is the CEO of The Brooks Group.  He is a leading developer and provider of sophisticated sales training programs to corporations of all types and sizes.  Bill’s a former successful football coach and has served as the CEO of a $ 300-million organization with over 4,000 sales representatives.  And in his 18-or-so years in the speaking business, he has given more than 2,500 speeches and seminars to companies, including General Motors, Hewlett Packard, Home Depot, etc.  He has five books that he’s written, including You’re Working Too Hard To Make The Sale and he is a founding member of the Board of Directors of the Psycho-Cybernetics Foundation.

Welcome, Bill, and thank you for sharing a few minutes of your time with us today. 

Bill:  Thank you for inviting me, Pamela.  And hopefully I can give you some insight or at least answer some questions you might have.

Pamela:  Yeah.  I’d be curious to know when you first started working with Dan Kennedy and if you can point to maybe two or three specific areas in which Dan has been particularly helpful in helping you build your speaking business and anything that you would think is related to the growth of your speaking business and revenues.

Bill:  Well, when I think of Dan and some of the work that I’ve done with him over the years, and it started many, many years ago, I think of two things.  I think of understanding the role that product can play in your business and the various ways that marketing strategies are key to your success.

I think there’s a big difference between selling your services and marketing your services.  And what happens is, traditionally, if you look at marketing, people who talk about it are used to having deep pockets and they talk about it with some abstraction. 

Dan has the capacity to help you take whatever limited budget you have, and through direct response mechanism and direct marketing activities maximize your return, minimize your investment, and allow you to test and make sure you’re going in the right direction.

Pamela:  So you think if someone’s thinking they’ve got to have a lot of capital to be able to even do this type of marketing, that that’s not true.

Bill:  It’s absolutely not true.  Particularly today, when it’s grown into things like technology with faxes and e-mails and all the other issues that relate to the way, you can do it much less expensively than you ever could in the past anyway.

So I think that telling you that you need to measure your response and find out if you spend a nickel if you get a dime or if you spend a nickel and get nothing is a major thing that Dan has helped me with.

The other things, specifically, are suggestions on products and how to bundle the products so that you get more than what you would normally get, give great value to the client, but bundle them intelligently.

Perhaps the thing that’s been most advantageous for us are what we call our “RX Audio Prescriptions.”  Dan and I were talking about this at lunch one day, and we have our own series of assessments.  Well, he came up with the concept of us actually writing mini seminars that related specifically to areas that we measure.  And since he helped me with that idea, we’ve got about 63 different mini seminars based upon what we measure.  And we prescribe these down to each individual participant.  And we’ve even gone so far as to have our people who do all of our production privately label these audio cassettes with the attendee’s name on it. 

So what happens is it becomes a totally personalized learning experience.  Dan was the one that helped us with that concept originally, and we’ve obviously expanded it.  But the seed of it came from his idea. 

So when I think of Dan, I think of the product extension, product possibilities, and real bottom-line, measurable, cost -effective advertising and direct response methods to help you grow your business.

Pamela:  Well, I think you brought up two very important points.  One was about everything that Dan teaches is all about measurable direct response marketing.  And I know from all of the NSA meetings I’ve gone to and all the speakers I’ve talked to, that many of them do quite a bit of marketing where they really can’t directly measure response.

Bill:  Not only do they find themselves in a position where they can’t measure it, the only thing they can measure are the vast amount of dollars they pay for some sort of image that nobody sees anyway.

I’ll give you an interesting thing.  I do an article weekly in a professional magazine.  It comes out every week.  What I do is make a free offer, fax offer, fax back.  I get between five and eight leads a week from this one particular thing.  And I’m thinking, “How many people are paying to advertise in this magazine or this newspaper and they’re not asking anybody to do anything anyway.”

Pamela:  Right.  Most ads that speakers run have no call to action whatsoever.  So there is no way to measure.

Bill:  There is no way to measure.  And here I am, being paid to write the article and I’m getting leads.

Pamela:  Exactly.

Bill:  And here are people who are paying them to go in there with no response mechanism whatsoever for all kinds of products.  The only people that make any money on that are the people that place it and somebody who writes it.  Other than that, the person who pays for it does nothing but keep paying.

Pamela:  Right.  And that’s something I’ve learned from Dan, too, that if you know how to use direct response marketing, you can do something such as write an article, where you’re not paying or even possibly getting paid to write that article and turn that into a lead generator for you.  A measurable lead generator.

Bill:  The other thing, too, that has been very influential for me, 62 percent of our revenue in our company comes from product sales – yet less than five percent of that comes from back-of-the-room sales. 

So we have learned how to sell it in other different ways, bundling it, prepackaging it, using it as a reinforcement, using it as measurement tools, using it for assessment.  And what happens is by thinking and learning about the flexibility of thought, that’s one of the things I think most characterizes Dan, he’s got tremendous flexibility of thought and he’s able to articulate those thoughts in such a way that you can relate them to what it is that you do. 

And one of the things about Dan, I’ve always said this, he’s very straightforward.  Don’t expect a lot of sugar-coating and don’t expect a lot of philosophical treatise or those kinds of things.  Expect some bottom-line, result-oriented, revenue-producing ideas that help you become more productive if you’re willing to implement them.  And that’s what he’s all about.

Pamela:  Absolutely.  One thing I was thinking of just from my own experience, tagging onto something you just said, you talked about that 62 percent of your revenue is from product sales, but only – what’d you say – 10 percent of that is from back-of-the-room?  How much?

Bill:  A very small percentage.  Dan, for a long time, tried to convince me how to do it and all these kinds of things.  And for me, it was well-taken.  But I just don’t really like to do that.  I prefer to pre-sell it.  And the nature of the business of our business is that we do work a lot with corporate entities.  Individuals don’t like to buy that.  And I know that the corporate entities don’t have credit cards that aren’t approved and don’t have checks that bounce.

Pamela:  That’s true.

Bill:  And I don’t have returns after someone’s duped tapes or videos.

Pamela:  Right.

Bill:  What I try to do is I try to…  I’d rather sell something to someone who can make a decision for 400 people than try to sell 400 people. 

Pamela:  Exactly.

Bill:  It’s more cost-effective that way.

Pamela:  And this means that your income is tied, to a less and less extent, to how much time you’re spending on the road.

Bill:  Absolutely.

Pamela:  In my own case, through what I learned from Dan, I went from probably 10 percent of my income being from product sales to over 90 percent.  And like you, I would say that only about five to 10 percent of that is back-of-the-room sales.  So it’s all through direct marketing strategies that Dan has taught you and I to be able to market these programs that I previously thought could only be marketed back of the room, charge a lot of money for them, and never have to leave my office.

Bill:  And it makes all the difference in the world.  Because then what you’ve got is you’ve got some equity.  Without that, you don’t have anything.  You’ve got a wagging tongue. 

Pamela:  Absolutely.  One other thing you mentioned is about intelligently bundling your products to be able to charge more.  Would you be able to say how you’ve been able to increase the price of your product by not just sticking a bunch of stuff together, but putting it together and presenting it in such a way that it has so much perceived value that people don’t mind spending a lot of money for this package.  Could you give us some idea about that?

Bill:  Sure.  The way that we do that is we bundle the packages inside of a process that we have actually trademarked.  And that process then has each of the products comfortably seated or fit somewhere inside of each step of that process.  So what we’re showing is that each sequence of the products takes them through another step of the process to get them to the final outcome that they want to achieve. 

So consequently, they can’t exclude any particular piece of the product because that means they miss that step of the process.  So by integrating them all together, what we’re able to do is say this is the world’s only, one-of-a-kind, unique, trademarked process, inside of which we have a whole series of selections.  We actually allow them to make the selections. 

In one phase of the process, we’ve got nine different products.  So what happens is they can pick and choose inside of that which ones are ones they want.

Pamela:  I see.  And this has allowed you to increase your price point by an average of what percent, would you say?

Bill:  I can tell you what it is.  Our mark-up, our average mark-up on any particular product, is somewhere between eight and 10 times.  So what that means is if it costs us $8, we’ll sell it for $90 to $100.  So what it’s done is it allows us to really maximize our margins.  And around here at our place, and perhaps even at NSA, I’m known as Mr. Margin.  Because it’s gross margin that gives you net margin. 

Pamela:  Right.  Absolutely.  Well, let me ask you this.  When I first started hearing about Dan and started getting mailings from him, probably because I was a member of NSA, I thought he personally sends out these crazy letters and they’re long, there’s lots of print on them, they’re on funky paper.  And my first thought was this guy is just some kind of crazy maverick.  I ignored him for years.  And finally, one time he sent me a letter that just really grabbed me.  And I thought, “Okay, I’m going to see what this guy is about.”  And part of me was saying, “I’m going to prove once and for all that he’s really a fraud to myself, so I don’t have to pay any attention to it.”

I got one of his programs, I did some consulting with him, and I very quickly proved myself wrong, that basically everything he was teaching me was far more effective than what I was doing.  And I’m sure there’s other people out there that are skeptical like me, and maybe think Dan’s – I don’t know – out there.

Bill:  Here’s what I think it is, Pamela.  I think it’s a function of two or three things.  At the risk of attacking some of my colleagues, here’s what I’m going to say.  At least particularly within the speaking industry and NSA as well, lots of people fall prey to the concept of style over substance.  And the truth of the matter is speaking is style.  But Dan’s material has great substance to it.  And what you have to be able to do is to say, “Okay, of the material that I see, what is most appropriate to me, and don’t let me prejudge the style.  Let me look at the substance.”

Pamela:  That’s a great point.

Bill:  Now, here’s the other secondary point that causes a problem.  Within the speaking industry – and again, NSA – what happens is if someone is a marketing/sales kind of person, it’s almost like this is a person that I don’t trust.  Because you do it for the purest of reasons.  And the way you do it is you deliver your message to help the masses. 

Well, the truth is no matter how good your message is, if you’re not able to market or sell it, it doesn’t make any difference because nobody’s going to hear it.  So consequently, you put those two factors together and then there’s a certain amount of pre-judging.  Then on top of that, I personally believe that Dan works very hard at creating a contrarian point of view.  And sometimes, that’s misinterpreted as being abrasive or crass or even worse. 

So consequently, people don’t look any further than their nose.  And from a competitive standpoint, I, quite frankly, am glad they have it.  Because that means that there’s less competition for me.

Pamela:  Less competition for us, absolutely.  Well put, Bill.  Well listen, Bill, I really appreciate your taking some time out of your busy schedule today to share some of your insight with us.

Bill:  Okay.  Well, I hope I was helpful.

Pamela:  You were.

Bill:  Thank you so much.

Pamela:  Thanks.

This is the end of side one.  Fast-forward the tape to the end and turn the cassette over for side two.

Pamela:  I’m speaking now with Barry Shamus.  Barry is founder of the company Selecting Winners, which has been in business for 14 years and does business all throughout the United States and in Australia.  He has been a professional speaker since 1976 and has done over 1,000 presentations on precisely how to interview, select and hire the best people. 

He is a certified speaking professional and he lectures at top universities and business schools throughout the country.  I’d like to say hello and thank you for joining us today, Barry.

Barry:  Great to be with you, Pamela.

Pamela:  Great.  When did you first meet Dan Kennedy?  We’re going to start with that.

Barry:  Well, being a member of NSA for a lot of years, I’d heard about Dan by reputation.  But we met for the first time face-to-face about two and a half years ago, when I decided to make the investment to go to one of his speaker’s boot camps in Phoenix. 

So that was the first time I met him face-to-face, but I’ve worked an awful lot with him since then.

Pamela:  And that was about two years ago?

Barry:  Two, two and a half years.

Pamela:  Okay.  Alright.  And what were the biggest nuggets that you got from his speaker’s boot camp that you have been able to implement in your business and tell us a little bit about the results that you’ve seen as a result of that.

Barry:  Well, I remember coming back from the boot camp with a yellow legal pad that was almost filled from front to back with ideas that I’d written down.  It was almost information overload.  I almost got too much.  But there was that much good stuff. 

And this is coming from somebody who had speaking for a long, long time.  I just was doing it the hard way.  I thought his ideas were absolutely revolutionary.  Either his ideas were good or I was slow, one or the other. 

The most important thing, two things, I would say.  Number one, he really taught me how to package myself.  I had been a subject matter expert for all these years and don’t think I ever really did a good job of packaging myself as a subject matter expert.  And once that was established and all the credentials – which were already there – I think Dan’s idea of inbound marketing was really revolutionary to me, because I was one of these dialing for dollars types and sending out unsolicited packages.  And his whole Magnetic Marketing System really opened my eyes. 

Pamela:  So do you anymore do outbound marketing?

Barry:  I haven’t done any outbound marketing in two and a half years.  Literally, I haven’t made a cold-call since I went to that boot camp. 

Now, when I pick up the phone, I’m calling people who have interest in what I’m doing.  And boy, is that a lot nicer because I just don’t handle the rejection.

Pamela:  I understand.  I don’t know too many people who do.  So every call you make is going to be at least warm and, in most cases, they’re probably calling you.

Barry:  They really are.  I’m doing a lot more just really ___ phone calls.  People are calling.  This morning, there were three phone calls that came in from people that I just don’t know, that had heard about me, that they’re doing a program and they needed someone to discuss hiring and selecting, which is a very, very hot topic right now.  And they heard that I was the person they needed to speak to.  And that just happens over and over and over again.  And really, it’s a result of Dan helping me position myself and those Magnetic Marketing techniques.

Pamela:  Tell a little bit about how you’re using Magnetic Marketing, which, of course, works across all medium.  You can use Magnetic Marketing in advertising, in sales letters, in direct mail, on TV, on radio and on the Internet.  And I guess you’ve fairly recently started doing some of this on the Internet.  What kind of…  What are you getting in terms of lead flow from that?

Barry:  Well, let me just start with the Internet, because that’s a real easy one and probably the easiest one to quantify.  We’ve had our site up for a little over six months, and we’ve had 1,300 legitimate leads come in off our Internet site. 

Pamela:  And these would be leads of, I’m assuming, people in a position to hire you, people who are in charge of hiring.  What kind of companies are we talking about?

Barry:  First of all, these are people who are interested in one of our three products or services. 

Pamela:  Okay.

Barry:  We have a series of products, we have a training company where we do training, or people who are interested in having me speak.  So it’s one of those three.  But in any of the cases, the people who are calling are people who want to part with their cash and help put my son through college.

Pamela:  And you’re doing this via the Internet, which means that your marketing costs are virtually nil, I would presume.

Barry:  Yeah.  You can’t even calculate the cost per week, because it just doesn’t exist.  So it’s been wonderful.

The other main area where Dan’s really helped – and I think this is a worthwhile story – is I think Dan’s the master of the sales letter.  Nobody does it better than him.  To this day, I say to people, “Would you read a six- and 12-page sales letter?”  And they say, “No, that’s absolutely absurd.” 

And a funny story I’ll share with you.  I was sitting at Dan’s first boot camp a couple of years ago, the first time I see it, and I’m reasonably skeptical.  And I raise my hand within the first couple of hours and I said, “Dan,” I said, “I just don’t believe people will read a long sales letter.”  I said, “People are busy.  They don’t have the time to do it.”  And he just looked straight at me and said, “You’re sitting here, aren’t you?”

Pamela:  Because you came in off of one of his long form sales letters.

Barry:  Because I decided to attend off of one of his long sales letters.  So that’s really made a difference.  I’ve, just in the past year, gotten involved in packaging up my information into products.  And I waited way too long in my career to do that.  But Dan has just been tremendously helpful, his ideas and techniques, in terms of once you have that information, how do you go about marketing it.  Because direct marketing was a brand new concept to me.

Pamela:  It was to me, too.  Let me share a quick story of a similar type experience that happened with me.  Because I kept reading Dan’s letters about how long sales letters outsell short letters.  And I had the same believe that I’ll be 98 percent of the speakers out there have, which is that if you can’t say it basically in one page, don’t bother saying it.  And I had a lot of great one-pagers that never got me any kind of terrific response.  Maybe one percent, maybe tops two percent response.  And I would be reasonably happy with that. 

Well, after getting a couple of Dan’s programs, I decided that I was going to test the whole concept of long-form sales letters to sell one of my products that I’d been selling back of the room and making $1,000, $1,500 here or there doing it. 

My first attempt, my first try, I created a… forgive me, but I don’t remember whether it was a 10- or 12-page sales letter, to sell the same product I was selling back of the room. I had never been able to make very much money selling it elsewhere through advertising.  I’d tried all that stuff, but it didn’t sell a lot of the products.

Well, within 30 days of testing the ad that I wrote and the sales letter that I wrote, we had an income stream for that one product of $18,000 a month.  And it just changed my life.  I realized I don’t have to be in front of the audiences all the time.  And that was just for starters.

Barry:  Yes.  One of the other ideas that Dan shared with me, that I’ll give you some real concrete numbers, is a pretty amazing piece in my mind, is the endorsed letter.  I have a product that I’ve created for sales managers that very specifically shows them how to choose great salespeople.  And I have a friend who’s on the east coast who sells in the software industry.  Software sales executives are his marketplace, where he markets information.  And we did an endorsed mailing to his list and we sent this out to 2,000 people on the list, and we had 580 sales, which is just stunning.  Anybody out there that knows anything about direct marketing, that’s one heck of a response rate.

Pamela:  That’s phenomenal. 

Barry:  That, by the way, was for a $149 product.  So it was just really amazing.

Pamela:  I can’t resist sharing one more story on that topic.  Dan showed me how to do that type of marketing, an endorsed letter, in one of my markets, the insurance market, from an agency manager to his colleagues.  And off of that letter, we did $90,000 in sales over a 90-day period.  And our marketing cost was about $2,500.

Barry:  Isn’t it amazing? 

Pamela:  Yeah.

Barry:  It’s really stunning what you can do with some of his ideas.  He’s really helped me grow the passive side of my business from the product perspective, and also, the bookings for my speaking have just gone up tremendously.

Pamela:  What about selling from the platform?  Is that something you’ve learned from Dan and gotten better at after studying Dan?

Barry:  Without a doubt.  Very early in my career, we’re going back 15 years, I was speaking at a conference and I spoke immediately following somebody who sold from the platform very poorly.  I mean very poorly.  Alienated his entire audience.  And I just got something in the back of my head that says you shouldn’t sell from the platform because you’re going to alienate your audience.  And I never did. 

And I was very skeptical when Dan talked about it.  But based upon the success I had using some of his other techniques, I used his model for crafting a pitch from the platform.  And I can remember the first time I delivered it, I almost wanted to apologize for delivering it until I was completely swamped in the back of the room with people trying to buy products.  It’s gotten better since.

I absolutely buy into his concept that you can’t get people all excited about an idea or concept and then not give them the tools to implement.  As a matter of fact, I used it in the pitch.  I say, “Listen to this and say it’s good stuff is all great, but you haven’t learned anything if you don’t put it into practice.  And to put it into practice, you need the tools.  And by the way, I’ve got the tools for you.”

You’re really doing a disservice. 

Pamela:  Exactly.

Barry:  So he’s really turned my thinking on that.  And he’s also added my bank account as a result.

Pamela:  Absolutely.  I studied all of the masters, supposed masters of platform selling and I tried so many other ideas.  And it never really changed my product sales.  They were always pretty much the same.  I rarely did more than $1,500 from any presentation back-of-the-room, and I would average about $10 or $20 per head. 

About two years ago, I started really studying Dan’s back-of-the-room platform selling ideas and adapting them to myself.  Obviously you don’t just take someone’s sales pitch exactly the way it is.  You have to tailor it to yourself.

But he weaves all these marketing principles into not only the sales pitch, but the whole presentation that brings it to a culmination.  And that’s what I finally started studying two years ago, everything that he does throughout the presentation, everything you need to do during the presentation and during the sales pitch.  And I went almost immediately – once I really started studying that – from the $10 to $20 a head to $100 a head.  And even as little as a month ago, I caught something of his on one of the tapes that I get from him, and it was just one sentence.  One sentence.  And I realized it was slightly different than the way I was saying a similar thing in my back-of-the-room presentation.  And I tried to tweak it a little bit according to what I gathered from that tape.  And I did three presentations in a row right after that with that, and I increased my per-head by another $20.

Barry:  That’s pretty amazing.  The one that he got me with has kind of become my anthem ever since, and I try to share it with the people that I do business with.  Someone asks me, “What business are you in,” and I say, “I’m in the training business.  I’m in the speaking business.”  And Dan says, “No, you’re in the business of marketing training.”

Pamela:  Right.

Barry:  “You’re in the business of marketing speeches.”  And once that becomes a way of life, you think about everything from a marketing perspective.  So I can’t even measure how much I’ve benefited over the years.

Pamela:  Well, okay, looking back now, two to two and a half years later, after you went to Dan’s first speaker’s boot camp – and you’ve got people possibly listening to this tape saying to themselves, “Should I drop that kind of investment in a seminar” – what would you tell them in terms of the kind of return you feel?  How worthwhile was that investment for you?

Barry:  Well, you’re going to get one idea that’s going to make that investment back 20 times over.  And that’s just one idea.  I came home with a legal pad filled cover to cover with ideas.  And any one of those made the fee back over and over again.  I’m a firm believer that you invest in your success.

Before I met Dan, for 12 years, I’d run a very profitable, very successful business.  So it wasn’t like I was desperate for solution.  But it has just made life a whole lot better because it’s easier, it’s quicker, I’m getting a greater return on my investments based upon many of the techniques that Dan teaches.

Pamela:  Well, knowing what you know now, if Dan was charging 10 times what you paid to go to that speaker’s boot camp two and a half years ago, would you still go?

Barry:  Yes.

Pamela:  Okay.

Barry:  I wouldn’t hesitate a second, because you can’t put a dollar figure.  What I earned off that one endorsed mailing pays for a lot of people to attend the boot camp.  That was just one idea that we’re going to repeat many times.

Pamela:  Many times.

Barry:  Many times over.  And one other benefit that I found while I was there, two of the people that I met at that boot camp, one being you, are people that are like yourself, that are moving in the same direction.  There’s lots of opportunities to network and share ideas and also share business opportunities with the people you meet.

Pamela:  Absolutely.  The networking opportunities could be fabulous at that.

Barry:  They really are.

Pamela:  Great.  Well, Barry, you’ve been very generous with your time today.  I want to tell you I really appreciate it and thank you so much.

Barry:  My pleasure.

Pamela:  I’m now speaking with Linda Miles, who is a speaker and consultant to the dental market.  She’s based in Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Welcome, Linda.

Linda:  Hi Pamela, and thank you for interviewing me.

Pamela:  Oh, thank you for being on this call.  I’m going to let you introduce yourself, give the listeners a little bit of background so they understand where you’re coming from and what kind of speaking and consulting business you’ve built.

Linda:  Okay, thank you.  For the past 20 years, I started assisting doctors to train their staff, their business staff in communication, organization, the motivation of the team members, the leadership of the doctors, and the art of appreciation for their patients, which is – broken down into lay terms – customer service.

And from those four areas, we’ve built a tremendous empire of management consulting and speaking, and I’ve spoken on three continents and I have six associates who also speak and consult.  And we have built a tremendous products division.  And a lot of that, in the past 12 months, I give credit to Dan Kennedy and his assistance.

Pamela:  What was it that you had kind of an unusual reason for contacting, maybe a necessity I guess it was, to contact Dan and get some help from him?  Do you mind mentioning what that was?

Linda:  I don’t mind at all.  In November of ’96, I had a ruptured disk.  Just came on suddenly, no apparent back problems in the past, pulling luggage through an airport in Wisconsin.  And for 11 months, I finished my next year’s schedule and I had a lot of numbness in my right foot and sometimes difficulty in walking.  So I was advised to cut my travel 50 percent and have back surgery, which I did in November of last year.  I knew that this was coming for a year in advance, so I contacted Dan and said, “I need to develop my passive income center and stop traveling 200 days per year.”

So with Dan’s help, that became a reality.  And we actually thought that the business would go down about 50 percent last year because of my travel and exposure to audiences.  And I was on the phone for 90 days during my recuperation, and therefore, I created a lot more business by phone.  So I hired three more associates.  My passive income center, our practice, our business actually went up 10 percent.  But the better part is that the overhead went from the 70’s to the 50’s, low 50’s. 

Pamela:  Wow!

Linda:  So we had our best year ever in the 20-year history of our company.  And I attribute a lot of it to Dan’s advice.

Pamela:  Can you give us some specific examples in terms of areas that Dan was most helpful for you?

Linda:  Well, I think that the direct mail process, Dan encouraged me to give him a little bit of background about my nine-video series that was filmed at a two-day workshop.  And with that information, he developed a four- or five-page letter.  And I must say that everybody in my office said, “There’s no way that a busy dentist will ever read this.  It will go right in the round file.”  But I said, “Well, this man gets results.  He’s very successful in his own rite.  Let’s do it.  What do we have to lose?”

So we did our first 20,000 mailers.  The results were great.  We did our next 20,000.  And over last year, I think our products division was up about 40 percent.  And in the month of January – my products used to be a third of my company – and in the month of January this year, they were 67 percent. 

Pamela:  Wow!

Linda:  And we had one of our best months ever.

Pamela:  Do you know the return, what you’re getting the return on, on this letter?

Linda:  I don’t know that now because my office handles everything.  My staff handles everything.  But I would say that it’s probably about average.  We do about…  I think that the average is somewhere between two and three percent.  And percentage-wise, I really can’t tell you.  But I do know that we are keeping our supplier very happy with reordering.

Pamela:  That’s terrific.

Linda:  And the other interesting part, Pamela, is that as a result of more and more dentists and their teams using my nine videos for lunch-and-learn sessions, Xing off an hour before lunch once a week, watching one of the 55-minute videos, and over a catered lunch they discuss how they’re going to use the material.  And from that exposure to the world that we serve, the dental world, we have a lot more demand for our other services.

Pamela:  Such as your consulting and speaking?

Linda:  Right.

Pamela:  Great.  Great.  Now, I understand you took a page from Dan’s book, too, about maybe simplifying your life and your office by reducing employees and staff.

Linda:  Right in the middle of mine and Dan’s first mail-out project, I said, “Dan, I just want to thank you.  Because when I met you two years ago, you said you have a very successful business with one employee.  But I want you to know that I gave six people a six-month notice that as of Halloween, when I went out for 90 days for surgery, that we will only be running this with my husband, my daughter, my son and myself.”  And I think I scared him because even though it worked for him, I don’t think that he thought it would work for me.  And other than the direct mail success, he assured me that you don’t have to have 10 people in the corporate office to make a business work.  So that was another turning point, shall we say, in the restructuring of my business.

Pamela:  And reducing headaches, for sure.

Linda:  Reducing a lot of stress knowing that staff salaries were over $300,000.  And if you divide my daily honorarium into that, then you know that you can’t slow down because you’ve got all these people depending upon you.

Pamela:  Wow!  Wow!  Do you mind mentioning what you sell your videos, your nine videos?

Linda:  They’re $395.  And if they order by a certain date, they get a copy of a couple of books that I’ve also written.

Pamela:  And how were you marketing those videos before you started using Dan’s direct mail approach?

Linda:  Basically, we did a catalog years ago, about four years ago.  I’ve always had the nine videos in circulation.  This is the third update.  I update them every four years.  Always at the seminar, back-of-the-room sales, and at conventions with exhibit booths.  And by newsletter and catalog, but never a direct mail campaign through thousands of pieces per month.

Pamela:  Would you say you’re selling as much or more now, just through the direct mail?

Linda:  Absolutely.  I would say that in the month of January, I called my office before our interview, that our product sales through Dan’s effort were up $39,000 in the month of January.

Pamela:  That’s terrific.

Linda:  I would say that’s a big hit.

Pamela:  No kidding.  Anything else that you might want to share about how Dan has helped you?

Linda:  Well, all I can say is that any speaker or consultant that has an audience and has a following and has been doing this for enough years that they do have a marketplace, should certainly entertain the thought of bringing Dan Kennedy into their business as a consultant.  He’s one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met.  He was very low-key.  I’ve know Dan for probably 16 years through the National Speakers Association, but I really never thought I would ever work with him because he was not an outgoing… he doesn’t act like a typical marketing genius.

Pamela:  Right.

Linda:  But when you get to know him and you sit down and talk to this man one-on-one, he absolutely has a talent that I don’t think I’ve ever found anywhere else.

Pamela:  He doesn’t come across as being full of himself.

Linda:  No.  You think of marketing people as being very gregarious and trying to sell themselves.  This man doesn’t have to sell himself.  His results and his referrals do it for him.

Pamela:  Absolutely.  Linda, I know that you’re getting ready to leave town, but I want to thank you very much for your time today.

Linda:  I enjoyed it. 

Pamela:  And I do hope that you continue to feel much, much better.

Linda:  I do.  And I love my new reduced schedule.

Pamela:  I’ll bet.

Linda:  It gives me another life.

Pamela:  And you can actually enjoy that beautiful beach in Virginia, right?

Linda:  There you go.  There you go.  Thank you so much, Pamela.

Pamela:  Thank you, Linda.

Linda:  Okay, bye-bye.

Pamela:  Bye.  I’m now speaking with Joe Polish and Joe, I have known for some years now and watched his business grow. 

Some of you may have heard of Joe.  Joe is a carpet cleaner who basically was struggling in the business and began learning some very powerful marketing strategies that helped him turn his business around, many of which he learned from Dan Kennedy. 

Then, Joe decided that he would start his own marketing company teaching other carpet cleaners how to market their business.  And he’s done very, very well in that area and he’s been doing that, I guess, for now about five, six years. 

Joe does a fair amount of high-priced seminars and boot camps and as very good at platform selling.  Welcome to the call.  Thanks a lot for spending some times with us today, Joe.

Joe:  You’re quite welcome, Pamela.  Thank you very much.

Pamela:  Yeah.  Can you talk about your very first time doing a high-end seminar or boot camp?  Because I know you had no professional training as a speaker.  You never probably even heard of the National Speakers Association.  Tell us how that got started and what happened.

Joe:  Actually, I did have a little bit of training.  It was probably being forced to read a paper in front of like a high school group or something to give a report.  Actually, I went to Toastmasters a couple of times, and then they horribly critiqued me on how many um’s and uh’s that I would say.  So basically, I didn’t go back much.  But I was still very scared and fearful of getting up in front of a crowd and speaking.

My first seminar was a full-day seminar that we had just promoted.  And I pretty much just forced myself to get up in front of this group and speak.  I was sweating bullets, I was so nervous.  It really didn’t calm down after the first hour.  I mean I was sweating profusely all day.  So nervous.  And it was basically nerve-wracking, but I ended up selling $12,000 worth of my marketing courses at the end of the day and everyone was ecstatic.  And this was to only a group of about 50 people.

So that was my first experience in the speaking business.  And then after doing a few more of those, I got real comfortable doing it, to the point of it became one of the main ways a couple years ago.  Actually, that first seminar’s probably three years ago.  I haven’t been doing this for too long.

But the next year, I ended up doing probably 10 or 12 of those full-day ones.  And my typical day, at this point, when I speak and sell for the full-day seminars, we’ll have crowds of anywhere from 60 to 120, 130 people in the room is normally the maximum for those particular ones in the small niche of carpet cleaners.  And my average sales will be between $20,000 and $30,000 in sales.  My best day was in Detroit.  We did $44,000 for the day sales.  But on average, it will be anywhere between $20,000 to $30,000.  If it’s less than $20,000, I get a little aggravated.

Pamela:  Okay.

Joe:  If you know what you’re doing – and you can learn how to know what you’re doing if you’re a Dan Kennedy subscriber and you listen to his information and take his advice, which Dan’s been a very large part in teaching me all this, especially on how to make money speaking – making money speaking, you’ll make more money knowing how to do the marketing and how to do additional sales than you will getting paid a speaker’s fee.  I’m not a member of the National Speakers Association.  Never have been.  To this day, I don’t consider myself a professional speaker.  But I can probably bet you money that I make more money speaking than 95 percent of every professional speaker in the country.

Pamela:  Well, knowing you and also having been involved in NSA, I know that you’re right.

Joe:  I still say lots of um’s and uh’s and I’m not a polished speaker, but I do give them great content.  The people really love the seminars that we provide for them.  I have a very happy group of very diehard, hyper-responsive clients because that’s how you make money speaking.  The real business of speaking is all the additional things that you can offer people.  And I don’t mean sell.  I never do a carnival barker show like you would see at some seminars, where people just get up and pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch.  We provide value in everything.  However, if you really want to make money, getting a crowd of people frothed up into believing what you do is one thing, getting them all excited and then providing them with additional ways that they can continue that excitement, continue that learning about you, that’s where all the marketing and learning what Dan teaches comes in.  That’s why it’s a major benefit.  

If I was somebody that was in the speaking business and wanted to figure out how to leverage and make more money, get everything that Dan sells on the subject.  Because I don’t think there’s anyone that I’ve ever met that knows more about how to teach speakers how to make money than Dan.

Pamela:  I would second that.  There’s an idea that you and I have both run with, Joe, that as far as I know there’s relatively few people doing this who are professional speakers or otherwise, and that’s the idea of creating our own dates.  How do you do that and how does that work for you?

Joe:  Well, one of my favorite forums, like we were talking about earlier, the one-day seminars that I do are normally not cold seminars.  They’re not endorsed to people that don’t know me just by saying, “Come and see me.”  What I do is I go to suppliers.  In this case, people that sell carpet cleaners chemicals, sell them equipment, and they already have a relationship with a group of customers.  And then I say, “I’ve got an idea for you.  You’re not real good at promoting seminars, but I know how to do this and I’ve got great information to share with these people.  And what I’d like to do is have you do an endorsed seminar where we mail a promotional letter inviting them to come and attend a seminar that I’ll provide for one day.  I’ll write the letter with an order form, so they can enroll and come to the seminar, and you basically just send it out to your list.  And I’ll write a cover letter written as if it’s coming from you.  You sign your name to it.  I’ll have everything taken care of.  We’ll print the letters, we’ll print the envelopes, we’ll insert them, and we will deliver them to you.  You just need to put on your customers’ names and a stamp and drop them in the mail, and people will show up. 

And because of the endorsement, since they already have a relationship with that person but yet some of them don’t know who I am, they may have heard of me but they really don’t know a lot about me, if the person that they’re doing business with is saying, “I recommend you attend this seminar,” then all of a sudden there’s a lot more credibility there and we’re able to put more bodies in the room.  And we’re able to do seminars where you’re bringing in $20,000, $30,000, $35,000.  Like I said, my biggest day was Detroit, where we did $44,000 in sales in a day to a very small group of people.  They don’t need to be humongous. 

Pamela:  Exactly.  And here’s a really key part of that, though, and that is that it’s not enough just to go to a vendor.  Or in my case, I typically go to associations in the markets that I work and present the same idea to them.  What it used to be is that I was in competition with every other speaker that wanted to speak at the association.  And very often with the way association memberships have been dropping, they got to the point where they didn’t even have a budget to pay a speaker or they would maybe pay you expenses only. 

So I’ve been able to use this concept to not only more than equal my speaking fee, but of course make a lot of money with the product sales that would come as a result of it.

But what’s really interesting is that it’s not enough just to go to an association – or in your case, a vendor – and say, “I’ve got this great idea for you to offer this seminar to your people.  Because if you don’t have the marketing materials that work for that, that make it work, it’s not going to pull a high number of people and it’s just going to basically be a waste of your time.

Joe:  Exactly.  Yeah.

Pamela:  So what happens is you completely take yourself out of the pack of all the other people who want to do a speaking engagement for that particular group.  It’s an incredible formula.  And I don’t know, really, anyone else that’s teaching it quite this way as well as giving you all the copywriting help you need to create the marketing pieces as Dan does.

Joe:  Exactly.

Pamela:  Well, let me ask you this because you’ve been very generous with your time.  By way of closing, what else would you tell someone who’s kind of sitting on the fence thinking, “Well, Dan charges a lot for these big boot camps on how to be a more profitable speaker,” what advice would you give them?

Joe:  If I’m going to put up with the travel and the hotel food and all the other things that go along with speaking, you better bet that I’m going to make a lot of money doing it or I’m not going to hop on a plane.  Buy everything that you can get on the subject from Dan, because he knows what he’s talking about.  The amount of money, even if you paid Dan and bought everything that the guy sold, went to every seminar, it’s really miniscule compared to what you can actually make after you learn these strategies and these techniques. 

I’ve paid Dan a lot of money.  I spend over $100,000 a year on my own self-education and seminars, speakers and things like that.  And it’s money well-spent.  It comes back 10-fold if you learn how to use it.

So just trust me.  If he is using this tape interview to expose you to people like me and other people to go to a seminar or to buy a speaker’s course, I’ll be at the seminar if he’s going to have one.  You can come and talk to me.  I’ll be happy to talk with you.  And it’s great stuff.  This is the way that you actually excel financially as a speaker, is invest in what Dan has to say.  I’ve met some of the best people on the planet that teach how-to stuff on not only marketing, but on how to make money as a speaker.  And I don’t think anyone even holds a candle to Dan.  The stuff’s great.

Pamela:  I agree.  I really appreciate your time and the time that you shared with us this afternoon, Joe.

Joe:  You’re quite welcome, Pamela.  Thank you very much.

Pamela:  My pleasure.  I’m now speaking with Michael Jans.  Michael Jans has a company called Insurance Profit Systems, located in the state of Washington.  His focus is dealing with property and casualty insurance agents and helping them market their practices.

He also is an association executive for a P&C association, but I would like to say hello and welcome to Michael.

Michael:  Hello, Pam.

Pamela:  Yeah.  Thanks for joining us.  How did you first get in touch with Dan and give us that kind of genesis?

Michael:  I stumbled across one of Dan’s books probably roughly five or six years ago.  I think that’s probably about 15 years later than I wished I would have. 

Pamela:  I know the feeling.  When did you first start either going to his seminars or really starting to use some of his ideas, consulting with him?  I know you’ve used his services quite extensively.

Michael:  I’m on Dan’s automatic charge program.  Whatever Dan does, if it’s speaking, I ___.  If it’s a publication, I get it.  If it is a product, I read it, breath it, eat it, everything.  So yeah, I’m a big believer in Dan because of the results.

Pamela:  And can you tell us about some of those results?

Michael:  Let’s talk about the results here.  Okay.  First of all, let me give a little bit of background that I think might be interesting to speakers.  Simply that you had mentioned that I’m an association executive.  And yes, in fact, I still am to this day.  And in that capacity, I hire speakers.  And we generally hire speakers for things like – among other things – keynote addresses.  We will pay them the going rate around here, roughly probably $3,000, $4,000 or something like that.  Dan has made it possible for me, a non-speaker, to speak at my own events and have a $50,000, $75,000 weekend.

Pamela:  That’s a pretty good trick, I’d say.

Michael:  Not a bad weekend for a guy who’s not a speaker.  I don’t pretend to be nearly as polished as the people who we hire for $3,000 or $4,000.  And yet, the financial success of the speaking events that we do engage in, frankly, I think they’re probably 10 times as lucrative for us as they are for most speakers.  I learned that all from Dan.

Pamela:  Right.  What do you currently charge for the seminars and boot camps that you do put on where you’re the featured speaker or at least one of the featured speakers?

Michael:  Well, Pam, they’ll range anywhere from $395 to $1,495. 

Pamela:  For what, a two- or three-day event?

Michael:  Yeah, two- or three-day event.  And a lot of the event is not me speaking.  I don’t have three days worth of stuff to say.  A lot of the event is a series of presentations from some of my students who have had some success with some of these principles.  And frankly, they do a lot of the training. 

Pamela:  That’s great.

Michael:  It takes a lot of work off of my shoulders.

Pamela:  Sure.  Sure. 

Michael:  We don’t get all of the income from the tuition and registration fee.  I think Dan is a master at podium sales or back-of-the-room sales, and he’s given us pretty much a turnkey system on how to do that.

Pamela:  And sell a lot more than a few thousand dollars worth of products back-of-the-room.  Yeah.  Yeah.

Michael:  And sell product, deepen the relationship, and all of this ends up in more sales later on, afterwards, for years and years to come.

Pamela:  Now, how many people typically come to one of your $400 to $1,500 seminars?

Michael:  We’re in sort of a small market and the company is not old.  Our training seminars generally have between 50 and 75 people.

Pamela:  Okay.  Okay, that’s excellent.  Now, how do you use Dan’s ideas to bring that many people to a high-priced seminar?

Michael:  Well, besides learning the art of generating income from speaking events, we’ve also learned the art of writing copy.  We’ve basically learned marketing from Dan.  So I can really attribute the attendance to what we’ve learned from Dan about copywriting and attracting people to the events.

Pamela:  Now, you also have products that you sell where you don’t have to be back-of-the-room.  You sell a package of manuals and audio tapes.

Michael:  I learned it all from Dan.

Pamela:  Yeah.

Michael:  We’ve got a number of products that we sell from a sort of low-end price point of, let’s see, $29.97 to a higher-end price point of about $800. 

Pamela:  You do the selling, which is passive income for you because you don’t even have to get out of bed to make these sales the way you’ve got it.

Michael:  Once the system’s in place, the sales all happen without my personal involvement.  I have not taken a sales call in two years.

Pamela:  That’s pretty nice.  Anything else that you could specifically point to that has really helped you in building your consulting, coaching, speaking and product business that you learned from Dan?

Michael:  Well, you did mention an interesting thing that I hadn’t spoken about, which is the coaching program.  The coaching program, I think that’s really our highest-end product.  We charge up to $4,250 a year for coaching.  We’ve got about 20 people in the coaching program.  And most of them come from – in fact, they all come – either from their participation at a boot camp at one of our training seminars and they want more, they want a long-term relationship, or they come in response to copy that we’ve written to our existing customers.  And like I said earlier, I learned to write copy from Dan Kennedy.

Pamela:  So you’re using all these different ways, then, to have a passive income stream which is pretty substantial, attract people to these high-priced boot camps.  What you learned from him about back-of-the-room sales, you learned in general about copywriting to be able to sell any and all of these services, including now your coaching program, which is a pretty high-end program.  That’s terrific.

Michael:  He gets the credit.

Pamela:  He gets the credit.  Well, I’ve asked this question of everyone else.  I may as well ask it of you.  If you had to give advice to someone who was considering doing this but is thinking to themselves, “Yeah, but it’s going to cost me money to go there and I’ve got travel expenses, and what about the time that I’ve got to take out of my business,” and they’re just not really sure that this is for them, what would you tell them?

Michael:  The answer is easy.  Crawl on glass to get there.  The investment that I have made in my relationship with Dan Kennedy has resulted in what I would say is probably a five-fold increase in personal income in the last three years.

Pamela:  Now, that’s very specific, very quantifiable and very impressive.

Michael:  Well, Dan’s got my endorsement.

Pamela:  Well, Michael, I really appreciate the time you spent with us today.  And I wish you continued success and growth in your business.

Michael:  Very good, thank you, Pam.  Glad to be able to help.

Pamela:  You’re welcome.