Seinfeld’s creation, The Soup Nazi, was a memorable character. The proprietor of a soup shop, telling anyone who annoyed him, “No soup for you!” If you’re going to get very far with this conversion to direct marketing, you’re going to have to yell at yourself and deny yourself things you’ve been indulging in. By the time you finish this book, you’ll have seen the prior nine rules applied and been directed to a number of places where you can see them applied. What may have started out as mysterious will be understood. You’ll be able to spot direct marketing when you see it. You’ll know what needs to be done. The real question left will be about your will to do what you know needs to be done.
You Will Be a Tough-Minded Disciplinarian and Put Your Business on a Strict Direct Marketing Diet
Business success is about that in many ways. Many business owners who perennially struggle and suffer are very much aware of things that need doing but simply lack the will to do them. There’s a longtime employee or vendor or client, now a “friend” who you know is toxic and detrimental and needs to be replaced, but you can’t muster the will to fire them. There’s advertising you keep spending money on that you know is failing to produce measurable results, but you lack the will to end it or fix it. There’s that website you know isn’t producing either, but the very thought of getting it remade (yet again) is painful, so it stays as is. The will to win is found in winners and is often absent in also-rans.
This is a consistent theme of success—broadly and narrowed to marketing. I wrote this edition in the 80th Anniversary Year of Napoleon Hill’s classic book Think and Grow Rich, essentially a report on common, principled behaviors of over 500 of the greatest entrepreneurs, marketers, and industrialists of the turn of the century, men who literally built America. Of those keys, Hill identified what he called “burning desire.” Not mere run-of-the-mill, gee, it’d be nice to have “x” kind of desire. Burning. Years later in sports, the legendary Vince Lombardi spoke often about the will to win. He acknowledged that the talent and skill of players on a team, the brilliance of the game strategy and coaching, even luck, all paled as success factors when measured against will to win. If you dig into the biographies and authoritative works about Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and others equivalent to the men Hill studied in his time, you cannot avoid the fact of obsessive will to win and willingness to do what is necessary to win. If you watched the 2017’s Super Bowl with the greatest comeback from the worst points deficit in Super Bowl history by coach Bill Belichick, ageless wonder quarterback Tom Brady, and every New England Patriots player on the field, you watched a modern-day Lombardi at work, and you saw extreme will to win exhibited.
A few years back, I was given The Persistence Award by the Napoleon Hill Foundation, but of better titles it might have had, The Will to Win Award more accurately describes my business life, since it is driven by being willing to do things most other people in my fields were not and are not, because I genuinely hate losing and prize winning.
With advertising and marketing, you have to be thick-skinned toward criticism, tough-minded about money invested, extremely disciplined in thought and action, and adherent to a winning game plan, all fueled by a resolute will to win. With every ad campaign conducted, every media used, every prospective customer attracted.
If you go on a diet—seriously—there are some things you need to do. First, purge your refrigerator and cupboards of fattening and junk foods. And keep them free of them. Celery sticks, not cookies. Second, decide on an eating plan and stick to it patiently and persistently. Make it simple, with hard and fast rules you can remember. For example, not eating anything that’s white is a very simple rule to remember. Third, get some tools, like a scale. Fourth, count something—calories, fat grams, carbs, Weight Watchers points, something—so you can manage with numbers. Fifth, step up your exercise. Finally, sixth, be very alert to hazards and scams that lead you astray. As example, a friend recently proudly showed me the bottle of “Vitamin Water” she had switched to from soda pop to be healthier. The label on the small bottle of red gunk said it was a delivery system for 32 grams of sugar! Gotta read the labels—if you’re serious.
Same thing with your transformation to lean, mean direct marketer.
First, purge your business of junk, like fancy brochures that violate most of the previous nine rules. Dead image or brand ads that just lay there. Gentle, subtle, plain vanilla sales letters. Media that can’t be ruthlessly measured and held accountable. Uncooperative staff. Out with the old, in with the new. Not slowly or gradually either. Just like with the refrigerator and pantry—get a big trash bag and purge. The great success philosopher, colleague, and friend of mine, Jim Rohn, was known far and wide for preaching the gospel of Massive Action. Key word: massive. Jim McCann, founder of 1-800-Flowers, who appeared on several programs with me, including one of our own GKIC Marketing & Moneymaking SuperConferences,SM talked about having to open the door of his marketing department and throw in a bomb now and then, to blow everything up, destroy all assumptions and habits, and start anew. This is what I want this book to inspire you to do and give you the gumption to do: blow it up, install direct marketing.
Second, decide on a new marketing plan. Like the eating plan, it’s best if it is simple, with hard and fast rules that are easy to remember. Rules #2, #3, and #4 on previous pages are just as clear, simple, and easily kept in mind as Eat Nothing White. I suggest my book The Ultimate Marketing Plan (4th Edition) as a good guide to creating your own simple and straightforward marketing plan. You do need a written plan. Organized effort.
Third, get some good tools. New ads, fliers, sales letters, websites, email follow-up sequences, scripts for handling incoming calls, maybe marketing system software like Infusionsoft, which powers GKIC and most of my clients’ businesses, and I recommend. A very simple, easy-to-follow guide is my book The Ultimate Sales Letter (4th Edition). A more robust tool kit, including templates and ready-to-use marketing documents, is my Magnetic Marketing System (GKIC.com/Store). A list of basic direct-marketing tools required by just about any business appears at the end of this chapter. It’s said that a poor carpenter blames his tools, and I suppose that’s true, but the flip side is true too: poor tools make it difficult to be a good carpenter.
Fourth, start counting and measuring things. Closely monitor numbers that matter.
Let me share a story told to me by a Disney Imagineer. If you visit Disney World, you will see kids engaging in pin-trading with employees. I’m told they monitor, track, and analyze each pin-trading employee’s productivity by pins sold at the locations they’re stationed at, hour by hour, day by day, in like weather conditions, etc., etc., to constantly make decisions about which employees should be trading and which shouldn’t, where, and when. Secretly, Disney may be The Most Micro-Managed Place on Earth.
If you don’t come up with things you can count and measure by hour, day, week, and month, and ways to hold your every dollar invested directly accountable, your attempt at conversion from ordinary marketing to direct marketing will fail. For a complete dissertation of “money math” and the numbers that matter, consult my book No B.S. Ruthless Management of People and Profits, 2nd Edition. I also urge reading Michael Levine’s book Broken Windows, Broken Business, a short, unsweet management guide based in part on the tactics that Rudy Guiliani used to transform New York City from unsafe to safe, from dirty to clean. (Regrettably, under Bloomberg and now Bill de Blasio, most of the strict controls Guiliani established were undone, and the city has reverted to, bluntly, a mess.)
Fifth, step up your exercise—to build your marketing-mind muscle. Throughout this book, I recommend other books; my own and others. If you’re like most business owners, you get completely caught up in the “doing of things” to such an extent you aren’t actually thinking much, let alone considering new and different and potentially better ways of growing your business. These days, this has escalated to new mental illness, as people have removed even the minutes of walks from business to car or with the dog from thinking time to cell-phone calling and texting and email checking and Facebook updating time. I suggest at least one hour first thing in the morning and one hour in the evening given to reading success literature and marketing information, and making notes and working on changes and improvements in your business. Further, you need to actually become your business’s chief marketing officer and devote a significant amount of time just to marketing work. I get professional practice owners to force all their appointments into four days and block one day a week to do marketing work and only marketing work. You also need to mentally exercise and build marketing-mind muscle by association with other businesspeople committed to direct marketing, in your category of products and services if possible, or/and in diverse businesses. One path to such associations on a national and local level is through GKIC, starting with the gateway offer on page 229.
Resource Alert!
If you find it difficult, even impossible, to get time every day to think, strategize, and use direct marketing, and to get engaged in ongoing serious studentship of marketing, I suggest you have not yet accepted the fact that you are in the marketing business. But management of self, time, and others’ interactions with you also come into play. My fully updated and expanded 3rd Edition of No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs lays out the blueprint I’ve long used and use, adopted by many clients who were at first skeptics—a number of which comment on their transformational experiences in the book. Today, your time, ability to focus on important matters, even your sanity, is under assault as never before. If you want to multiply your productivity and have the super-power of true control over your time, you’ll get, read, and use this book.
Sixth, finally, be alert for and resistant to those who would dissuade or distract you from putting your business on the Direct-Marketing Diet. You need to be very careful not to let anything into your new direct-marketing business that doesn’t belong there. Consider the bread the restaurant gives me with my salad. When I get a big Caesar salad with grilled chicken from a nearby restaurant as takeout, they always put one-third of a loaf of fresh-baked bread in with it. When I get home, I take the bread out of its wrapper and throw it in the big garbage can in the garage before entering the house. Why? Because I have a lot less discipline than most people give me credit for. If that bread gets past the perimeter into my house, I’ll eat it. So I can’t let it in. You’ve got to do the same thing with your business. Anything that doesn’t conform to the Rules here, do not let in at all. Just say no. And bar the door.
BASIC Direct-Marketing Tools List
Front-End/New Customer Acquisition
• Lead Generation Magnets: books, reports, CDs, online videos, etc., that offer information of prime interest to your desired customers, clients, or patients that can be advertised and promoted, and when delivered, establish your authority, credibility, expertise, trusted advisor status, and promote your products, services, and business.
• Direct-Marketing Website(s) that capture visitors’ contact information for follow-up and present your information, and that place people into well-controlled Sales Funnels (more information is in GKIC’s Chapters 12 and 14).
• Main (Long-Form) Sales Letter(s) that sell the core product/service or the sale event, i.e., appointment, in-store visit, etc.
• Follow-Up System for Unconverted Leads: online and offline steps, put into a sequence.
• In-Bound Call Script that includes capture of prospects’ contact information for follow-up.
Back-End/Customer Retention, Ascension, Repeat Business Nurture, Referrals Nurture
• Online/offline sequences for each sales purpose—for example, cross-selling the buyer of Item #A into Item #B
• Seasonal/holiday promotions
• Customer newsletter or alternative, regularly delivered goodwill/relationship nurturing material
• Referral stimulation campaign(s): The book No B.S. Guide to Maximum Referrals co-authored with Shaun Buck delves into this in deep detail and helps you build a complete system for internal marketing, for multiplying customers by referrals.
• Late or lost customer re-activation campaign
• Catalog, offline and/or online, of all goods and services
For more detailed information about these tools and referrals to relevant resources, access the Special Report: Direct Marketing Toolkit at www.NoBSBooks.com/DirectMarketingBook.