HOW TO GET FROM WHERE YOU ARE TO WHERE YOU WANT TO BE

Simplify Your Life, Multiply Your Profits and Have More Fun
Growing Your Business or Profession

Quotations

[These quotations from the front of the workbook are included with the text as we
discussed the possibility of having rotating pop ups on the site]

Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business has two -- and only two --
functions: Marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results, the
rest are costs.

Peter Drucker

“It is the process of diverting one's scattered forces into one powerful channel.

James Allen

“The best kept secret in the global economy today is this: When your service is
awesome, you gel so stinking rich you have to buy new bags to carry all the money
home.

Tom Peters

“Where you've been is not at as important as where you're going.

Anonymous

“Here is a simple but powerful rule: Always give people more than they expect to get.
Nelson Boswell

“The significant problems we face today cannot be solved at the same level of thinking
we were at when we created then1.

Albert Einstein

“You don't build it for yourself. You know what the people want and you build it for
them.

Walt Disney
“You cannot teach a man anything. You can only help him discover it within himself.

Galileo

“The teacher, if indeed wise, does not bid you to enter the house of their wisdom, but
leads you to the threshold of your own mind.

Kahil Gibran

“Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a
trail.

Anonymous

“You are searching for the magic key that will unlock the door to the source of power;
and yet you have the key in your own hands, and you may use it the moment you learn to
control you thoughts.

Napoleon Hill

“Success; my nomination for the single most important ingredient is energy well
directed.

Lottis Lundborg

“No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible until a great change takes
place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought.

John Stuart Mill

“Any fact not facing us is not as important as our attitude toward it, for that determines
our success or failure.

Norman Vincent Peale

“It's what you learn after you know everything that counts.
John Wooden

“The best way to predict the future is to create it.

Peter Drucker
Table of Contents
Strategic Planning Survey ..............

Twelve Ways You Can Grow More

Customers or Clients - Part 1 ........................

Twelve Ways You Can Grow More

Customers or Clients - Part 2 ........................

How to Keep Your Customers

or Clients Coming Back! How to Turn
More Inquiries and Prospects Into Sales ....
Session One Transcripts ...............................
Session Two Transcripts ..............................
Session Three Transcripts .............................
Session Four Transcripts ..............................

SECTION ONE

STRATEGIC PLANNING SURVEY

SECTION 1

WELCOME TO A SIMPLER AND MORE PROFITABLE

BUSINESS LIFE STARTING TODAY!

SUMMARY OF SESSION 1

I want you to achieve every objective you envisioned when you invested in this program.
I'm convinced you deserve to play the game of business by your own rules. As long as
you're operating with integrity and your product or service offers superior quality and
value, you deserve to be as successful and fulfilled as you want to be in your business or
professional practice. Whether you want to achieve dramatic financial growth over the
next few months, or put an end to those 14-16-hour days so you can have more time with
your family and friends--or both-- I know I can help) you.

What You Can Expect From Me and From This Program

I'm approaching my relationship with you in the same way I would approach a
consultation with any other client who pays mc $5,000 per hour--first, by letting you
know what you can expect from me, then explaining what I expect from you. In this
program I'm going to devote myself to you and your enterprise just as I would with any
other client. The first thing I want to do for you is to de-mystify how to grow your
business or professional practice. I'm here to give you the simple knowledge, skills, and
strategies you need to design your enterprise to give you exactly what you want.

So what do you want from this program'? Do you have a clear vision? If you do, that's
great! But if you don't, we're going to work together over the next six weeks to help you
clarify your vision, so you'll know exactly what direction to take to get from where you
are to where you want to be. This means having the sales you want, the income you're
looking for, the security you're after, and The personal fulfillment I know you deserve.
And here's the best news--it's not hard. Actually, it's fun and games.. That's what you can
expect from this program and from me.

What I Expect From You

For you to accomplish your objectives with this program, obviously you have to do your
part. So first of all. . .

I. I expect you to trust me. I've been able to help thousands of others, so I know what I
have to offer will work for you.

II. I expect you to commit yourself. Take it one step at a time and follow through
consistently on what I ask you to do throughout the six weeks of this program.

The design of the program itself is very simple. It's divided into 12 sessions, each of
which will cover two or three days of the week for six weeks. So I'm going to assume
you're starting with me each week on a Monday, followed by a session at midweek. It's
up to you, of course, to complete your midweek assignment--it may take a little time and
sometimes a little effort the payoff will be more than worth it!

Here Is the Simple Foundation We're Going to Build Upon

There are only three ways to grow any business or professional practice. You can:

1. Increase your number of customers or clients. This is where almost everybody

focuses almost all their attention But the second and the third ways arc actually where
you have the greatest potential for leverage and growth. The second way is to...

2.Increase your average transaction value. This simply means increasing the amount
of the sale and the amount of profit that sale products for you...

3. Increase your frequency of purchase. This means you get more residual value from
each customer or client You get them to come back more often to buy more products or
services from you.

Most people don’t realize that the cost of acquiring a customer is substantial, while the
cost of selling them more or selling them more often is significantly less. More about this
later.

12 WAYS YOU CAN GROW MORE

CUSTOMERS OR CLIENTS

Referral systems. These are the specific processes you use regularly to get your
customers
or clients to recommend and encourage other people they associate with to seek out your
products or services. The key ingredient in making referral systems work is to make your
customer or client understand and appreciate the value and benefit they receive from the
product, service or purchasing transaction they do with your business or practice. Like so
many things in business, it’s about educating your customer, showing him what is in his
own best interest.

Acquiring customers at break-even and making a profit on the back end.

If your business or practice is one that has a high probability of customers or clients
coming back to repurchase frequently the same or different products or services from
you, you owe it to yourself to do everything within your power to get customers into the
buying stream as quickly and easily as you possibly can.

Therefore, it is important to identify a new customer’s marginal net worth, i.e., the
lifetime value in profit a customer or client has to your business. Until you do, you can't
determine how much time, effort, and, most importantly, how much expense you can
afford to invest to acquire that customer or client in the first place.

Risk reversal. Any time two people come together to transact business, one person is
always asking the other to take on or assume more of the risk than they do. If you're
asking your prospects to assume the risk in purchasing your product or service, many of
them won't be willing do it. And your customers won't begin to buy at anywhere close to
their capacity to purchase, because they don't want to take on all that risk. So the key here
is to recognize that if you can reduce or eliminate altogether the burden of risk on the
transaction for your customer or client, a lot more people will buy from you, and they'll
buy a lot more and a lot more often.

By guaranteeing the purchase and reversing the risk, you actually help your customer or
client appreciate at a far higher level the results and the benefits your product or service
provides for them than they probably do now. And you cause everyone in your enterprise
to raise the standards of performance they exert on behalf of those customers and clients.

Endorsed Marketing. Establishing mutually beneficial relationships allow you to utilize

existing good will and strong, bonded relationships that all sorts of other companies and
professionals already have established with prime prospects for your product or service.

The question you have to ask yourself is this: Who in your marketing area is already
selling the customers you want to reach or the clients you want to serve? They would be
selling something that either goes before, goes along with or goes after the product or
service you would sell to these people.

The moment you identify these businesses or professionals, you’re almost all the way
home. It's that easy. All you have to do is contact those companies or those professionals
and make it easy and advantageous for them to recommend their customers or clients to
you.

Advertising.

You should only advertise when what you have to say will be heard by a high enough
concentration of thc people you want to be talking to, i.e., real, qualified prospects.
Whenever you run an advertisement–whether in print, on radio, or on television--it must
provide the reader listener or viewer with a self-serving advantage.

Again, it's all about them always. It's never about you.

Here are the five ways you can increase the number of leads, prospects, and inquiries
mentioned in this corresponding audio session. Think about how you might adapt each
concept or strategy to your business or professional practice and write down your ideas in
the space provided

Grow your business by increasing the number of your customers/clients

1. Referral systems

2. Acquiring customers at break-even and making profit on the back-end

3. Guaranteeing purchases through risk reversal

4. Host-beneficiary relationships
5. Advertising

Choose and implement one of these five ways to increase leads, prospects, and inquiries.
Describe your plan below.

Listed are two ways to increase your customer retention rate. Think about how you might
adapt each concept or strategy to your business or professional practice and write down
your ideas in the space provided.

1. Deliver higher-than-expected levels of service.

2. Communicate frequently to nurture your relationships with your customers/clients.

Listed are four ways to increase your inquiry.-to-sale conversion rate. Think about how
you might adapt each concept or strategy to your business or professional practice and
write down your ideas in the space provided.

1. Increase the sales skills of your staff.

2. Qualify leads up front.

3. Make irresistible offers.

4. Educate your customers by giving them valid and beneficial reasons why they should
do business with you.

YOUR ASSIGNMENT FOR THE NEXT 3 DAYS:

Apply the concept of risk reversal in your enterprise starting today. Pick up the phone
and take the next call from a inquiry or take the next order. Perhaps you'll need to go out
and make a sale, or wait for somebody to walk into your office or store, then try out a
guarantee----a better-than-risk- free guarantee or partial guarantee.

Notice the multiplied result it has on not only how many people say yes, but also the very
positive impact it's going to have on your bottom line. Formulate your strategy now, then
before you begin the next session, note specifically how you used risk reversal along with
the results you received in the space provided below

Direct mail. This is salesmanship or saleswoman ship in print. It affords you the
opportunity to take your most powerful sales presentations and turn them into printed
messages you can deliver into the hands--and into the minds--of all the prospects you
ever want to reach. Direct mail gives you enormous flexibility, enormous possibilities. It
allows you to contact people and businesses your normal selling methods don't allow you
to reach.

Telemarketing. Allowing you to penetrate areas and contact prospects in ways no other
business-building method allows, telemarketing is a tool you can use many different
ways: to survey your market to see how your business is performing (in the process of
doing this, you can also generate referrals), to establish, develop, and maintain very
close, tight relationships with prospects and with customers: to follow up on sales letters
to your customer or prospect list (you call get as much as 10 times increased sales and
results just by calling behind a letter you mail out!); to find out why people do not buy
from you and to convert them; to pre-test advertising approaches and new products or
services: to offer your best customers or clients preferential values on products or
services.

Special events and information nights. This can give you great distinction and connection
with your customers or clients--and they can be a lot of fun! You offer prospects,
customers and clients a chance to come to you to learn more about your product or
service and its benefits and results. You create an opportunity: to meet you and/or your
staff or key executives or key team members; to meet high level executives or experts in
your field or your industry who possess knowledge and ability even superior to your
own; to enjoy a unique entertainment and social experience; to bring customers and
prospects together, a) to acknowledge your customers as being important to you, and b)
to tap into the loyalty and satisfaction they feel and to transmit that feeling to prospects
you are endeavoring to sell.

Qualified lists. It is very easy to identify specific people or businesses (and key decision
makers at those businesses), who are more likely than not to be your primary target
audience for your product or service. There are a number of sources, including the
Standard Rate and Data Director, of Business Lists published monthly by Standard Rate
and Data Service. This directory contains approximately 35,000 listings and descriptions
of mailing lists and customer lists and demographic lists you can rent for any purpose
imaginable.

Unique selling proposition (U.S.P.). Your U.S.P. is a statement that communicates the
most powerful benefit or advantage you offer your present and future customers or
clients. You must determine what they are not getting from anyone else--and offer it to
them. Incorporate the fact that you're offering them this unique benefit in everything you
say and everything you do. You have got to ask yourself: What superior benefit is my
business or practice in a position to give to my customer? Also, what superior benefit am
I already actually providing that my customers or clients may not be aware of? Your goal
is to convince customer or prospect or client you ever deal with that they can expect to
receive that unique benefit on an ongoing basis by doing business with you instead of
your competitors.

Increasing perceived value through better customer or client education. All you have to
do is recognize that the more people understand and appreciate why and how a product or
service can benefit or improve or protect their life or their business, the more they will
desire it and the more closely they'll get connected to those who educate them to this
fact. You can think of this process as an collaboration of your US P.

11.

Using public relations. Within your marketplace there arc publications, organizations
with newsletters, etc., and there are media--radio, TV, and special alternative
communications– that are hungry for information and ideas. All you have to understand
about PR to be extremely successful is one simple but vital fact I keep emphasizing to
you: It is all about them, it is not about you. What people care about is what is important
to them--what will help improve their life, what will expand their comfort, what will
make them more enriched, more entertained, more fulfilled& more protected Public
relations will work for you as long as you keep the focus of your information on what
will benefit people's lives or businesses the most.

Answer the review questions below before going on to the last seven methods for
growing more customers or clients.

What do I know about the buying habits, the business activities, the business or personal
interests of my customers and prospects?

Identify tile type of customer I do business with, or would like to do business with.

Who else are my customers buying from (either before or after they would typically buy
my type of product)?

What kind of customer or client do I want to deal with?

What other products or services go along with my product or service?

How many different ways can ! use qualified mailing lists to improve the effectiveness
and multiply the results and successes in my business or professional practice?

Can I describe why my customers or clients buy from me instead of my competitors?

What superior benefit, advantage, improved result is my business or practice in a
position to give to my customer?

What superior benefit am ! already actually providing my customer or client with that is
so subtle they aren't even aware of it? Am I doing myself and them a disservice because
they are not aware of it?

How can I extend my business or my practice into my community or into another

industry?

How can I provide greater service, benefit or provide advantage, information or

education in the press, through my actions, through my company, through my
positioning,
through my contacts?

Listed are the final seven ways to increase the number of leads, prospects, and inquiries
mentioned in session three. Think carefully about how you might adapt each concept or
strategy to your business or professional practice, and write your ideas in the space
provided.

6. Direct mail

7. Telemarketing

8. Special events/Promotions

9. Qualified lists

10. U.S.P. - Unique Selling Proposition

11. Increase perceived value through education

12. Public relations

Choose and implement one of these five ways to increase leads, prospects, and inquiries.

YOUR ASSIGNMENT FOR THE NEXT 2-3 DAYS:

Review Session 3 once again, and as you review these last seven methods for growing
more customers or clients, consider how you can specifically adapt and apply each of
them in your own enterprise. As you listen, write your ideas in the space provided.

2. Think about how you can specifically apply the concept of educating your customers
or clients. Try several different approaches on how to educate your customer, client or
prospect:

a) Tell them what distinguishes your product from your competitors.

b) Tell them how and why your product is made or created the way it is and what
the impact of that creation, design or construction process is on them
and their sales results.
c) Explain to your customers or clients the advantages and benefits of your product
or service and why it will be important to them.

Between now and the next session, have some fun experimenting with different
approaches. Remember, the more people understand, the more comfortable and confident
they are about buying specifically from YOU. So, go out and have a ball as you watch
what happens between now and when we get to session four .

Finally, record your plan and the results you get below:

3
SECTION FOUR

HOW TO KEEP YOUR CUSTOMERS

OR CLIENTS COMING BACK!
HOW TO TURN MORE INQUIRIES
AND PROSPECTS INTO SALES

SUMMARY OF SESSION FOUR

Three Ways to Increase Your Customer Retention Rate:

Contact inactive customers and ask, Is anything wrong? Call them up, visit them or
write them, and communicate the fact that you are concerned and you're contacting them
because you want to know why they arc no longer doing business with you. Whatever
wrong, you want to know. If they have a problem, you want them to be aware that you
are supportive. You arc there to help in any way possible. If they have a problem with
you, you want them to know that you stand ready to correct it--and to guarantee that the
problem will never occur again. By taking the time to contact all of your inactive
customers or clients and communicating with the re, you’ll have continues positive
impact on them and their buying relationship with you.

Make sure you're delivering higher-than-expected levels of service. The first question
you
have to ask yourself is: What docs my customer or client ordinarily expect to receive
when they do business with my rims or my competitor? The key here is the word
ordinarily, because your challenge is to take what caved.'one ordinarily does and make it
extraordinary, either by vastly improving upon it or by adding to it.

Communicate frequently to nurture your customers or clients. Your challenge and your
biggest opportunity is to keep those customers constantly connected to you and your
business or practice--to keep them constantly thinking about how good you arc, how
valuable you are, how much you care about them, their well-being, and how much they
enjoy, desire, and value the products or services they acquire from you, keeping that
connection alive and flowing.

Four Ways to Increase Your Inquiry-to-Sale Conversion Rate---Mastering Direct

Selling:

Increase the sales skills of your staff. There are two different schools of selling thought.
One is technique-based: the other is strategy-based, if have to choose, I would have
recommend you choose strategy over technique. Strategy is the big picture, the intent,
what you’re doing to accomplish, the big, strategic purpose or basis behind everything
you do.

Technique-based selling is a little more manipulative. I advocate a consultative or

advisory form of selling. That means that you’re leading, guiding, educating, and
directing your customers or clients into what's in their best interest. Selling strategy is
really easy to learn.

Options for increasing sales skills include identifying and transferring the scaling skills of
your best producers over to everyone else in your organization
3. and adding a dedicated sales manager.

Qualify leads better up front. Most businesses and professional practices who have a lot
of leads and prospect coming to The never stop to consider what a idea or prospect costs
them to acquire. Quantity docs not matter in ICA generation. Quality and convertible arc
the kc factors. Quality results to the your prospects' capacity and their level of desire to
buy 5,our product or service. Somebody could desire your product or service but not be
motivated to buy it right now. You get people better qualified by modifying the selling
strategics you use to general that ICA or prospect. For example, when you run ads, make
sure those ads contain information and inducements that tic in very specifically to your
product or service and the benefits it provides.

Make irresistible offers. It can cost you a small Fortuna to attract each new customer or
client. However, it costs you very little to resell those customers or clients over and over
again. Consequently, you have an canorous incentive to do whatever is necessary to make
it easy and irresistible for The to start or resume a purchasing relationship with your
business or practice immediately, not some time in the future. You don't want to make it
difficult. You don't want to give them a reason to think about it. You don't want them to
put off making their initial purchase with your organization. So everything you do should
be geared toward making ii easier more attractive, and appealing to do business with you.
The way to do that is to make it harder to say no than to say yes. Eliminate all the hurdles
prospects have to jump over. Make it more irresistible than resistible. Make it much more
appealing than unappealing to do business with your organization.

Give your customers or clients reasons why. Your prospects are always asking why: Why
should I buy from you? Why should I buy this product or service over someone else's?
Why should I buy today'? Why should I spend this amount of money? Why should I put
my faith in your professional expertise, your company or your manufacturer? If you can
help them understand and appreciate the reasons why, your customers or clients will be
strongly bonded to your business or practice, because, unlike your competition, you're
willing to take the time to explain how things work, how things are created, how your
people are trained, how they go about doing what they do. It's a very powerful process.

Review this section, try to answer all the questions and make notes in the space provided.

Why are customers no longer doing business with my firm? Did something happen?

Was something wrong in their business or in their life?

Did they have an unsatisfactory experience the last time they did business with me or my
firm?
Did I ever have a bad-buying experience with any company or any professional I ever
worked with?

Did they ever call me afterwards?

How would I have felt if they had called me afterwards?

What does my customer or client ordinarily expect to receive when they do business with
my firm or my competitors?

What is the ordinary service, product, transaction, process, experience or expected result
that a customer or client expects when they deal with, not just my company, but with any
one of my competitors?

How can I move my company or practice from the ordinary to the extraordinary?

How can I vastly improve upon the way everyone else in my industry or my profession
does business?

What can I add, both tangible and intangible, that would make it so much more beneficial
and enjoyable to do business with me, virtually guaranteeing I'll have that customer or
client forever?

On average, how many additional transactions can I expect to get from a new customer!
bring into my business or practice in year one, in year two--forever?

Can I, in doing a true service to that customer, offer them an improvement or an upgrade
in either the size, the quality or the combination of the product or service they're buying
that would make it mutually profitable?

What kind of irresistible offer will attract the largest number of qualified prospects to my
business or practice and compel the largest number of those prospects to take full
advantage of it?

What is it about what I do, how I do it, and the people I use to help me do it, that my
prospects and customers find valuable and appealing?

How could I better explain the process we go through to create our product or service, the
components we use, how we choose them, the engineering standards we created, and
their performance expectation?
How could I better explain the process of elimination we went through to reject all kinds
of components or manufacturers before we settled on the handful of ingredients or
composition products we use to create the product or service we sell?

How could I better explain the reasons why this product or this service performs more
advantageously, beneficially or tangibly for a customer or client than an alternative one?

Customer retention rate

Attrition is the opposite of retaining or continuing buying relationships with customers or

clients. Attrition is the number of customers or clients who stop doing business with your
enterprise. They're inactive customers or clients, they are people who move out of the
area, they are people who, for whatever reason, stop dealing with your company.

What level of attrition does my enterprise experience?

1. Have they stopped being in a position to need or benefit from my product or service?

YESNODON'T KNOW Why ?

2. Do they no longer gain a significant benefit from using my product or service?

YESNODON'T KNOW Wily'?

3. Did they have an unsatisfactory experience with my business or practice?

YESNODON'T KNOW Why

4. Did they do business with you and not get the exact outcome they wanted?

YESNODON'T KNOW Why?

5 Have they dealt with someone at my business who was offensive?

YESNODON'T KNOW

6. Did the product or the service not perform exactly the way it was supposed to?

YESNODON'T KNOW Why?

7. Did they try to get an adjustment, new product or additional service, or get some
improvement that wasn't fully made or wasn't made to their complete satisfaction, thus
becoming dissatisfied?

YESNODON'T KNOW Why ?

8. Has a change occurred in my former client's business or personal life that caused them
to interrupt their buying practices with my enterprise and not start up again?

YESNODON'T KNOW Why?

Three things to do to retain your customers:

1. Identify all the inactive customers and clients you've got, and contact them. Find out
why they left, and get them back as customers, perhaps with a risk-reversal offer.

2. Make sure you arc delivering consistently higher-than-expected levels of service to

each and every customer or client you deal with.

3. Communicate frequently to nurture your customers or clients.

4. Educate your customers by giving them reasons why

b) Use the preemptive marketing process by asking these questions:

1 ) What is it about what I do, how I do it, and the people I use to help

mc do it that my prospects and customers would find valuable and appealing?

2) Flow could I explain better the process we go through to create our product or service,
the components we use, how we choose them, the engineering standards we created and
their performance expectation?

3) How could I explain the process of elimination we went through to reject all kinds of
components or manufacturers before we settled on the handful of ingredients or
composition products we use to create the product or service.

4) I how many ways can I explain the training process we put, our staff members
through or that I went through myself to gain the knowledge, the experience, and the
expertise I use to produce this product or service for you?

5) How can 1 explain the reasons why this product or this service performs more
advantageously or beneficially or tangibly for a customer or client than an alternative
one?
YOUR ASSIGNMENT FOR THE NEXT 2-3 DAYS:

Your assignment may sound very familiar, but I'm sure the results you've gotten from
what you've done so far have given you some strong momentum and enthusiasm to build
on.

First, review this session as you did before, making additional notes on how you can
apply what you've learned to your own enterprise. Start with those methods and strategies
that are simplest and easiest for you to apply and begin using them.

Next, at least one time, make someone--a prospect, a customer, a client--an irresistible
offer, something that's harder to say no to than anything that you've offered before. And
if they say yes, and you haven't given away the store, and you stand to make a profit over
the long run, do it again with another prospect. And then do it again and again and again.
Try a number of different customers and clients and enjoy the results.

Detail your strategy for this assignment and your results below.

REVENUE

Most businesses continuously rely on one marketing approach to grow and sustain their
business... (The Diving Board Philosophy)

REVENUE

What happens when that one approach becomes less effective? Your business becomes !
ess stable and you begin to lose market share!
REVENUE

What would happen to the stability of your business if your marketing mix looked like
this?

REVENUE

What would happen to your revenue level and profitability if you combined a wide
array of marketing approaches?

SESSION ONE TRANSCRIPTS

M

Hi, I'm Michael Basch, and I'm delighted to welcome you to this six-week program with
Jay Abraham. You've just begun what I believe will be one of the most enjoyable and
rewarding adventures of your business or professional life. How do I know? Because
before I met Jay Abraham, like you I was looking for answers--real nuts and bolts
practical answers that would help me get my own enterprise to really take off and start
giving me the kind of life I wanted for myself and my family.

I'd been very successful working in large companies, and, by the time we founded
Federal Express, I'd a good instinctive sense of marketing. I was even offered the top
marketing spot at Fed Ex by Fred Smith in the second year of our operation. And I was a
marketing and sales vice president for another company. But it wasn't until I met Jay
Abraham that I really began to understand in-depth what marketing is all about. So I'd
like to take a few minutes to tell you what happened to me so you'll know what you can
expect from Jay over the next six weeks you'll be spending with him.

Several years ago, I decided to leave the corporate world to start Service Impact, my
present consulting business. By this time, I knew I could handle corporate marketing
reasonably well, but didn't have the foggiest idea of where to start as a small business
without huge resources. We started off with a bang, but we were doing all our business
with only two clients. My partners and I could see the end was in sight, so I began
searching for marketing help. I went to a person locally and explained our situation. He
immediately said, Listen Mike, you're beyond my capabilities. You need to go to a Jay
Abraham boot camp. Well I had never

heard of Jay, but I had enough respect for this guy that I called up and signed up for a
$25,000 three-day program. Everyone, including my wife and business manager, Karen,
thought 1 was absolutely crazy.

Well, after signing up, I received some seminar tapes from Jay and began listening. And
then Karen listened as person after person got up and explained how well they had done
after applying Jay's strategies. And she started thinking that maybe 1 wasn't so crazy after
all.

Meanwhile, I decided to take one of Jay's strategies and do some experimenting with it. It
was risk reversal. Now 1 considered offering guarantees before, but decided against it
because I thought it might demean the image I was trying to create.

But now it was time to experiment. I was scheduled to give a talk at a monthly meeting at
a small group of CEO's. Only six, in fact. But as luck would have it, the companies
represented included: Harley Davidson, a major insurance company, and a large hospital.
I didn't change my talk much. In fact, in a three- hour talk, all I said was, Ill can't take a
team of your front line people and have them blow you away with their service plan, then
the work is on me.

Now keep in mind, typically a talk of this kind would involve a nice lunch, a few
questions about Fed Ex and a pleasant, See you later. Not this one. Before I left that day I
had promised to ride back to the insurance company with the CEO and spend the
afternoon with his people, call the executive vice president of

Harley Davidson marketing, and set an appointment with the hospital CEO. The end
result was over $100,000 worth of business and two great clients: Harley and the
hospital. All with only one idea. And I hadn't even been to Jay's seminar yet.

Obviously, I went. And it was expensive. But there were only eight companies there. So
after half a day of lecture, it soon came to be my turn on the hot seat, and l'll never forget
it. I can see it now. I'd always had a hard time explaining what I did--as we all do. Jay
leaned back in his chair with a big grin and said, “Come on Mike. lmagine it's 2:00 in the
morning and you and I have had 18 scotches each, you've forgotten all the buzz words
and the rhetoric and you just simply want to tell me what you do. What are you going to
tell me? I don't remember my exact words. But I probably gave the clearest, simplest
explanation I've ever given about my business--and it was powerful.

Jay then dictated a strategy, a few letters and a number of other ideas. When I got back,
Karen and I hit the road. Literally, got in the car and spent six days listening to the
seminar tapes. We'd ride along on the roads of Idaho, listen, stop the tape, discuss it and
listen some more. That's how we formulated our core business strategy over five years
ago, and it more than tripled our income in the first two years.

Since then, I've gotten close to Jay and I can tell you, his stuff isn't for everyone. If you're
not open to changing your mindset, if you're not willing to try new things, if you're not
up to setting some of your own rules, I don't think he can help you very much. On the
other hand, if you're willing to change your

approach--and I'm sure you are since you invested in this program--there's no one that I
know of who can help you more than Jay Abraham can at any price.

I have known only two bonafide marketing geniuses in my 35-plus years in business. One
was the late Vince Fagen, the marketing genius behind Federal Express. The second is
the man l'm about to introduce to you. His strategies have been proven in over 400
different industries. They're simple, straightforward, and they'll work for you no matter
what kind of business or professional practice you may have. The next six weeks is going
to be about building your business, expanding your profits, creating more value for your
customers or clients, and liberating yourself from daily business pressures. All together,
this program is about having more fun playing the game of business your way.

Jay

So get ready for some real adventure. Here's my friend, Jay Abraham.

Thank you so much, Michael, and let me add my welcome to you, the listener, to this
great adventure. Yes, we mean it, during the next six weeks I'm going to show you
exactly how to simplify your life, multiply your profits and have more fun growing your
business or professional practice.

So let me start by asking you: Do you have a clear vision of where you want to be? If you
want to expand your enterprise, have you thought about how big you want it to be or how
much more profitable? How many more customers or clients do you want to benefit from
your product or service? How much more free time

would you like to have to spend with your family and friends, or traveling to distant
places, or improving your tennis or golf game? Well, all these are within your reach,
along with much, much more.

You see, I'm convinced you deserve to play the game of business by your own rules. And
as long as you're operating with integrity and your product or service offers superior
quality and value, you deserve to be as successful and fulfilled as you want to be in your
enterprise. So as we work together over the next six weeks, don't be surprised if all of a
sudden, without much effort, without much thought, just by shifting the way you look at
things and shifting the way you approach your customers, your team members, your
suppliers, your marketplace and even your competitors, your sales start growing more
rapidly, your profits soar, and what used to be hard becomes easier by the day, that's
exactly what will happen if we both do our part.

Now, whether you want to achieve dramatic financial growth over the next few months
or put an end to those 14 to 16 hour days so you can have more time with your family
and friends--or both--I know I can help you. If you'll commit yourself to listening
actively to these sessions and follow through immediately with what 1 ask you to do, as it
applies to your specific business or practice, you'll find yourself moving quickly from
where you are to where you want to be.

I'm going to help you develop the optimum business strategy to get there. And here's the
best news. It's not hard. Actually, it's fun and easy. That's what you can expect from this
program.

So I'm approaching this the way I would approach any other consultation I take on. First,
by letting you know what you can expect from me, then explaining what I expect fi'om
you.

What 1 want to do first is demystify how to grow your business or professional practice.
In other words, l'm here to give you the simple knowledge and skills and strategies you
need to take your business or professional practice wherever you want it to go.

You're going to realize you can specifically design your enterprise to give you exactly
what you want. More sales? More clients? No problem. More profit? It's simple.
Expansion geographically? You'll have many different ways to do it. You'll be able to
keep your business growing and still have more time to spend with your fhmily and
friends. You can reach and maintain a level of competitive advantage that will give you
lasting security and certainty about the future.

I want to offer you a new way of thinking based on a set of universal principles l've
discovered to help you develop your own vision. Instead of thinking in terms of what isn't
possible, you'll begin to see opportunities and possibilities everywhere. It's the same
possibility- based mindset that has gotten me to where 1 wanted to be.

And what you learn to do from this program will become automatic. You won't have to
worry about, What should I do next? Because you'll know. It will

become natural. You'll never have to think about it once you master it. Once it becomes
a natural part of you.

You'll come to understand wilere you have the easiest, fastest sources of cash flow and
profitability [?om your business and how to take fullest advantage of them. 1'11 explain
how you can get everyone involved to actively share and support your vision.

So what do you want ti'onl this program? Once again, do you have a clear vision? If you
do, great. But if you don't, we're going to work together over the next six weeks to help
you clarify your vision and realize exactly what direction to take to get t?om where you
are to where you want to be. And this means having the sales you want, the income
you're looking tbr, the security you're afler and the personal fulfillment I know you
deserve. But/hr you to accomplish your objectives witIl this program, you have to do
your part. So here's what I expect from you.
First, over the next six weeks I expect you to trust me. I'm asking you to assume what I
have to share with you is valid, l've been fortunate to be able to help thousands of others
through my seminars and private consultations, so I know what I have to offer will work
fbr you. As I said a moment ago, the principles are universal and the skills and strategies
are simple and virtually risk free. So 1 expect you to take it one step at a time and fbilow
through on what I ask you to do.

I'll be offering you simple explanations, plus lots--and I mean lots--of specific examples
of how others have successfully applied these principles and skills. Throughout the time
we spend together, you'll always be clear about what to do. I'll be closing each session
with specific directions for you to apply and get results from what you've just learned.
Then the following session will lead you to build on that experience. That's why just
listening to these cassettes, frankly, won't do very much tbr you. But if you're willing to
follow through consistently, I think you'll find we're going to have a lot of fun together
and make a lot of money for you and your business. And that spirit of fun and adventure
and discovery will continue long after the six weeks is over.

Secondly, 1 expect you to commit yourself for six weeks to follow through on the
directions 1 give to you and recognize that though what 1'11 share with you is simple,
you know that the first time you try anything new it's not going to be perfect. And that's
okay. Keep in mind that every effort you make is moving you closer and closer to where
you want to be.

At the close of this program, you'll have in place the basic strategies you need to maintain
control of your enterprise and give you the freedom you want in your personal life. Like
the strategies I'll be giving you, the design of this program is very simple. It's divided into
12 sessions, each of which will cover two or three days of the week for six weeks. So I'm
going to assume you're starting with me each week on a Monday, tbllowed by a session
in mid-week So you may be working an occasional Saturday to complete your mid-week
assignment, but the payoff will be more than worth it. So, obviously we're going to be
pretty busy

over the next six weeks, but I think you're going to enjoy yourself, and I know you're
going to enjoy where you and your enterprise end up.

Now, I'd like to take you back with me to my most recent seminar, where I asked for a
show of hands of people who had studied the preseminar materials that I had sent them
and had discovered hidden assets in their businesses. Then I asked who among them had
successfully applied at least one idea they'd learned before coming to the seminar. I
invited these people to come to the microphones and share their stories along with what
they thought everyone else could learn from their experience.

I think you'll be fascinated. Here's what a few of them had to say:

JA

My name is Jay Adrian. I work for a custom plastic extrusion company. Plastic extrusion
does things like window frames. We run frames for projection TVs and everything, Since
we're a custom job, we deal with quotations. I got Jay's infbrmation and I kind of sat back
and realized maybe we weren't educating the customer as much. We had a chance to
quote on a nice window job for people that make vinyl window profiles, a large
company. We got the quotation out late on Friday. I wrote a nice letter with that, and I
educated them. I used a lot of your concepts with risk reversals, PS and everything. We
sent that letter out on a fax at 6:00 on Friday night.

One of my employees was working Saturday morning at 11:00. She got a call from this
customer. She called me at home. I called the customer. The customer

Jay

JA

Jay

JA

Jay

JA

Jay

was very interested in a lot of the things that we had offered and said he'd like us to get
back with a quotation and how fast we could build some of this tooling and run these
jobs. He said, Give me a call on Monday.

I immediately got off the phone, called up our engineer, found out how fast we could
make the dies, gave that individual a call back within a half hour. He was so impressed
that we got three of the jobs, which started out at about $120,000 a year and have a
potential of going up to at least halfa million.

What's the lesson for them?

If you tell your customer you're going to respond, to demonstrate that as fast as possible
and to do it. And they were very impressed...

Did you used to not do that?

We did that, but we did not do that to that degree.

And was it hard to do?

No, it was not.

Felt good, didn't it? It was exciting, wasn't it?

JA

Yeah, I never included the cover letter to differentiate ourselves from everybody else
that's sending out quotations. And I also addressed that person telling him the fact that, I
realize you're going to be receiving other quotations. And I pointed out what our
differentiation was, how we would perform. And then I demonstrated that by doing this
on a Saturday morning.

Jay Are you going to start doing that from now on?

JAAbsolutely,

DR

My name is David Rusenberg. I'm a software developer in New York. I write software
for investment banks. And there's a couple of ideas that were involved with this. One is
optimization, where you were talking about optimizing the past, which sort of intrigued
me I was thinking about that.
Jay

Claiming, optimizing the claiming of the past. There's so much you can do with what
you've already done--with your relationships, what ads you've run, with approaches with
organizations, with inactive customers, with distribution networks. That's what you're
talking about?
DR

Yes, this was a contact, somebody I'd known at the bank I was working at. And

1 decided to just give her a call, and she had moved to another investment bank-- smaller
investment bank in the city. And at first I was thinking, this was another idea, 1 was
thinking not to go to her because 1 didn't think she could afford to pay me enough to
make it worth my while. But then I thought about the back-end idea

Jay

DR

Jay

DR

DR

Jay

DR

and the marginal net worth and I realized that for some of my clients the marginal net
worth to be like $800,000. So, I talked to her and she had a small system I could put in.
But it turned out that there were a whole bunch of other systems that her company would
be interested in. So, it looks like it's going to be a very sizable...

If it works, what's it going to be worth?

Could be $80,000.

What's the implication to you and then what's the lesson to me?
Well the biggest lesson for me was to think about the whole concept of marginal net
worth. It was something l'd never thought about.

Who doesn't really know what marginal net worth means? How did you interpret it?

Well, what is that customer worth to me over the lifetime of the customer?.
Great. And, what do you think they should do?

Well, think about that. I mean, the initial sale might be small, but if you think about it in
terms of what the ongoing relationship would mean, it could be very

substantial.End of Side

SB My name is Sarah Hamilton Brown. I'm from Milton Kings near London.

Jay

SB

Jay

That's a long drive.

It's a long drive. Yeah. As we flew over, I was thinking: God, thosepeople in wagons
must have got very depressed as they were coming across the States.

What's your business?

SB.

I'm a strategic marketing consultant, so I help people make more money. And I realized I
wasn't capitalizing on the risk reversal. If people don't like my ideas, they don't have to
buy what I'm offering them. But I hadn't been telling them that. Just by putting that into a
letter to an accountant who'd never used any marketing at all.

Jay How did you articulate it?

SB If you don't like what I say to you, you don't have to buy.

Jay Wow, profound statement. It was implied anyhow, but you never said it. Right?

SB

And I had it fed back to me that that was the only reason he was willing to see me.

Jay And what happened?

SB

Jay

SB

Jay

SB

Jay

SB

LC

He phoned me several times, we had long meetings. He wants a relationship with me for
at least two years because he thinks what I can offer, it's at least $50,000.

What's the lesson?

I wasn't capitalizing on what I was already offering. I knew that I wouldn't ever charge
for something if people didn't want it. But I hadn't told anybody about it. It was obvious
to me.

So what's their lesson? What should they do?

They should look at what they're actually offering, the things that they take for granted
that everybody would know about their business.

But that they don't articulate, denominate or even express.

Yes.

My name is Louie Curl. I'm a consulting engineer. I live near St. Louis, Missouri. 1 have
two short stories.

The first is the idea of marginal net worth. We have a regional convenience store that
we've done work with over the past couple years, and we fell out of favor because we
weren't quick enough in our response. When I identified the marginal net worth for that
customer, I went back to them, wrote them a letter and offered
to do the next project for them at 20% less than what we had been doing our projects.

Jay Did you give him a reason why you were offering?

LC That I wanted them back.

Jay

And you basically told them that you didn't care that you made no profit on them. You
wanted a chance to make it up?

LC

That is right. Within 30 days they sent us a couple projects. Within the next year we
probably did I 0-11 projects tbr them. The bottom line is it brought us in about $40,000 in
12 months. So, it was worth--

Jay But you'd never thought in terms of marginal net worth.

LC

Absolutely. Never, never, never. The last story happened last week. We were working on
a project, another subdivision The Realtor and I got into a bit of tiff--I have a short thse.
i'm not real sure. Normally I would blow it off and say the heck with this and l'm done.
What I decided to do in response to some of your comments was--let's leverage this
conversation. Let's make the best of it. What I said to her was, Look, we obviously are
not going to be happy with each other unless we find a way to do more work together
after this project's done. We're both mad at each other. We know it. Let's get it done. But
let's find a way to make some money.

Jay

LC

MW

Jay

The bottom line is what we agreed to do is that she would refer us on projects in the St.
Louis area and then we would reciprocate with her. Looks like that will probably be a
quarter of a million dollars in the next 3 or 4 years.

Tell us what you think the applicational lesson is to everybody in this room. What can 1
learn from that?

The first one is determine the marginal net worth of your customers. I sat down and
calculated what our real costs were for that client for each project and what we charged
them for each project and identified the difference in cost, spread that out over
anticipated number of projects in the future, gave us a marginal net worth. We knew what
our parameters were for that particular individual, and that's when we made the decision
that we couldn't afford to let them go.

In the second case, the individual that we got into a disagreement, I would never have
tried to recapture as a potential customer contact. I would have let it go. She would have
gone her way. I would have gone my way. And that would have been the end of the
discussion. And I'm glad I separated my emotions from the desire to grow the business.

I'm Martin Whales. I'm with Simplified ... from Toronto Ontario Canada.

What do you do?

MW

We make computer tele-sofiware. We've basically done in voice-mail what Bill Gates did
with DOS in the case of Windows. It allows a small to medium-size business to turn
itself into a big-looking business. We basically narrowed it down to eight buttons, so a
secretary could almost integrate this voice-mail with any telephone system that can
handle voice mail.

Jay How did you uncover an asset or opportunity?

MW

The president sat me down--and I have no marketing training. I'm a retired high school
teacher and somehow became the vice president and the director of marketing of this
company. And I said, What's the budget for advertising? And he said, Zero. So, I took a
look at what we had. We had relationships with vendors. I flew down here to Los
Angeles to the computer show, stepped into one of our suppliers' booth, took over one of
their computers. We picked up a--that space was probably worth about $10,000. The
business we got out of it was worth about a million dollars. Sole distributorship in South
Africa--
Jay Had you not thought about doing that before?

MW

Jay

No. I had to because my budget was zero. I looked at other suppliers. I went over and got
our brochures and two other suppliers' booths.

Did they go like that and they refused you. Or did they embrace you--

MW At first they were hesitant because they didn't know who the heck I was.

Jay How did you win them over? What was the premise that you proposed?

MWI showed them how we could move more of their product by selling it as part of
“OURS.

Jay So, you were focused on what was in it for them?

MW

Yes, absolutely. I had one salesman and we were making the occasional phone call and ...
leads, a thousand leads for that one. I also went to people who had already softly picked
up our product before it was even out of beta. We sold a quarter million. So, 1 went to
some of those people and got one to write an article, and it's going to be in the industry
magazine which is the bible for the computer industry.., next month and it's 2-3 pages
and I didn't even have to get set-up costs for it, and it's probably worth about
$20,000-$30,000 worth of advertising, let alone the calls that will come in.

Jay

MW

Great. What's the lesson in what you've just shared--that anybody in this room can benefit
from and act upon--not just theoretically, understand? What can they do? What's the
lesson? What's the transaction?

First thing is to sit down and evaluate in your own inventory in the relationships that you
have, how other people benefit from you selling a product. How does somebody else
benefit from you selling their product or how can you enhance somebody else's business
with yours? And they may have a much larger budget and may be willing to up-front
moneys or--
Jay Good. Thanks.

BP Hi. I'm Bob Packer.

Jay Hi, Bob!

BP How are you?

Jay I'm comfortable thanks to you.

BP I made some furniture for Jay.

JA It's wonderful.

BP 1 know he lies on that chaise and every great idea comes off the chaise.

JA That's exactly right.

BP True facts.

JA This came right off of it.

BP

The idea I took was I make furniture but I don't sell fabric at all. And I went to one of my
vendors and told them how much I loved the fabric. They had a showroom in New York
City and they have reps all over the country. And I told

them that I would love to help to display their fabric on furniture. And if they'd allow me
to make some pieces and put them in a showroom of their fabrics. So, as a result of it, we
not only got a showroom in New York City that would cost me several hundred thousand
dollars, we've also cloned that into Philadelphia. We're just starting with that. But they
also gave us their entire mailing list, and it's very hard for us to find people that are
upper-end and identify those people, so that had great worth. And they both started
giving out our catalog in their showroom.

JA What do you calculate the bottom line to that is?

BP
Well, the program has just started and our business is a relationship business. It's just not
one sale. It's over and over again. This alone could be bigger than my business has been
to that point.

JA

BP

What's the lesson to everybody from what you did?

Well, when your vendors call you up to pay your bills, change the subject to how they
can help you.

That's great. Thank you, Bob.

Pretty interesting stories, aren't they? And you're going to be able to experience the same
kind of success just as easily as these people have.

Now over the next six weeks, I want you to keep in mind that you've engaged me just
like any other client who comes in and pays me $5,000 per hour. In this program, I'm
going to devote myself to you and your enterprise, just as I would with any other client.
And no doubt questions will occur to you along the way. However, as with my other
clients, I think you'll find most, if not all of them will be answered as you move through
the program.

Now, before we close this first session, I want to introduce to you the foundation on
which we're going to build over the next six weeks. The success of the people you just
heard from was based on their understanding of the simplicity and the importance of this
foundation. And here it is: There are only three ways to grow any business or
professional practice. Just three.
The first one is the most obvious. It's increasing the number of your customers or clients.
This is where almost everybody focuses almost all their attention. But the second and the
third are actually where you have the greatest potential for leverage and growth. They
are, number two, increasing your average transaction value. That means the size of the
sale and the size of the profit that sale produces for you. And number three, increasing
your frequency of purchase. That means you get more residual value out of every
customer. You get them to come back more often and come back and buy more things,
more products, more services from you.

People don't realize it, but the cost of acquiring a customer is substantial. The cost of
selling them more or selling them more often, is inconsequential. We're going to talk
about this at length. But for now, I just want you to be aware that there are three and only
three ways to grow any business, any practice, and the second and third are the two most
overlooked ways of growth and profit you have available to you.

In this program, I'll give you all the information and the tools you need to evaluate how
to do this in your own business or professional practice. In our next session, I'll have
much more to say about the three ways. In the meantime, here's your first assignment.

Turn to Section One of your guidebook. There you'll find a very powerful and very
important questionnaire. This questionnaire is the result of my examining and analyzing
about 400 different kinds of businesses. It's critically important for you to know the
answers to these questions and how they relate to each other. To give you the leverage
you need to get to where you want to be.

Once you've completed the questionnaire, you'll have a much clearer understanding of
the opportunities your business or profession holds for you. If you can't answer all the
questions precisely, don't worry about it. Just give approximations. Get help fi-om your
accountant, your bookkeeper, your sales manager, your shipping department. It doesn't
have to be perfect. Just be sure to give a meaningful answer to each question. It's sort of
like connecting the dots. And a great picture of possibility is going to emerge from this
process.

So take today and tomorrow to complete this questionnaire. Then we'll get together to
discuss your answers. Once again, thanks for investing in this program. I'll talk with you
again in session two.

MB

My name is Mark Anthony Bates and the name of my company is Key Logo
International. And the industry that we're involved in is, the primary market is the hotel
casino industry. Secondary markets are travel and entertainment. And the way that we got
started up on this was that my partner in this, who's the assistant general manager of a
hotel casino in Laughlin, Nevada, was reviewing areas of loss in their organization. They
have a number of fixed costs and also their primary source of revenue is in gaming. So
their tunnel vision at times doesn't allow them to look for other areas that they can go out
and try to generate revenue. And what we did was we took a loss center and turned it into
a profit center--and that being the front desk.

He was going through the books and found out that they were spending an average of
$50,000 a year on little plastic hotel key cards. And the lock company that provided those
cards was charging them $. 12 each. They're blank and they were advertising their own
card. So what he did was he came up and he started going out to bid out and get a tbur
color design done on it, and now it's got the hotel's picture, their address, all the
amenities on the back at $.08 cents each. And that was just the start of the idea.
Where it began to snowball was, is we said, Okay, now we've reduced the overhead
there, what's the way that we can go ahead and increase and turn this into profit? And
years ago, fbr those of us that have been around for a little bit, remember when the hotels
used to charge a deposit of approximately $2.00 for their keys. That used to be when they
were just the little brass keys. And the reason that they stopped doing that when we
inquired on it was that they're plastic, they're cheaper, it impedes the check-in and
check-out process, it puts the guests out and it puts more time and effort on top of the
clerks.

Jay

MB

So we came up with an idea to design a machine that would actually read and validate the
card. They could still charge that and the machine spits out eight quarters. It's just
coincidental that the machines are placed by the doors next to the quarter slot machines.
Actually, we had to think of ways to go ahead and regenerate that revenue. But the more
important thing is that we didn't want them to return the keys and put the money in the
slot machines. We wanted them to take the keys with them because of the profit margins.
And we took this to other hotels and then the risk reversal, what we did was we said
we're going to provide you with 100,000 hotel key cards with these unique design prints
you have approval of, you have complete control over that. We're going to put these
machines that we have the patent rights on and we're going to service those machines in
your hotels. You're not going to put out any money at all.

Now that was probably the most difficult hurdle that I had to start with, because free was
a bad four letter word. Because they want to know when the other shoe's going to drop.
Especially in the hotel casino industry.

And did you show them what your motivation was?

Well, yeah. I mean, our end-all motivation was to create a name and be able to generate
revenue for ourselves at the same time being able to help them out to take that center that
was a loss center into a profit center.

Jay And how's it doing?

MB

Jay

MB
We're a new company. Our first beta test that we did, we did it with an event down in
that area. And I figured if we lost, it had a loss rate of 35% of those cards were not
returned at charging them $2.00 that that was a good profit margin. The loss was 66%.
Which was really good and we ended up taking, what we ended up doing was not just
leaving it right there. We said. Okay, the hotel casino industry is one market, what about
the rest of the hotels. How can we provide this out here?

And what I did is, I designed the cards now to be more specific to the events around the
area, and I've been out on the road working with the Olympics to design these cards and
then actually we don't have them charge at that point, but we provide the cards for free
and we put everything else on there and the designs that they approve of, and then I was
selling ad spots in the corners of the cards.

I'm intrigued. What's the bottom line, first of all? What do you think it's going to be
worth? And second, what's the implication and the lesson to everybody here?

Well the bottom line is: One--and you've talked about it--look for the void and fill it. And
don't be so narrow-minded that there aren't other ramifications that can be used for in that
product. And what has come back on that whole thing is it was nice when I was on the
break, there was a message for me from Southwest Airlines, and they decided to go
ahead and purchase $500,000 worth of key print on there, which was unexpected. I
thought I had lost that. And so you have to have the tenacity to go out there and always
be looking for the thing that doesn't exist and not assume just because somebody else
hasn't done it yet or that it has been done or it can't be done. Because we've gotten a lot of
resistance to that. And the people that I dealt with in the outside industry, they all wanted
to send me to their media buyers. And that was frustrating, because the media buyers
really didn't want to deal with me.

Jay

So who's the real decision maker in your concept? Who's making the decision at the
client level?

MB

Actually, the decision comes from the head of marketing. What I had to do was educate
their own marketing people on what we were trying to do and how it was being
presented, because they weren't understanding it.

Jay Bottom line again there, is what?

MB
Jay

Well, the lessons that I got out of it was: To stay focused, not to lose sight of what the net
result is. And what that result is, is an outcome for your customer first--and then you get
the benefit of it--back on it. And the next one is: Don't give up when you think that it's
gone and it's over because that's when...I never expected this call to come back.

Good.

END OF TAPE 1

SESSION TWO TRANSCRIPTS

Jay

Welcome back. Now we're into session two. You should have answered all the questions
in the survey. It should have been very revealing. Was it? Ordinarily, when people do
that survey, they discover at least a half dozen opportunities or more they can take
immediate advantage of. Did you? I hope you did.

Let me go through with you the key questions I asked you there to tell you what the
implications are and give you a little bit of method behind my madness and tell you why
I did it. I think it will help you get excited about your business and yourself., and it will
make everything we're going to be doing over the next six weeks make better sense to
you.
You'll remember that one of the first questions I asked you was about what initially got
you started in your business. Did you wonder why I asked it? Well, I'm interested in the
motivation. I'm interested in what event may have happened. The key to making the next
six weeks the most powerful and profitable six weeks of your entire business life is
turning up the passion and the excitement you have about your business and your
customers--it's that simple. Once we turn up or turn on your level of enthusiasm for what
you're doing and who you're doing it for, you can't help but do it better, do it faster, do it
easier and do it more effectively. So the first question is my way of helping you
reconnect your self with why you got into this business in the first place.

Normally there was a passion you felt, a passion about what you did, a passion about
what you wanted to do for others. Sometimes, after a few years, that passion gets dulled,
your enthusiasm gets diffused. Normally, this is the easiest issue to resolve. All you have
to do is reconnect yourself with the reason and the purpose you got into the business or
the profession in the first place. So, hopefully, when you answered that question a bell
rang. It became evident to you. Hey, I've forgotten how excited I was when I started my
business or profession. All I'm trying to do with this question is reconnect you with your
own enthusiasm and passion once again. Did I do it? I hope so.

I ask you about what attracted your customers or patients or clients in the first
place--what process, what method, what action you used. Why? Because so many people
start a business or profession based on a really powerful and effective process of
attracting customers and then, as the business matures and they get a number of
customers or clients or patients, they stopped doing the very process that worked for
them. By revisiting the very process you used to start and succeed with that business or
profession in the first place, ot~en times you'll discover or rediscover that you've
abandoned one of the most powerful and profitable business-building concepts you ever
had. Why? No good reason. You just got complacent. Did that happen for you? It does
with a lot of people.

When I ask you about why customers bought from you originally, that has to do with the
value, the benefit, the result they perceive you deliver to them. Many times when a
company or professional practice starts leveling off or plateauing, I discover that the real
reason that the customer stopped buying has nothing to do with competition, has nothing
to do with price---it has everything to do with the fact that the business owner or the
professional has stopped providing the same level of benefit, and the customers stopped
getting value. When anyone stops getting value, they stop dealing with a company or
profession. It's that simple.

So the purpose of that question was to cause you to revisit the value, the result, the
benefit, the entire concept of what service did I really provide in the first place and ask
yourself, Am I still providing that service today at that same level? Is it still evident? Are
they still getting the same or increased value? I bet it caused you to think very carefully
about that issue, didn't it?

Let's go on. I asked you a question that probably is the most revealing single question
you'll ever ask yourself. It had to do with what the primary method of generating
customers or patients or clients your business was built on.

Now, I ask you that question for a couple of reasons. Until and unless you understand
where your business has come from so far, you can't possibly build your business to a
higher level of growth or sales or profitability the easiest way possible. So many business
owners and professions don't understand how easy it is to improve their business
overnight just by expanding upon the one basic method of business building they've
already been using.

My goal in asking you this question was to have you challenge yourself to see how much
higher is high. Now, don't worry about it right now. We're going to get into showing you
and demonstrating how many easier ways you have of using the same business-building
process but expanding it. But I want you to question, I want you to challenge, I want you
to recognize that there's so much more you can get out of the same process. Another
important realization I want you to make for yourself, and it might be a little bit
embarrassing but very exciting when you realize the opportunity in it, is that most
businesses I look at have never identified where their customers are really coming from.
That's very different than what their primary mode of business-building or marketing or
selling activities are. Let me explain. You might spend most of your time, you might
spend most of your money, you might spend most of your manpower running ads or
doing mailings or sending salespeople in the field. And yet, if you analyze the true origin
of most of your customers or clients or patients, you'll find that they actually resulted
from referrals. I see this a lot in the real estate business, it's a really great illustrative
example. I work with 400-500 different real estate agents and the first question I'll
always ask them is: Where do most of your customers or clients come from? Most of
them don't know. I'll ask them to go back and reconstruct. Not unlike what I asked you
to do with the survey.

When they do that, they'll come back and they'll say, well 80%-90% of my customers
came from referrals. And I'll ask them a real revealing question. I'll say, well okay,
referrals are a huge part of where your business comes from, right? And they'll say,
right. And then I'll say, well how much of your time and your activities do you spend on
referral marketing? And they'll look at me and they'll say, well none. And I'll say, well it
seems like there's something wrong with this picture, what do you think? And they'll say,
well yes, I guess so.

And I'll say the same to you. If you identified that the bulk of your business results from
something other than where you spend the bulk of your time and your efforts and your
money and your manpower, that simple realization acted upon could improve your
business massively overnight by getting you to redirect your efforts and your attentions
and your resources on the area of business building that's producing the greatest result
for you. So, the purpose of that question was also to get you to discover, not only where
are you putting the bulk of your efforts, but, more importantly, from where are you
getting the bulk of your results.

One of the next questions I asked you had to do with how well-connected you are
directly to your customer or client or patient at the selling level. And by that I mean, at
the point that a sale or a purchase is transacted. Why is that important? Because, as you'll
discover as we go through the next six weeks, the most important key to growing any
business is understanding the value or result or benefit or advantage a customer or
patient or client is seeking and giving them more of that. You can't give them more of
the advantage or the result they're after if you're not really well-connected.

So my question was designed to give you the chance to think through--am I really in
touch with my customer, personally, not through three levels of management? If you are,
that's great.

This is going to be a cakewalk. If you're not, that's no problem, as long as you are
willing to allocate time on a regular basis to either go out in the field, talk directly to
people who call in, call out and talk to your customers--but get connected to them. And
this is wonderful, because you're going to find the more connected you are to your
customer or client, the more enjoyable the selling or the business or the professional
process becomes to you. This connection ties into everything we're going to work on,
every technique you'll be discovering. It's all about getting greater connectivity between
you, your customer, and getting that customer more of the result they're after.

Connectivity is what every relationship is built upon. It's nothing more than basically
getting in touch, feeling what your customers feel, seeing life the way they see life,
looking at the situation from their point of view on their side of the desk, looking at their
life, understanding their hopes, their dreams, their fears. It's a very powerful shift in the
way you do business, but one which will put so much more enjoyment, excitement and
effectiveness into everything you do and everyone who does it with you.

The next question that I asked you had to do with where your customers specifically
come from. And this is more of a demographic question than a marketing question. By
that I mean this: I'm not asking in this question what method you're using to get the
customers. I'm asking you literally, where exactly do your customers reside? And by
reside, I mean this: If they are consumers, what do you know about them that identifies
them as a prime target audience?
Do you know, for example, that they live in a certain geographic area? Do you know, for
example, that they possess certain kinds of material items, like automobiles? Maybe they
all drive Lexus and Cadillacs and Mercedes and BMWs? If you sell
business-to-business, do you know--for example--what kind of industries or what's
called SIC codes (and this is a reference to the kind of identification you can make or a
specific kind of generic industry) .what SIC codes they tend to--more often then not--be
existing in? If you sell professional services, do you know what kind of individual or
business entities tend to be most receptive or most qualified or in a situation or in an
activity or at a time in their development when your service is most appropriate for
them?

Why is this important? Because until you know where to direct your efforts the most
productively, you cannot possibly give yourself and your business the highest and the
best use and outcome of the time, the effort and the attention. In other words, knowing
where your best and highest source of probable new customers exists is where you
should be targeting your new efforts.

Make sense? Right. But most people don't. They'll run an ad in the newspaper when 99%
of the readers aren't the targeted audience. When in fact, you can identify by writing the
right list--100% of those people. And do a direct mailing that could be dollar for dollar,
effort for effort, time for time, 10 or 100 times more effective for one-tenth or
one-hundredth of the cost.

I know I may sound a little bit like an evangelist sitting here basically on my sermon
about this, but truthfully, my goal is to make every action you take, every effort you
make, every opportunity you decide to take advantage of, give you the highest multiplied
result and effect possible that cannot possibly occur unless you concentrate your efforts
only on those prospects that have the highest probability of producing results and
becoming customers for you.

So, if I sound excited about this, it's because I am. Because this one realization, this one
simple understanding can make everything you do produce two or three or five times
greater effect for this same effort or less, and often times, most of the time for less
money. So I hope you're excited too, because you should be.

Another question I asked you, which is critically important, had to do with who else
benefits from your success, excluding your customer and excluding your employees and
excluding your family members.

What's the meaning of this? Simply this: In business, if you practice the principles I'll be
sharing with you throughout this program, you'll understand that there is no rule,
certainly no law, that says you have to do it alone. You don't. There are a number of
businesses out there that are as motivated, if not more so, than you are to help grow your
business for you. You just never recognized that motivation, and asked them or taken
advantage of their willingness to help. And that willingness means they can help finance,
they can bring people into your business, all at no cost or risk to you.

What am I talking about? Ask yourself this question. If you grow customers, if you grow
sales, if you grow volume, if you grow more business, who else grows with you? First of
all, your suppliers grow, right? When you add more business, when you add more sales,
when you acquire more customers, you need to acquire more products, more services,
more raw materials to create the product or service you sell to those customers. The
people who supply you now will have to supply you with more.

What does that mean? It means that they have a direct and a substantial investment and
motivation to see you succeed at a higher level. The moment you realize this, you have
within your grasp, an opportunity you can take enormous advantage of. You will
discover, before you've completed this program, that you have at least two or three, and
very probably a half dozen or more businesses right now who would be extremely
willing and eager to help you grow your business without any investment or risk on your
part.
Three real world examples Let me share with you three real-world examples so you
can see what I mean. I know a printer who regularly funds advertising and pays a portion
of the cost of new salespeople for a number of his customers because he's learned that
the more sales they generate, the more printing he does, and he stimulates their growth
for them. I know a dental supply company that makes available to all the dentists they
sell to marketing consultants, tax accountants, management consultants. Because they
want their dentists to build their practices. Because they've learned when those dentists
build their practices, they buy more dental supplies.

I know an envelope manufacturer who has found that the only way he can grow his
business is by helping people find better ways to use envelopes. So he makes available
copywriters who come up with sales campaigns and sales ideas free of charge as long as
the people will test them. Because he's found when they test these ideas--a number of
them work. And companies buy hundreds of thousands and millions of envelopes from
him because of it.

Does this give you any ideas? Look around your business right now. Ask yourself: How
many of my suppliers would be motivated to help me grow my business more because it
will directly benefit them at a very high level? And if you're an independent
professional, you have the same opportunities. There are a number of suppliers of goods
or services that can be very easily motivated to contribute dramatically and substantially
to your marketing and your selling and your business building activities.

But don't stop there. There's a whole additional side to the opportunity. So far we've
talked about who directly benefits from you selling your product. After you've sold that
product or service or professional services to a customer, ask yourself this question:
When I create a new customer for my business or my profession, who else have I
indirectly created a new customer for? What other businesses or professionals will then
be able to sell their products or their services to my customer?

When you've identified the answer to that question, you have recognized an entire new
realm of businesses and people who will be eager and willing to help you grow your
business at a higher level then you've ever dreamed possible. Why? Because it's in their
self-interest. Not only will they be eager and willing to fund or invest or pay for
advertising and salespeople and promotions and retail displays and all kinds of other
selling opportunities you'll want to take advantage of, they'll be equally as willing and
eager to share with you very, very generously, more generously, I might point out, then
you probably even expect, a very large portion of the profits and the sales that your
activities end up producing for them.

Now we'll get into a much more detailed explanation of how and why and where this is
most applicable as we get on in the program, but I want you to be aware of it, and that's
why I asked you that question. Let me give you a couple of real world examples so you'll
understand this. I've known many real estate agents who recognize that mortgage
bankers, title companies, moving companies, swimming pool manufacturers, fence
companies, landscape architects, driveway pavement companies and remodelers
benefitted incredibly when they sold somebody a house. So they were able to contact all
of those people and easily get them to help fund 100% of their advertising and their
selling and their promotional activities.

Why? Because they saw the self-interest. I know a clothing store who sells very
expensive, upscale fashion clothing. They have a standing arrangement with an upscale
jewelry store, with an upscale shoe store and with a BMW dealer to help them run all
their advertising, because they share their customer names and they recommend those
companies to them.

I'll give you a couple of professional examples so that you understand that it's not limited
just to retail or just to wholesale or just to manufacturing or just to some other kind of
general business services, I can give you dozens and dozens but I don't want to get into it
too deep yet. We'll get into some more specifics as we get further in the program. But I
know of a number of CPAs who realize that when they get a client, attorneys get clients
from them, and financial planners get clients from them, and stockbrokers get clients
from them, and banks get clients from them, and trust offices get clients from them. So
they go to all those professionals and all of those entities and they get them to contribute
resources, funding, activities, time, expertise, written materials that they create, to help
the CPA get clients. I've seen numbers of these professionals combine services to put on
training programs and seminars that attracted customers they all benefitted from.

You owe it to yourself, no matter what business or profession you might be in, to
identify what other companies or professionals will benefit, as much if not more than
you will, by you adding new customers to your business. And, once you've identified
who they are, contacting them and making arrangements for them to cooperate, to
collaborate, to co-fund or 100% fund and finance some, most, all or even more of the
marketing or selling activities that you are currently doing.

Again, I'll get into this in more detail as we move through the program, but I asked you
this question so it would stop you, so you would realize, wow, I don't have to go it alone.
In fact, there are so many other people who will be more motivated than I will to see me
become successful. Do you realize it's a lot easier than you ever imagined possible? I
asked you another question in the survey that is critically important. That question was:
How many better ways could you reduce the risk of transaction or lower the barrier of
entry, or reduce the hurdle for your customer or your client or your patient, so you made
it easier for them to do business with you?

Many companies and professionals I work with, and you may be one of them, never
thought about this fact. Any time two people or companies come together to transact
business, one company is always being asked, either explicitly or implicitly by the other,
to assume or take on far more or all of the risk in the transaction. Ask yourself this
question: Are you unconsciously asking your customer or your patient or your client to
assume far more of the risk then they need to? Are you making it more difficult for them
to get started on a business-buying relationship with you? Are you making it more
difficult for them to start using your professional services because they're too
cumbersome or too expensive or too foreboding or too intimidating?

Whatever the answer to that question, you should recognize this. The simpler you make
it for someone to sample your services or your product, the less risky you make it for
them to get started in a buying relationship with you. The moment you make it easier to
buy, more people will do so. So just by having the awareness, you've automatically
increased the level of success you can expect to have. When automobile manufacturers
made it easier for people to buy, back in the original days, all you could do was write a
check for the full purchase price. That limited, severely, the number of people who could
buy a car. But when they made terms available, when they financed it, all of the sudden,
ten or a hundred times more people were able and eager to buy.

When health clubs started letting you try out a two-or-a four-week free membership,
guess what, lots more people started coming to health clubs and lots more stayed.
When software companies started letting you have a free-trial demo before you had to
spend $500 or $1000 for a piece of software, guess what, a lot, more people took
advantage and they kept it and they bought it.

Does this give you an idea? Look around your business and ask yourself this question,
and don't worry if you don't have a clear answer yet because you'll be given a lot of clear
answers when we get to the session on risk reversal. But right now, merely by becoming
aware of the fact that by taking away or eliminating risk or lowering the barrier of entry,
you automatically make it easier for more people or companies or patients or clients to
do business with you. That awareness alone guarantees your business will grow. Let's
run through a few more of the questions I asked in the survey so you'll understand that
merely by asking you to answer these questions I've begun the process of helping you
easily grow your business or professional practice.

One of the questions I asked you was: What is the biggest customer complaint about
your industry or profession? Did you wonder why I asked that question? Remember
earlier in this session we talked about turning obstacles and problems into opportunities
and possibilities?

Well, understanding and identifying problems and complaints is the easiest way
imaginable you have for growing your business. Why? Because people aren't buying
from you or your competitors because they have problems, or complaints, or
dissatisfaction. The moment you understand and identify what those problems are, and
the moment you discover and identify ways to solve them, you give your business or
your profession an advantage. A distinction that none of your competition possesses. I
asked you another question in this survey that's important. Actually they're all important,
but this one's going to be extremely important in helping you get from where you are to
where you want to be in the fastest time possible and with the least amount of effort.
The question was: What is your vision for your business? And I asked you to identify
that vision over six months, over a year, over five years and off into ten years and
beyond. The reason I asked this question was that many of the businesses and the
professions that I work with, privately, have never identified what their clear and true
vision and goal and objective really is. If you don't have a clear picture of where it is you
want to go, it's impossible to get there.

I asked you another question in that survey that had to do with the lifetime value of your
typical customer or patient or client. In other words, how much revenue and
corresponding profit will that customer or client generate for your business or
professional practice over the course of the relationship? Why is this question critically
important? Because until and unless you understand and identify accurately how much
profit or revenue a customer or client is worth to your business or professional practice,
you cannot possibly know how much money you can afford to spend to acquire a new
one.
The question we're going to talk about now is a biggy. I ask you: What is your unique
selling proposition or USP? And don't confuse that with UPS. The USP is the reason
why your customers buy from you instead of your competitors. Or the reason why your
clients or your patients come to your practice instead of your colleagues. Most of the
companies, and a very large number of the professional practices I work with privately,
have never defined or established any uniqueness, any specific advantage, or any reason
why their customers gain more benefit by favoring them over their competitors. Or if
they have, they never tell anybody about it.

I asked you two questions in the survey that were tied very closely together. One had to
do with what your customers really want, and I asked you to be very, very specific.
Don't just say quality, service, dependability, but be very specific in denominating and
expressing and identifying the solution or benefit or result or advantage or protection
they were looking for.

I also asked you the question about what problem does your product or service solve for
the customer. I mentioned this a little earlier, but I want to underscore it now. Whatever
business or profession you are involved in, recognize this fact. Your customer or your
client or your patient is not buying a product. They are not buying a service, either. What
they are buying, knowingly or otherwise, is a result, a benefit, an advantage, an
improvement, a level of protection in their life or their business or enjoyment or prestige.
The moment you realize that simple distinction, you have an enormous advantage over
your competitors who don't realize.
Now in my experience, that usually means about 95% of all the businesses or colleagues
you compete against. But some of them might know this. Most of them who do realize it
don't begin to take it to its fullest application.

You have a double advantage. This very moment now you realize what 95% of your
competitors probably don't realize, and by the time you complete this program you will
have applied this simple understanding at such a high level that your customers or clients
will have no choice but deal with you because they'll see self- servingly that you otter
them a greater benefit or advantage than any other company or professional they are
likely to do business with. Now I hope you're starting to see the method, so to speak,
behind my madness, the reason I ask you to answer these questions in the survey. I think
it's worthwhile at this point for you to go back and review all the other answers we
didn't talk about in the light of what I've shown you.

Think about the implications and the possibilities and the instant opportunities those
answers make possible for you, and then we'll continue. Now that we've taken a closer
look at the answers to these questions and the implications those answers hold for you
and your business or professional practice, I think you're better prepared to take fullest
advantage of the opportunities and options that have always been available to you but
you've never really understood, within the range of these three ways you've got to grow
your business or professional practice.

The only three ways to grow a business

So we're going to return to that now. We're going to go really deeply into each area and
explore and identify and examine all the options and opportunities you have available to
you within each category, and then we're going to help you identify the most powerful
and preferred options you should be using first in your specific business or professional
practice operations or activities.

So let's start out by quickly reviewing what those three ways to grow a business or
professional practice are, once again. You'll remember: Number 1. You can increase
your number of customers or clients. Number 2. You can increase your average
transaction value, that's the size of the sale or the transaction you do each time with a
customer. Number 3. You can increase your frequency of purchase, getting customers to
buy more often, more things from you.

Okay, you have those three ways. Before we go into these in detail, you need to first
recognize a very critical fact. Every industry you could look at, and that includes your
own, basically depends on one primary method or way to generate almost all their
customers or clients. But you don't have to be limited. There is no law that restricts your
ability to only one method, particularly one method which is less effective than other
alternatives you have available. What we're going to do now is identify, explore and
examine the entire scope of opportunities and options you have available to you and your
business within each category of those three ways to grow a business or professional
practice.

Let's look at the first of the three ways. Increasing your number of customers or clients.
This is the most obvious way for most people, but it isn't necessarily the easiest. But it's
the approach almost everyone turns to when they have the need or desire to grow any
kind of enterprise. To expand your vision, your awareness of what's possible, let's look
at the basic methods 1 recommend and see which ones offer you a multiplied result over
the method you're currently using. Then, at the close of this session, I'll give you some
very specific guidelines for getting started. So now, here are 12 ways you can increase
the number of customers, leads, prospects or inquiries you generate. The first is referral
systems. Getting your customers or clients to recommend and encourage other people
they associate with to seek out your products or services.

In order to help you appreciate the power and opportunity that referral systems offer to
your business or practice, I want to take you back to an experience you had and enjoyed
in your own business or personal life. Can you remember how much you enjoyed
sharing a great value, or experience, or company, or product, or service, or professional
that you were dealing with, with someone in your life who was important to you, a
friend, a colleague, a co- worker, an employee, an employer, a relative, a neighbor?
Remember how great you felt when they called you up and told you how happy and
appreciative they were that you introduced them to that company or to that professional?
Well you owe it to your customers or clients to give them the same opportunity with
respect to your products or services. It does three very powerful things for you, for them
and for the people they will refer to you.

First of all, it helps them better appreciate the advantage, result, benefit and value they
derive each and every time they buy or transact business with your company or practice.
And that's important because it connects them and bonds them much tighter to you and
your company.

Number two, it gives them an opportunity to give back to you in a reciprocating way the
appreciation they feel for the protection, the advantage, the pleasure, the benefit, the
qualitative superiority they feel they get from the product or service you provide them
with. Third, it gives them the opportunity to protect or improve, or enrich the life of
someone or someones, plural, and it's not uncommon when you do this that you'll get
multiple referrals from a customer or client, it gives them this opportunity to do an
incredibly noble and beneficial service to people in their lives they care deeply about,
because they know when they refer those people to your company or your professional
practice, they are increasing their well being, they are improving the quality of those
people's lives.
What I want you to understand is that the key ingredient in making referral systems work
is that your customer or client must understand and appreciate the value and benefit they
receive from the product or service or purchasing transaction they do with your business
or practice.

Now as you listen to this, you might be asking yourself some pretty serious questions,
such as: Am I getting the best possible value or benefit or advantage I humanly can to
my customer or client? Do I genuinely care about my customers and clients' best
interests and needs and desires at the level I should or could? Am I extending myself and
every filament of my being and my company and my staff and my services to those
customers? Am I genuinely thinking about their interest always above my own?
Because, it is all about them, not you.

We'll get into this issue and area over and over and over again throughout these sessions,
but this is one of the most critical and the most powerful distinctions you'll make in the
six weeks we spend together. It's all about them, not you. Anyhow, I'm bringing this up
to introduce you to the enormous force and power you will harness when you realize
how much more effective everything you do in your business will be when you start
focusing all your thoughts and all your actions on what's going to be in the best interest
of the customer or client, not yourself or your company. Now you may already be doing
that, to some extent, and if you are, I commend you.

But this session is about getting you to a much higher level, multiplying many times
over the effectiveness, the profitability and the impact of everything you do. And
everything you do from this day forward, will be much more effective the moment you
shift your focus and attention and interest from yourself and your business to the needs
and desires of your customers or clients. Referral systems are surprisingly easy to set
up and require very little extra effort, cost or time. They represent the most immediate
source of increased customers you have available in your business or practice.

Now I want to introduce to you a client of mine from Australia, named Paddy Lund. He
is a dentist. A truly unique man. And his approach to referral systems has transformed
the thinking and positioning of over 2000 business owners and professionals I've worked
with around the world. Now in Australia, the average dentist works 60 hours a week
and makes about $60,000 a year, Australian, which is only about $45,000 U.S. So they
work very, very hard and make very, very little.

Paddy Lund is totally different. He works 23 hours a week, max, and averages making
approximately $400,000 a year, Australian, and he has more fun and enjoyment then any
dental professional I've ever met. As you listen to this interview, recognize that it's not
about dental practices, it's about you and your business or your practice. Now let's listen
very closely. PL I only take people by referral. And the way that I started doing that
was initially by asking people for referral, and that was fairly scary, to say to somebody,
would you ask one of the ..... Jay It was awkward too, wasn't it? PL It's awkward,
it's scary, it's intimidating and makes you feel a little small somehow. And then
somewhere, and I'm sure somebody gave me the idea, but I can't remember who, but
thank you whoever gave it to me, somebody said, or some little Pat O'Brien said, what
about if you tell people that I'd better refer people to you.

Jay What if you make that a condition of doing business with you is what you're
saying.

L Yeah, when someone becomes a client of mine, I sit them down and I say, hey,
before you can become a client of mine, we have this little bargain that I would like to
run past you and one part of the bargain is that I owe an awful lot of things to you
because you've decided to become a client of mine. And the other part of it is, because
you've become a client of mine, you owe me some things, and one of the things that you
owe me is to refer to me two people of comparable quality to yourself and...
Jay Because he's raising them to a height of acknowledgment, their specialty. They're
not the norm. His clients are a special elite breed. Right?
PL They are special because they've been referred by other clients of mine.
Jay Similar to them.
PL Yeah, similar to them, of comparable quality to them. So I say, I require you that
you do this before you join the practice. And when I first said that, I thought, it's a bit
scary, I'll probably get 50% and that's pretty good. And in actual fact the common
response is, can I only refer you two people? Which I thought was an interesting
response.
Jay Why do you think? Do you think they responded that way because they don't know
the rules and if you tell them these are the rules and you lead them, they would say...
PL I try and destroy their concepts of what it means to be in my particular business...
Jay Tell everybody how you do that.
PL Well, whenever we run a business, we tend to copy the other people that run the
same sort of business.
Jay Why?
PL Because this is just the way it is we do it in...
ay There's no reason for it, though, is there?
PL I don't think so. But we act as if there is a law like that in Australia. We act as if we
have to run our business exactly the same as everybody else has run their business. But
we don't and nothing happens awfully if we don't run our business in the same way. So I
decided to destroy people's paradigms by changing my way of business. And one of the
things that I did was ! locked my front door so that people couldn't get in. And that
makes it a little different. Does it make it different? Yeah. Jay Do they have to ring a
buzzer?

PL You got to ring the bell. And there's a little sign on the door that says, Thank you
for calling, we're inside, but we can't do much unless you've been referred by someone
who's already a client of ours. So if you've been referred or you're a client of ours, please
ring the bell. Otherwise, if you have a major problem, we'll try and find somebody who
will help you, but we won't help you .....Yes, it does. Yeah. If you ...yourself to be
exclusive, people tend to want to get it. It's really weird, isn't? That's part of it. Yeah. I
think you've made the point I want, but let me put an add-on on it and you can be a vivid
illustration. I submit to you that if you don't reveal yourself, nobody will. Don't you
think, Paddy?
PL Oh absolutely.
Jay But when you do and you don't do it, you got to do it with finesse and you got to
do it with education. You got to do it nurturing way. They can't respect you if you don't
give them a basis for that, can they?
PL No. If we don't love ourselves, it's hard for other people to love us. Is that okay?
Jay That was great. Thanks, Paddy.

That was quite a powerful interview, don't you agree? Before I introduce you to a few
other ways my clients have used referrals, I want to make certain you grasp the full
impact of what I think Paddy Lund has to teach you.

Number one, it's look at your customers or clients as dear and valued friends. Treat them
with the concern and respect for their well-being and importance that you would have for
any other valued friend.

Number two, respect and revere the value and the benefit and the impact what you do or
what you sell or the service you render has on the life of that customer or client you deal
with.

Third, hold yourself and your business or practice to the highest possible level of
performance in behalf of your customer or client's best interest. Okay. Now let's look
at some other ways clients of mine have successfully developed referral systems. I
have a client who is a public speaker.

0% of his business is referral generated. He speaks for all kinds of groups and
associations. He has found that the best way for him to continuously generate referrals is
for him to keep himself constantly in the mind and awareness of his customers. In order
to do that, he has a very comprehensive listing of all the issues and interests his
customers have and he continually finds and sends to those customers valuable and
important information, books, articles, reports, tapes, interviews, video recordings on
subjects of keen interest to them.

They don't just receive Christmas cards and birthday cards, although they do get all of
those. Each one has a very specific and personalized reference to that customer of
something they're interested in. His strategy is very simple, he understands that if he
thinks about the interest and needs and well-being of his past customers at a higher and
more continuous level than anybody else in their lives, he's going to constantly be at the
top of their awareness. So when they're with people, when they're socializing, when
they're playing golf, when they're having dinner with friends or colleagues, if the
opportunity ever presents itself and someone ever mentions or discusses any area where
my client has any suitability, his customers are automatically predisposed to introduce
my client to anybody that's in earshot.

They can't help it because my client is constantly in their minds. He's always thinking
about them. If they're interested in exercise, he sends them exercise articles in books and
videos. If they're interested in sports, he sends them anything he can find that's useful
and valuable, not filler. The key to this whole process is not just going through the
motion, it's being connected to your customer and sending them information that has
genuine value constantly. Do that and nothing else and you can't help but get all kinds of
referrals because you'll be the most valuable and the most thought-about person in your
customer or client's mind. So that's the way that person built his referral system.

Another person, Alex, is a tax preparer. He does his very simply. Every year he contacts
every one of his clients and he tells them that if they will send him two referrals who
will have him do their tax returns for them, Alex will give the referring client a 50%
discount this year on their tax service. I guess you would say enlightened self-interest is
his referral secret, but he's grown his business three-times over since he's started this
referral system and his clients love him for doing it.

I have another client who found that in his business, a product business, his customers
were so happy, almost elated, at the time of purchase with the decision he made that they
were only too happy when he asked them to give him two or three referrals right there on
the spot. He would just give them a form and say who else do you know who'd like to
have this benefit? Who else do you know who could utilize and enjoy the benefits and
advantages of the product you just bought? Then he would guide them gently to help
them recognize and remember who, in fact, they did know, in their personal life, in their
business, in their neighborhood who would, in fact really appreciate or benefit from the
same product? It was no effort to get these very elated customers to sit down right there
and give him the name, the address, the phone number, and to allow my client to use
their name to encourage the referrals to buy from him. Not a hard process to do if you do
it.

Most people don't realize how excited and motivated and confirmed their customers and
clients are at the point of purchase and how important it is to those clients to get
confirmation. One of the greatest forms of confirmation you can give to a customer or
client is the opportunity for them to give the same benefit or joy or advantage or
protection or result to somebody else in their life who is important to them. Anyhow,
that's how that client does it.
Another client of mine owns a photography studio and, whenever a customer is finished
with a photo session and buys their pictures, they are asked by my client for referrals of
other people they know who might also be interested and benefit by having photo
sessions for themselves or their family or their children. The incentive my client offers
for receiving the referral is he will give the referring customer one or more large
beautiful additional prints.

He also offers to give the people they refer to him a substantial price advantage he does
not offer to outside customers, so a significant value is given to the referred party by the
referring customer, one that is genuinely appreciated by all parties concerned. A
simple process: win-win-win. Easy to do.

It's added 40% a year to my customer's bottom line. It takes no extra time. It's just a few
words you say differently at the point of purchase, and the difference is a 40% increase
in sales and profits for him. What could it be for you in your business or practice? The
important point is that your business or practice absolutely can utilize referral systems to
immediately increase the number of customers and the corresponding amount of profit
you do every single day for the rest of your business life. And it's so easy and simple and
it costs you nothing more than a shift in your thinking and a slight modification in the
things you do and the words you say.

Method number two: Acquiring customers or prospects at a break-even or slight loss and
making substantial profits on the back-end. This is one of the most overlooked and
under-utilized methods of customer growth and generation you have available to you,
but it can't work for you until you first recognize a very important fact. If your business
or practice is one that has a high probability of customers coming back, over and over
again, to repurchase frequently from you, the same or different products or services, you
owe it to that business or practice to do everything within your power to get customers
into the buying stream as quickly and easily as you possibly can.

When I work privately with customers in Los Angeles, I put them through a process
called Identifying the marginal net worth or life-time value a customer has to their
business. This is really important to them and it's important to you also because until and
unless you first identify and understand exactly how much combined profit a customer
represents to your business for the life of that relationship, you can't begin to know how
much time, effort and most importantly, expense you can afford to invest to acquire that
customer or client in the first place. Let me clarify what I mean.

Many, many businesses, and I suspect yours is one, and if it isn't, it will be when we get
to another area in this session called the Back End, you business is such that a substantial
amount of the profits your business or practice makes results from customers or clients
who keep repurchasing from you, over and over again--over the months, over the years,
over the decades. Obviously, all those repurchases put a substantial amount of increased
profit into your bank account and into your pocket.

Very little of that profit would be there if you didn't bring those customers or clients into
your business or practice in the first place. What I want to share with you now are
some actual examples and stories of how a few really interesting companies increased
their customers and profits merely by shifting their focus away from trying to make a
huge profit on the acquisition of a new customer or client and, instead, were content to
make their real profit on all the repeat purchases that resulted from those new customers
and clients. The classic example that comes to everybody's mind is the record clubs and
the tape clubs and the CD clubs.

Why would you imagine a big, astute company like the Columbia Tape or Record Club
or The Book of the Month Club would possibly be willing to send you six or 10 or 12
tapes or CDS or books for six cents or a dollar initially? Do you think it's because they
really lose money long-term on you? Or, do you think it's because they recognize that for
every 10 or every 110 people coming in, a large number will keep buying over and over
and over again in the future at full rate? So they want to do everything possible to make
it easy and attractive to get you started buying and using their service in the first place,
and they do tens of millions of dollars a year from the people that come in on that
break-even proposition.

A client of mine in Australia--by now you probably realize I spend a lot of time down
there because I've got some wonderful entrepreneurs and professionals who have done a
lot of breakthrough work and have grown their businesses mightily by following these
same principles and practices--but a company down there I've worked with is in the
construction business. They are really a large firm. They make it a matter of practice that
the first job they do with any new customer, they do at a break-even to their company.
And they make certain that the customer knows they're not making any money and
they're doing it just to demonstrate and prove their ability and their performance. Eighty
percent of the people that do the first job with them come back over and over and over
again, and they do $50 million (Australian) a year, almost all of which is the result of
bringing customers in at a break-even initially.

Another client of mine does $6 million a year in air-conditioning and heating

maintenance repair work and the entire business is based on a very simple premise. Two
times a year he does a mailing to all his customers and he does advertising to the outside
market offering a $19.95 tune-up and cleaning service for your air-conditioning or
heating system. In the winter he, obviously, offers to do your heating system; in the
summer or springs, he offers to do your air- conditioning system. He only charges
$19.95 for the service. Quite frankly, it costs him about $30.00 to actually perform the
service. Why in the world would he lose nearly $10 on every customer who responds?
Because he has discovered, after analyzing the results of what happens when he runs this
promotion, that 50% of the people having a service done have an immediate additional
problem that needs to be repaired with their air-conditioning or heating system that
results in a minimum of $125 additional service charge that is very profitable that occurs
right at the same time the tune-up is being performed. So he makes profit. Even though
he loses $10.00 on the initial service, he makes a very handsome profit before he ever
leaves the home.

Number two, he has discovered that half of all the new people having the service
performed for the first time come back over and over again as regular, full-paying repair
customers over the years that follow. Half of his business, over $2.5 million worth of
new customers result from these $19.95 small-loss based acquisition programs. Let me
share with you one more.

A coin company I worked with in the Midwest built a $500 million a year investor base
by offering people the chance to buy the first coins at a break-even. They made no profit.
They actually lost $10 because they gave every customer buying those coins about, $100
at retail value, $10 at manufactured cost, books and reports that educated them, that gave
them a basis upon which to consider and evaluate whether coin investing was right for
them. They got 50,000 people the first year they did it to buy the coins at a break-even.

Of the 50,000 initial customers, 10,000 came back and bought $5,000 worth of
additional coins from that firm within six months at full margin. Of those 10,000 people,
2000 people came back and bought $10,000 or more additional coins from that company
at full margin. Of those 2000 people, 500 came back and bought at least $50,000 of
coins, all before the first year was over, and approximately 2000 of those people kept
buying over and over, and over again. The result was tens of millions of dollars in profit
that resulted from 50 thousand people who were acquired at a slight loss initially.

Method number three for increasing your number of leads, prospects, inquiries and
customers is guaranteeing purchases through risk reversal. I want to remind you again of
a very important fact of life I mentioned earlier in this session. Any time two people
come together to transact business, one person is always asking the other to take on or
assume more of the risk than they do. If you're asking your customer or client to assume
the risk in purchasing your product or service, a lot of them won't do it.

nd a lot of your customers won't begin to buy at anywhere close to their capacity to
purchase because they don't want to take on all that risk. So the key here is to recognize
that if you can reduce or eliminate altogether the burden of risk on the transaction for
your customer or client, a lot more people will buy from you and they'll buy a lot more
and a lot more often.

As you look at guaranteeing purchase and reversing the risk, understand this fact. What
you're really doing is lowering the hurdle, reducing the barrier of entry, making it more
advantageous to buy from you than not to buy. When I introduce the concept of risk
reversal or guaranteeing the purchase to most people, they shudder and they're fearful
and they say, Well, I can't guarantee the purchase. What happens if everybody I sell to
asks for a refund? I calm them down and I remind them as I would like to remind you of
two very important factors.

One, I presume the product or service you sell is a quality one. It provides value. It
provides a benefit. It creates an advantage and a very, very substantial result for the
customer or client you deal with. Am I right?

Of course I'm right or they wouldn't be buying from me in the first place. By
guaranteeing the purchase and reversing the risk, you actually help your customer or
client appreciate at a far higher level the results and the benefits your product or service
provides for them than they probably do now. And, you cause everyone in your
company to raise the standards of performance they exert in behalf of those customers
and clients. Again, win-win for everybody.

How do you guarantee purchase and reverse risk? There are many different ways. The
key here is this. If you know your product or service will provide an absolute minimum
level of result, of advantage, of measurable performance for any customer or client who
uses it, you have no fear and no problem whatsoever stating that performance guaranteed
to them. The more specific, the more measurable, the more tangible you can make the
customer or client's expectation of a very specific outcome, the more appealing your
proposition will always be to them.

Okay. Let me give you a couple of illustrations. You remember when Domino's Pizza
first started, and if you didn't get a pizza delivered to your door in 30 minutes, it was
yours free? You knew if you didn't get a hot, delicious pizza to your door in 30 minutes,
if it came an hour later and it was cold, they were the loser and not you. Do you
remember when Federal Express first started? If they didn't get the package delivered to
your door by 10:30, it was their problem and not yours? They paid, you didn't. That's
risk reversal.

Did you ever subscribe to a magazine or a newsletter and the reason you subscribed was
because they gave you a 30 or a 60 or a 90-day no-questions- asked, 100% money-back
guarantee? That's risk reversal. Before I give you some examples of how my clients
have used risk reversal to substantially grow their customers, let me remind you of one
important fact again.

The biggest single reason people don't buy products or services from companies and
professionals is they don't want to make a mistake. They don't want to look dumb. They
don't want to mess up. If you can eliminate altogether the possibility, not the probability,
but the possibility that anyone will ever screw up, that anyone will ever look bad, that
anyone will ever make a mistake that they will suffer for again, people can't help but
take advantage of your product or service in much bigger numbers. Here's a few
examples of how it's worked for my clients.

I have a large power equipment company in the south who has built a multi-
million-dollar business by telling anybody they sell to that they have five working days
after they take delivery of any large piece of power equipment to bring it back for 100%
refund, no questions asked. They've had three people in the last five years since they've
done this ask for a refund, which is the negative side, but they've had 300% increase in
business, which is the positive side. And every piece of equipment that was returned
they sold almost instantaneously to somebody else again on a no-questions asked,
five-day money-back basis.

I have an architectural firm I work with that built a thriving practice by offering any
client who ever engaged them a simple proposition. Any stage of the work they did for
that client, unless the client agreed it was superior to anybody else's work and it would
provide them with the exact design and structure they needed for their purpose, the
service was theirs free, no charge. And they don't even ask to be paid or expect to be
paid for 60 days after they render the service.

A car dealer I worked with, and one of the first to ever do this, in Las Vegas doubled
their business by offering no questions asked two-week, 100% money- back guarantee
on any new or used car purchase that anybody made with them. No dealer had ever
offered that. They stood out so favorably against and amongst every other dealer they
competed with in Las Vegas that it was no contest.

If you were going to buy a car, why in the world would you buy a car from a dealer
when you might make a mistake and regret it a week later, when if you bought a car and
regretted it you could take it right back to my client dealer and get 100% of your money
back, cheerfully, no questions asked. His volume shot up. He did have a small number
of people who did bring the cars back, but surprisingly, the vast majority didn't want
their money back, they wanted to trade up to a larger model or more luxurious one and
he actually made more profit on the people who came back and traded up than he did on
the initial sales they made to them.

I have a speech-writer client. He's one of the highest-paid speech writers in America. His
prices start at $35,000 a speech. He works exclusively for Fortune 100 companies all
across the country. He is the only speech-writer in America who absolutely guarantees
every speech he writes. In essence, when you come to him, he will not do the speech
unless the two of you agree upon what the specific result you, the client, want from his
speech. If you're a CEO addressing a group of manufacturers, you want those
manufacturers to go out and sell your product or buy your product or advocate whatever
position you got. If you're a sales manager addressing all your sales team, you want that
team to go out after your speech and really perform.

If you're an executive addressing an association, you want the members of that

association to go out and speak highly about you and your organization and start buying
your products and services instead of your competitions'. Whatever your outcome, the
speech writer sits down with you and you mutually agree on a minimum acceptable level
of results that must occur in a minimally acceptable period of time.

Until and unless those two results occur, my client, the speech-writer, refuses to be paid.
Is it any wonder that he has nearly a two-year waiting list of people trying to get him to
write for them? Number four: Host-beneficiary relationships. How would you like to be
able to tap into millions and millions of dollars of investment that dozens and dozens of
companies have made over dozens of years or decades in their customers and cost you
nothing? How would you like to be able to fully utilize and tap into hundreds of
thousands of dollars or millions of dollars of equipment, of real estate, of technical and
service people that organizations all across the country have invested dearly in? And
finally, how would you like to take fullest advantage of tens or hundreds of thousands of
customers all around your marketing area who have an enormously strong loyalty and
respect for the businesses they are currently dealing with?

How would you like to get all of those companies and professionals to direct all of their
customers and clients to start doing business with your company or practice? Well, you
can. And you can do it so easily. Again, the concept here is called host-beneficiary
relationships, and it's a simple process that's based on utilizing existing good will and
strong bonded relationships that all sorts of other companies and professionals already
have established with people who are prime prospects for your product or service?

The question you have to ask yourself is this: Who, in your marketing area--and I say
this because I don't know if you market locally or regionally or nationally or
internationally--who in your marketing area already has established a very tight, a very
high-level relationship with the same kind of people or businesses you desire to sell to?
That means who's already selling the customers you want to be reaching or the clients
you want to be serving? They would be selling them something else, something that
either goes before, goes along with, or follows the product or service that you would sell
to people.

The moment you identify who these businesses or professionals are, you're almost all
the way home. It's that easy. All you have to do is contact those companies or those
professionals and make it easy and advantageous for them to recommend their customers
or clients to you. Why would they be willing to do that? For two reasons. You
demonstrate to them why it will be in their customers' or clients' best interest because
you demonstrate to them the level of value and benefit and advantage and result that
you provide their customers that other competitors don't provide for them. And secondly,
because you give them some consideration about what they want. Remember, I said
earlier, it's all about them. It's never about you.

You ask yourself this question: What do referring companies, what do referring
professionals, what do host companies want or need? Now there's not a single answer to
this question because the answer will differ in different situations and applications.
There are many companies who are desperately searching for new profit centers, and
they haven't the slightest idea of what they should be and how to start one. You are
perfectly suited to be a joint-venture profit center for them.

There are other professionals who are very eager to try to grow their practice and they
don't know how to. You can offer them practice-building assistance in exchange for their
cooperation, recommendations and referrals. There are certain situations where you can
provide one another with reciprocating services. In other words, if they will recommend
their customers and clients to you, you'll turn around and reciprocate and recommend
your customers and clients to them. In certain situations where professionals are barred
by protocol from accepting financial consideration, you offer them other intangible
considerations they can accept--marketing assistance, management assistance, other
kinds of products or services.

Anyhow, host-beneficiary relationships are one of the most powerful methods you can
use to grow your customers or clients. I have personally used this single method to more
than double the size of customers or clients for over 1 O0 businesses and professional
practices. I am absolutely confident the same method will work wonders for your
business or practice also. So, now let me give you a few real-world examples you can
relate to as you get your mind thinking of how many different ways you can use host
beneficiary relationships in your business or professional practice. I had an investment
firm that did hundreds of millions of dollars of business a year by using relationships
they established with financial newsletters.

Why? Because they realized that people who subscribe to financial newsletters were
obviously people who had a lot of assets they wanted to invest. And by getting
newsletter publishers and editors to recognize the value my financial services client
offered to their investor subscribers, it was very easy to get them to recommend their
services to those subscribers. Tens of thousands of investor clients were generated in a
two-year period. Millions and millions of dollars of commissions were generated
because that host-beneficiary relationship was in place.

We engineered a million-dollar profit for one of our clients one time by contacting a
software firm who specialized in contact-management software. Contact- management
software, by the way, is software that helps sales companies, companies who have
salespeople, manage the contacts and keep communicating on a frequent basis with
prospects and clients. It's a very big part of the selling system today. We went to the
company who sold that contact software and got them to recommend to all their software
clients that they and their companies attend sales-training programs my client provided.
Thousands of companies attended these seminars paying a $1,000 to $5,000 apiece, and
none of them would have been there if it wasn't for the host whose recommendation they
trusted and whose direction to action they followed.

've worked with a lot of plastic surgeons who work host-beneficiary relationships with
cosmetic dentists. Why? Because both sides have patients who are concerned with their
appearance and looking better. People who go to dentists to have their appearance
improved through braces, caps, crowns and other cosmetic dentistry are perfect
prospects to have other parts of their bodies improved cosmetically, and vice versa.
People who go to plastic surgeons and have their eyes done or their faces lifted or their
noses improved are perfect prospects to have their teeth cosmetically attended to. So
they are perfect complements to one another. We have done millions and millions of
dollars of services just by getting one cosmetic professional to recommend a colleague in
a different cosmetic profession and back and forth. It's very logical. An attorney we
work with generated $3 million worth of fee income one year by following my lead and
going to a financial institution, in this case a savings and loan, and persuading them that
it was in their customers' best interest to set up trusts for their estate. It was in the bank's
best interest to help those customers set up trusts because once the trusts were
established, the bank could then sell to those customers all kind of investments,
insurance products and other financial instruments to fund those trusts with.

Consequently, the bank had enormous motivation in recommending my attorney- client

to speak for the bank at seminars the bank organized, funded, promoted and
recommended to all their customers, and which drew hundreds and hundreds of people
each time the bank promoted them. My attorney-client built a 4,000- person client base
just through this host-beneficiary process.

Method five: Advertising. You obviously know what advertising is. You see it
everywhere. Maybe you even do some of it. But the advertising I am referring to is
highly specialized. Quite frankly, most people waste the bulk of the effort and expense
they invest in advertising because they use it incorrectly. I want to talk a few minutes
about how to use advertising totally correctly, extremely effectively and in a very
targeted and rifled approach that can't help but grow your customers or clients many
times over. Let's look where advertising makes incredibly strategic sense and where it
doesn't. Once again, I believe most companies and professionals advertise inefficiently
and ineffectively. By inefficiently I mean that most companies I look at, and
professionals too, are paying to run ads in publications that are not being read by
sufficiently large enough numbers of the kind of people they're trying to reach. Now my
example obviously refers to print advertising, but the same rules apply to any advertising
medium you may use. If you run radio advertising, you could easily be using the wrong
station, the wrong day-part, the wrong time-slot. If you're on television or cable
television, you could be running on the wrong station, the wrong show, the wrong time.
So, rule one, you only advertise when what you have to say will be heard by a high
enough concentration of the people you want to be talking to.

Now let's talk about effectiveness. After you have decided you're only going to run your
advertising if you can reach a high enough concentration of real prospects, you want to
make the advertising you decide to run produce solid, continual results. Whenever you
run an advertisement, that advertisement must provide the reader or the listener or the
viewer with a self-serving advantage. Remember I said earlier, it's all about them, not
about you. They've got to be certain they are going to receive a pay-off, a benefit, an
advantage, a profit from reading or listening or watching. Or a pay-off from sending in
or coming in or calling in. It is essential that you understand there are two elements to
making your advertising productive and effective.

Element number one is it's got to be about them and their concerns and their well- being
and their advantage, not yours. Number two, you've got to offer them enough
information and education. And finally, you've got to give them some reason why they
should contact you or call you or come in or try out some product or service you are
offering. Unless your advertisement combines these two elements, self-serving
advantage for the intended prospective customer and a reason why they should take the
action of connecting with you or your business or practice, your advertising will fail. Or
at best it will be so much less effective than it ought to be. Let me give you some
examples now of how other people have used advertising very effectively and
efficiently. I have a plastic surgeon client who used to run advertising in the Los Angeles
Times newspaper. It was very expensive, inefficient and ineffective. Number one, he
paid for a million circulation when only at best a few thousand of those readers could
possibly be interested in his specific cosmetic surgery. Number two, the offer he ran was
all about him and how great he was, not how great the reader would end up looking or
how much more improved their appearance or life would be. Number three, he gave
them no reason why they should contact him.

I changed all three of those factors very quickly. Number one, we stopped advertising in
the Los Angeles Times and instead, started running our ads in what' s called LA
Magazine. Los .4ngeles Magazine is a specialized magazine that is read by a more
upwardly mobile, more appearance-conscious and more-affluent level of reader. Quite
literally, over half of those readers are exceptionally good prospects for cosmetic
surgery. Number two, we changed the advertisement to be, first and foremost, focused
on them. It was no longer about how great he was. It was all about how great you could
be if you had this surgery. Number three, we offered them a reason why they would
benefit from contacting us by offering them an invaluable videotape that explained
answers to the most common questions people typically ask and introduced a dozen men
and women who had had the actual surgery performed by my client who told firsthand
what a difference it had made in their lives. That simple change tripled the number of
patients my plastic surgeon client generated, and we cut his advertising expense in half

A financial service company I worked with had sold a very specialized form of
expensive financial annuity, used to run ads in the business section of daily newspapers.
They got very, very meager results. My first action was to stop that advertising
altogether. My next action was to arrange advertising in a number of financial
newsletters. These are publications most people would never even think to run ads in, but
100% of their readers were prime prospects for my client's products and service.

The third thing I did was change their advertising totally. Instead of running what's
called tombstone ads (and they're called that because all they are is a flat,
non-dimensional declaration ora few simple facts, in this case my client would say,
Guaranteed Return Annuities, call this number, now paying 'blank' percent.), I changed
the advertisement totally to focus, guess where, on the intended investor on what was
their best interest. I showed them how the same amount of money they were now
investing for retirement could produce for them two or three times the income and
lifestyle when they retired at 65.

And finally, we needed to get them to contact us. So we offered in it an incredible report
to help them evaluate the advantages, the questions, the answers to create for themselves
a model of how much more improved their retirement life could be if they bought one of
our products. To appreciate the impact these three simple changes made in the business
and the bottom line of my client, you should understand, the year before I started
working with him he spent twice as much money and produced a total of 2,000 clients
for his effort from the inefficient and ineffective advertising he had been doing.

When I started working with him and we stopped running ads in the wrong publications
and we stopped running ads that didn't induce the reader to want to contact us directly,
we reduced the advertising expenditure by half and produced 50,000 clients the next
year, and my client's income was multiplied ten times over.

I have another client who sells computer-based training. They used to run their ads also
in daily newspapers and they did a very meager job. They were struggling when I met
them. By evaluating with a few simple questions who and where in the world their
intended customer was, it was evident to me to move their advertising out of newspapers
and into, guess what, computer magazines. The moment we did that, every ad he ran
increased results three times over.

That was before I even changed the content. When we changed the content of the ad, we
improved results two-times over. Easy little shins and simple little changes in the way
you do things and where you do them can improve your results many times over.
Finally, I'm going to use myself as a simple example. We used to run advertisements for
our training programs. We do very expensive, $5,000, $15,000, $25,000 week-and
week-end long training programs. We ran our advertisements in the business section of
newspapers. Why? Because we thought, erroneously, that a lot of business owners read
them. After doing that for a month and a half, I realized that the number of real business
owners who read and responded from the daily newspapers is probably the lowest
possible level you could reach.

When we changed our advertising and stopped running in newspapers and instead started
running in Entrepreneur Magazine, Success Magazine, and the in-flight magazines on
the airplanes (these are the publications most likely to be read by the highest
concentration of business owners and professionals we were targeting to reach) our
results shot up almost 15 times over.

Now I think this would be a good time to stop and have you begin to apply what you've
learned in this session. So far we've covered five very effective ways to increase your
number of leads, prospects and inquiries, and thereby multiply your number of
customers. Here they are once again: Number one, referral systems; number two,
acquiring customers at break-even and making a profit on the back- end; three, risk
reversal; four, host-beneficiary relationships; and number five, highly focused and
effective advertising.

Now, here's what I'd like you to do over the next three days: Assuming you're following
the design of this program and you started with me on a Monday, this should take you
through the end of our first week together. So here we go:

1. The first thing I want you to do for me is go back and listen through this session at
least one more time. And by the way, this is a great habit to get into right from the start
and continue throughout the six weeks of the program, whether I remind you to or not.
As you listen again, please pay especially close attention to these first five ways to grow
more customers. Let the examples inspire you.

Think about how you might adapt each concept, each strategy to your business or
professional practice. Then write down your ideas in the space provided in Section Two
of your guidebook. I know you'll get significantly greater results from this program if
you do.

2. Just for fun, let's single out risk reversal because you can try it out and apply it so
easily, quickly and flexibly in virtually anything you do. No matter who you sell to and
what you sell: products, service, professional, retail, wholesale, it doesn't matter, you can
try out risk reversal right now--today. When you turn this program off, you can pick up
the phone and take the next prospect or order, you can knock on somebody's door or you
can wait for somebody to walk into your office and try out at least one guarantee, better
than risk-flee guarantee, partial guarantee and see what a difference, what an impact,
what a multiplied result it has on not only how many people say yes, but also the very
positive impact it's going to have on your bottom line. That's all I got for now. I look
forward to getting together again with you in Session 3.

SESSION THREE TRANSCRIPTS Jay

Hi, and welcome to Session 3 in the beginning of our second week of how to get from
where you are to where you want to be. I'm assuming you've completed what I asked
you to do at the close of our last session and you're beginning to get a real taste of what's
possible as you continue to apply those first five methods for increasing your number of
leads, prospects and inquiries.

I'm curious. What happened when you tried out risk reversal? Pretty powerful, wasn't it?
A lot more people said yes, and they said it with a smile and a respect for the fact that
you trusted them. They didn't have to trust you. Pretty interesting distinction, isn't it?
Let me ask you another question.

What kind of ideas did you come up with for applying the opportunities in a
host-beneficiary relationship? Did you come up with some pretty interesting companies
who are marketing products and services to the exact same type and kind of customers or
prospects you wanted to be reaching? Did you figure out a way to go to them? Suggest
some kind of a joint- strategic approach, relationship, venture? Did you call anybody?
Did you write anybody? Did you think about who might be in a position to recommend,
endorse or feed their customers or prospects or old inactive customers to you? It's a
powerful concept when you think about it. And that's only the beginning of the education
in store for you.

ow, let's move on to Method Six, which is direct mail. Direct mail is the workhorse tool
you have available to grow customers or clients in your business or practice. If you can
imagine for a moment what it would be like if you could have 1000, 5000, 10,000,
15,000, 20,000 100,000 salespeople working around the clock, 24-hour work shifts,
calling on prospect aPter prospect, making the most complete and compelling and
irresistible sales presentations possible, extending every advantage, presenting every
benefit of your product or service, introducing every advantage your product offers over
your competition, explaining how and why and where and when a prospect could use
your product or service to get themselves an incredible result in their life or in their
business.

Imagine what it would be like if you could gain entry to every otherwise inaccessible
prospect you ever wanted to reach, not just in their offices, but in their homes, not just
during the business day, but in the evenings, on the weekends, on Sundays, on holidays.
Well, that's the advantage that direct mail offers to your business or practice if you start
using it intelligently as a customer- and client-building tool. Let me give you a quick
summary of how and where and why you can and must use direct mail. First of all, let
me try to characterize for you how you must look at direct mail. It is salesmanship--or
saleswomanship--in print. And, as such, it affords you the opportunity to take your most
powerful sales presentations and turn them into a printed message you can deliver on the
desk and in the hands and into the eyes and minds of all the prospects you ever want to
reach. Direct mail gives you enormous flexibility, enormous possibilities. It allows you
to contact people and businesses your normal selling methods will not afford you the
chance to reach.

For example, let's say your business has one location and you have no salespeople out in
the field. You are limited to just the people who come to you or see your advertising. IfI
happen to read a magazine or be listening to a radio station or watching a television
show, yes, maybe I'll see your message. But if I'm not, you don't reach me, unless you
identify me, get my name, and send me a letter.

Let's say I inquire, I come into your store but I don't buy, Let's say, I call up for
information but I don't follow through. Let's say I send away for something but I don't
buy. You can send me a follow-up letter or a series of progressive follow- up letters that
build the case, that develop my understanding, that create my desire, and ultimately
transform and convert me from a suspect to a prospect to a loyal customer, just by using
a few simple procedures. Direct mail can be used in many situations.

One, it's a great way to prospect for new customers and clients, either people who come
to you or people you can send your higher-paid sales professionals out to talk to.

Two, it's an incredibly powerful means to use to follow up on people you've had initial
contact with, either in person, by phone, or by letter.

Three, it's a powerfully effective way to give you access to markets and prospects you
could not normally justify accessing. When you have a business that can only justify
selling, for example, to a very large average unit of sales-type customers, direct mail let's
you go deeper to smaller customers and further to customers outside your direct selling
area. It gives you enormous flexibility.

And as you'll learn a few sessions from now, you've always had the right to make all the
rules for how you play the game of business. It couldn't be more evident in the way you
utilize direct mail. Direct mail offers you so much flexibility, there are so many options
in the way you can use it. For example, you can use a full- blown letter along with a
brochure and a response card to try to sell your product or service, trying to get people to
send something back. You can send a little postcard just basically making a statement of
what your product or service is and trying to get them to call or come in. You can use a
tent postcard, which are two postcards together connected by perforations. One postcard
side makes the proposition, the other they tear off and put on that side their name,
address, and other critical and pertinent information you want to know, and they send it
back to you. You can do a self-mail or self-contained single proposition, all in one fell
swoop with no envelope covering it. You can do an elaborate, very richly presented,
high-profile sales presentation, and anything in between.

Now let me share with you how certain companies that I've worked with have used
direct mail very successfully to give you a few ideas of the many opportunities you have
in store for your business or practice. Keep this in mind: When you're thinking about
using direct mail, you are not limited. Just like you're not limited in any other area or
method you deal with, but you're definitely not limited in how many different ways you
can use it at one time. You can use direct mail constantly to generate leads, consistently
to follow up on prospects who call you or come in but don't end up buying. You can use
direct mail at the same time to penetrate new markets or difficult-to-reach markets. You
can do all those and so many more. Here's how a few people I've worked with have used
direct mail specifically in their business activities.

A really inventive-minded client I worked with in Seattle had a medical diagnostic

laboratory. He sold diagnostic services to physicians all over Washington State. When I
told him how much more he could be doing by using direct mail, he surprised me. He
took the easiest, simplest application and parlayed a $500 investment into $900%,000
worth of first-year new customers in business. How did he do it? It's so simple, it's
almost funny. He took a new service, a new diagnostic service his company came out
with, he summarized the service on the front of the postcard, and he made a very
irresistible offer. Remember break-even to acquire a customer that we just talked about.
Well, he did that, but he used a postcard to communicate his offer. He identified the
thousand doctors in his marketing area he was not doing business with for that service.
He made each one of them a very powerful but a very simple offer on the backside of his
postcard and 60 or 70 responded to his first mailing. A $500 investment generated not
only $900,000 in sales, but $900,000 in repeat sales that kept growing and growing. He
remailed that postcard three or four times, he built the business in the millions, and he
sold the business for an amount of money you cannot believe. I am honor-bound not to
reveal the specific amount, but it was millions of dollars, to a division of Revlon in New
York. All because he started reaching his prospects through direct mail in the form of
simple little postcards.

Give you any ideas? I'm sure you've received more than one offer from a magazine to
subscribe to it. Those offers are compelling. They give you reasons why. They tell you
about the articles. They put you in the place of what it will be like in your life once and
if and after you subscribe, and they make you an irresistible offer. They ask you to send
back a simple card but send no money now. Hurry up, pick up the phone and call an 800
number. I bet you subscribe to more than one magazine or publication that way. Well,
the newsletter industry has built a multi-hundred-million-dollar business just by using
direct mail letters that are sent to prime, targeted investor prospects romancing the
advantage and the benefits various financial newsletters will offer to those investors. Did
you ever get one? I bet you have. You've probably subscribed to more than one right
now.

A company I worked with in Australia, once again I'm taking you down-under, found
direct mail to be the most effective selling mechanism they had available to them when
they were trying to reach secretaries of chief executive officers to sell them legal forms.
They found out that they could rent lists of secretaries by going to certain publications
they knew secretaries were the prime subscribers to, and they mailed incredible letters
that talked one-on-one to that secretary, acknowledging the buying power they wielded
on behalf of their bosses.

They made a specific offer that they extended to these secretaries through these letters
and they used risk reversal to make it irresistibly appealing for the secretaries to send for
the legal forms for their businesses.

By changing their selling method from field salespeople to very targeted, rifled almost,
direct mail letters they sent out, they tripled their business and they reduced their selling
expenses by about 40%. Does that give you any ideas.'? I have a client I worked with in
the northeast who is the largest, most successful single representative in the country for
New York Life. He sells more policies every year than any other two people combined.
He makes millions of dollars and he does it all by using highly targeted direct mail
letters to business owners around New York State. A simple letter offering them a free
preview analysis and giving them the opportunity to respond discretely without risk and
without obligation to see how much of a difference certain financial services might make
on their future and in their retirement years. That simple approach, executed beautifully,
has created a seven-figure a year income for my client, who never leaves his office.
Almost all his business is transacted by telephone and overnight mail. I helped a
mortgage broker go from making $90,000 a year and spending 90% of his time driving
all over Los Angeles County to the point where he was able to stay in his office 95% of
his day and just send out highly placed letters every day of every week of every month
of every year, letters that went to targeted home- owners who were in perfect position to
refinance, and he was able to generate for himself a $250,000-a-year income without
ever knocking on any doors, without ever cold calling on any prospects, without ever
leaving his office except, and this is hilarious, to go to the bank to deposit all the checks
he was earning. Let me summarize with a quick blitz of a couple of other ways my
clients used direct mail very successfully, and a company I wish were my client. First of
all, I had a very successful software company that used direct mail, targeted to high
school principals, to generate very, very qualified leads. They were able to sell 5,000
pieces of educational software.

I worked with a nationally prominent swimming pool company that built a massive
multi-million dollar business of new swimming pool installations just by identifying
affluent home owners who did not have swimming pools and, believe it or not, it's real
easy to find out who they are, and sending them really fun, easy, non-threatening,
four-color, very, very rich-looking postcards that offered them a wonderful beall up or
send the card in just to get a review or an examination and a free consultation of how a
swimming pool might fit into their home and what the resulting cost might be. That
simple process alone, done strategically and continuously, built a $40 million swimming
pool installation business.

Finally, Dell Computer, who's not my client, built, I believe, a half-billion dollar
business initially by doing nothing more than direct mailing targeting business owners
around the country. The lesson here, simple: If you don't incorporate some application
of direct mail into your customer-generating or client-building activities, you are
denying yourself an enormous growth opportunity.

Telemarketing

Okay, let's move on. Let's look at Method Seven, which is telemarketing. Telemarketing
is a powerful and important tool you must incorporate into your business-building or
practice activities. Why? Because it allows you to penetrate areas and contact prospects
in ways no other business-building method allows.

Telemarketing is a tool you can use many different ways. Let's look at a few of them.
One, you can use it as a method to survey your market to see how your business is
performing. In the process of doing that, you can generate referrals. Two, you can use it
effectively to establish, develop and maintain very close, tight relationships with
prospects and with customers.

You might be saying, But, Jay, how can I develop an ongoing relationship with a
prospect? Don't they become a customer? Well, obviously, that's your objective, but you
may be one of the many people I work with who has a very long selling cycle. You get a
prospect, and it may take a long time to nurturously convert a prospect in your business
or profession from the time they inquire till the time they buy.

I have a lot of examples. Many of the professionals, particularly the cosmetic surgeons,
plastic surgeons, cosmetic dentists, people don't just walk in and decide to spend $5,000
or $10,000 or $20,000. They inquire. They may come for a consultation. They may think
about it. Telemarketing is an enormously effective way to keep advancing and building
the relationship and gently leading that prospect to a purchasing decision.
You can use telemarketing a lot of other ways, too. Almost without fail, if you mail any
sales letters to your customer or prospect list and you follow those up with
telemarketing, you can absolutely expect an improvement in results from a low of 30%
to a high of 1000%. Stated differently, you can get as much as 10 times increase in sales
and results just by calling behind a letter you mail out.

Telemarketing can be that powerful. But ask yourself this question: Did you ever get a
letter in the mail for an offer that you actually were interested in, but you didn't respond?
Not because you weren't interested, not because you couldn't have benefitted, not
because it didn't have appeal and attraction, but because either you put the letter away
and lost it or you weren't ready right then, or you actually filled it out or picked up the
phone but something else came up and you forgot about it and it sort of fell out of your
mind?

But, when somebody called a little later and followed up on that mailing, nurturously,
not offensively, remember how much you appreciated it? You weren't at all put off. You
were quite the opposite--you actually appreciated their assistance and their being there to
help you remember what you had forgotten to take action on and how helpful it was that
they were able to facilitate the purchase transaction for you. Well, your customers or
clients are probably no different than you are.

They get diverted. They lose things. They forget to respond. They are interested beyond
all interests in a lot of the offers and the propositions you make to them in letters, but
they don't get around to coming in. They don't get around to calling up. They don't get
around to mailing something back. You actually do them a fabulous service if you have
someone in your organization or if you yourself pick up the phone and call them to
follow up. And the call does not have to be an aggressive one. It can be an informative
one. Re-alerting them, verifying that they got the letter, that they understood the
opportunity, that all the information they might need was there for them. If they had any
questions, giving them a chance to ask them. Guiding and telling them how they can take
action if they're so inclined and telling them what kind of risk reversal they have
protecting them.

That's exciting. And knowing that you can increase the effectiveness of any letter you
send out by up to ten times just by communicating with the customer, isn't that
wonderful? Now let's look at how some of my clients have used telemarketing very
successfully.

have a software company I work with in Tulsa, Oklahoma. They sell very expensive
software, $3,000 to $10,000 and higher. They send out mailings every month to their
target audience. They follow them up with telephone calls just to make sure the people
they mailed got the letter, understood how the software worked, where it offered them
the best value, and answered any questions they had. They didn't used to do telephone
follow-up.

Before I met them, they would do a letter. The letter would pull about three times their
money, and they made a meager profit. The first year I got them to use telemarketing
follow-up, their sales jumped 900%. That's a nine-times increase just by following up a
letter with a phone call. They found that there were dozens and dozens and dozens of
people they called every month who had gotten their letter, who were interested, but
never got around to buying or trying it out. They made so much money the first year,
they closed down the company for two weeks and took every one of their employees to
Honolulu for a weeks paid vacation--they were that successful.

I have a client in Australia--surprise, surprise--who is the number-one seller of drapes

and blinds in the entire nation. They sell $40 million worth of draperies-- a lot of drapes.
They use telemarketing to follow up all the inquiries they generate. They get 900
inquiries a day, each and every day of the week. Those inquiries are sent a booklet that
helps people decorate their homes more effectively. That booklet answers questions and
shows them the multitude of different ways they can use blinds and draperies to make
their homes more attractive.

After the booklet is received, my client calls them up on the phone, answers their
questions, serves in an advisory role, functions as an interior decorator by telephone, and
closes 45% of the people they contact. Average order, nearly $1,000. Of the
approximately $40 million in sales they do, $32 million would not be done if they didn't
add telephone follow-up after they sent the booklets out.

A car dealer I worked with used telephone follow-up to contact all his customers who
bought new cars but who did not buy the extended warranty plan. He would call them up
two weeks later and tell them they were still eligible, retroactively if they wanted to add
extended warranty to their sales package. They found that 35% of the people they called
took advantage of it. It added enormous profit to the transaction.

A cosmetologist I worked with, who had a very successful specialty practice for higher
and very affluent people, called referrals all over her state and had women flocking in to
see her from as far away as 300 miles because she would call them up at the request of
an existing client of hers, she would talk to them on the phone, and ask them questions
about how they viewed their appearance, asked them what kind of cosmetic questions
and problems they suffered, and she'd offer them advice that they could do themselves.
But, she offered to work with them one time free if they wanted to come to her salon.
Hundreds of people from miles and miles and miles away drove because she was so
engaging and authoritative and consultative over the telephone. Does this give you any
ideas?
You can use telemarketing to find out why people don't buy from you and to convert
them over. I worked with a chain of expensive leather furniture stores around the
country, and they found that three-quarters of the people that came into their showrooms
did not buy initially. Why? Because it's custom furniture, it's expensive furniture. It's
large furniture. It's extremely dramatic furniture. You don't just look at it and say I'll take
it. You look at it, you go back, you think about it, you measure, and you look at it again.
They were spending a fortune to bring prospects into their showrooms who did not
convert.

I installed a telephone follow-up system that did not just call them one time, but called
them five times over a six-week period, never trying to sell them, always trying to advise
them, always trying to help them, always trying to answer questions and give them the
best reason professional advice possible. The result, we added $350,000 a month, not a
year but a month, to the bottom line of that business just by their helping their prospects
make their ultimate decisions more intelligently.

I have another client who uses telemarketing to pre-test advertising approaches and new
products he's thinking of getting. He'll get a group of his core customers, call them up,
try different approaches and offer different products and see which ones they respond the
most to. Those will be the ones he'll use in his major promotions.

I have another client who uses telemarketing to offer his higher-level clients, the ones
who buy the most often, preferential values on products and services he doesn't normally
offer or sell or stock in his stores. By calling people up and pre- booking sales, he can
make a lot more money because he never has to stock any items. He only purchases
products after a customer has preauthorized him to do so over the telephone, so he
doesn't have to put anything in inventory and worry about it not selling. I could go on
and on, but are you starting to see how much flexibility telemarketing gives you and
your business or practice, and how you can adapt some of these applications to your own
enterprise?

Special events

Number eight, and this is one of my absolutely most favorite, special events and
information nights. It's one of my favorites because it's so much fun and it gives you
such distinction and it gives you a way to make a connection with your customers or
clients. The concept behind special events or information nights is very simple.

You offer a prospect, a targeted, highly qualified person or business you feel has an
excellent probability of turning into a customer or a client, a chance to come to you,
either directly to your place of business or to another location offsite, for the purposes of
getting an education about your product or service and its benefits and results; getting
information they don't know about that product; getting to meet you and/or your staff or
key executives or key team members; getting the chance to meet high-level executives or
experts in your field or your industry who possess knowledge and ability even superior
to your own; allowing people to come and enjoy a unique entertainment and social
experience; to bring customers and prospects together and acknowledge them as being
important to you; and to tap into the existing loyalty and satisfaction your customers feel
for you and to transfer that feeling to prospects you're endeavoring to sell.

Okay, now let me give you a few examples of how clients of mine have actually put the
concept of special events into very profitable practice. I had a real estate developer in
Australia who did a multi-million dollar transaction by having a special event where he
invited key influential people in the community to come for an evening and help him and
his architects design the ultimate luxury homelike development. He got all these very
well-heeled, well-known, extremely affluent people to collaborate and brainstorm with
his architect and designer to come up with the ultimate home development. They worked
together, not only on the kind of lot configuration but the kind of public grounds, parks,
golf courses, the kinds of guarded areas, the kind of land configurations, hills, lakes, etc.
When it was all done, half the people who collaborated became first on the list to buy the
properties for their own residences, and he sold the program out in about 60 days.

I had a BMW dealer who sold an enormous number of brand new BMW 740 ILS by
having a fashion show. He got one of the most prestigious clothing stores in our city to
host and hold a very, very high-level fashion show at his facility at night and invite all of
his past clients, plus all of their upscale clients to come as his guests for dinner and hors
d'oeuvres and drinks, and he had something like 600 people attend and something like 35
bought an automobile.

I had a Mercedes dealer that had a special annual golfing outing for his past customers.
He would get hundreds of people to come. He would reserve the most prestigious golf
club in his city, which he happened to be a member of, for the entire day. It was great
fun. It was really exciting to rub shoulders with people at this very affluent country club.
During the time all the salesmen would partner up with different foursomes. He basically
would write 30 to 40 pieces of business. The average Mercedes runs about $70,000; it
was a very profitable activity.

had a plastic surgeon--in fact, I still work with him--who every three months holds a
major seminar in a major Beverly Hills hotel for people all over Los Angeles who are
curious to know a lot of things about facial plastic surgery--face lifts, eyelids, noses and
facial peels. He'll get 200 or 300 people each time to come to one of his seminars, and
10% to 12% will turn into plastic surgery patients at an average of $6,000 a piece.

I have an attorney who specializes in trusts who holds one seminar every week. He
averages 60 people who come. He does it through direct mail. The average person will sit
for 90 minutes, Eighty percent of the attendees end up buying some legal services from
his firm for an average of $1,000 or more.

I have a retail jewelry store who regularly holds closed-door events only for the
preferred-pass clients where they'll sell extremely beautiful one-of-a-kind and
higher-grade, higher-ticket, expensive pieces of jewelry at very advantageous prices by
invitation only on a basis that's not available to the outside market.

They will typically have hors d'oeuvres, drinks, entertainment, prestigious fashion shows
going on, extremely attractive and very expensive models will be walking the store
bedecked with all kinds of very expensive and beautiful jewelry, diamonds, rubies,
emeralds, etc. He always sells at least $100,000 worth of jewelry at each one of those
events. And because of the experience and the values he's become known for offering at
these closed-door events, he fills every one of them and turns people away.

As a final example, I want to tell you about an incredible store I ran into in Australia, in
Melbourne It's a record store but it's unlike any other record store you've ever been
introduced to. And by sharing with you how they have built their business on promotion,
I hope it will open your mind to all kinds of possibilities you can incorporate in your
own business or professional practice. I'm going to read to you for a moment a major
article that appeared in the most prestigious Australian business publication about the
success and the uniqueness of this enterprise. Hopefully it will stimulate your
imagination to a high level.

Here we go. “When you walk into Gaslight Music, the name of the store, you are
walking into much more than a music store. At any one time you could find yourself
walking into an in-store rock concert, the launch ora new CD, or a shoeful of naked
people. Gaslight Music houses Melbourne's most diverse range of music, specializing in
CDs, tapes and videos that 'you can't get anywhere else'. But when it comes to in-store
events, promotion, if you will, Gaslight Music has a well-known biannual customer
participation calendar which highlights special days, the most famous of which is Nude
Day with a free CD given to everyone who comes dressed in their birthday suit. Last
report had 300 such people jam the store. They also featured Shave Your Head Day,
Seeing Eye Dog Day, Speed Reading Day, Pet Fishes Day, Dancing Business Men Day,
Fake Orgasm Day and many more. So full is their calendar of events that they have even
created a 'No Big Deal at Gaslight Today' Day.

This has drawn a lot of publicity to the store. As an example of virtually an event a day,
take a look at what they have in store for June, 1994--and in the article they actually
posted the entire month's calendar of special promotions for one month. Let me share
some of them with you. June 2, Military Personnel Day, 10% off all day long. June 5th,
World Environment Day, everyone who joins the World Environment Day protest march
which was held that day gets 10% off their purchase. June 8th, Cole Slaw Day, the best
cole slaw made in the store wins a $20 drink card and a double pass to a cinema. June
10th, Balloon Basketball Day, three double passes to be won. June 1 l.h., Balloon Soccer
Day with one of four CD's being given and one of six T- shirts being awarded. June
12th, Warwick Camper's birthday, the boy with the longest hair and the girl with the
shortest hair wins a $20 drink card. June 13th, Queen's Birthday, the first four people to
sit for ten minutes on the in-store throne 1oo, 1oo is a bathroom, wearing the Gaslight
crown and giving each customer a royal wave wins a double pass to the cinema. June
16th, the first person to come in at 12:30 and make any kind of hors d'oeuvre for the
lunch-time customers for twenty minutes wins a double pass to the cinema. June 17th,
staring into the mirror marathon. Bring your own mirror, dinner for two at the lounge.
June 19th, Poetry Day, 20-dollar book voucher was awarded to the book cave for the
best two-minute stream of consciousness poem. June 21 St., Date to Insinuate, scream
insinuations at Gaslight staff, the best four win double passes to the cinema. June 22nd,
Cane Toads were first introduced to Australia in 1935. The first four customers to hop
around the store and be a pest for fifteen minutes win a double pass to the cinema. June
23rd, the most unusual car double parked outside Gaslight today wins a gold pass to the
Prince of Wales Hotel. June 24th, the first same-sex marriage in the U.S.A. was
commemorated, the lucky gay couple who are betrothed win a dinner for two. June 25th,
World Record Day, in-store world record attempts, many prizes, including $50 drink
vouchers to the Town Hall Hotel. June 28th, Unworthiness Day, the first person to
proclaim, I am not worthy ora prize wins a Surf Dive and Ski T-shirt. June 30th,
Lawnmower Day, the first person to bring in a lawnmower and mow the store wins a $20
drink card. Now they've taken promotion to the extreme. But if you do no promotion, if
you have no special events, if you do no preferred customer acknowledgment, if you
have no experts, if you do no seminars, you see that somewhere in between is a golden
opportunity. I've seen so many of my clients build incredible loyalty and add tremendous
windfall profits and sales to their business mix just by adding either a business-based or
an entertainment-based event to their marketing activities. I strongly urge you to
consider doing that more than once a year in your business or professional practice also.

Number nine. Using qualified lists. One of the most powerful breakthrough methods of
growing customers you have available to your business or professional practice is the
proper use of qualified lists. You may not recognize it, but it's very easy to identify
specific people or businesses and key decision makers at that business who are more
likely than not to be your primary target audience for your product or service. Most
people don't even begin to explore how they can access these lists but they are readily
available.

Let me first tell you some easy ways to identify and acquire these lists, then let me share
with you some actual stories of how clients of mine have enjoyed enormous successes by
incorporating qualified list marketing into their business mix. First of all, where do you
go to find the lists? There are a number of sources.
The first is what's called the Standard Rate and Data Directory of Business Lists. There's
a company in Skokie, Illinois, called Standard Rate and Data Service Publishing. That
company regularly publishes every month a huge, approximately 10`-pound, six-inch
thick directory. That directory contains approximately 35,000 listings and descriptions of
mailing lists and customer lists and demographic lists you can rent for any purpose
imaginable. Say you're in a business and your target market is affluent people ages 50
and above in the top geographic sectors of the country. There are probably 25 different
ways you can target those people and 25 different lists you can rent from just basically
compiled lists where a company goes around the country and actually organizes the
names, the addresses and even the phone numbers by that definition that I've just given
or by other factors you know those people tend to relate to.

For example, if you know that the affluent people that you are trying to reach tend to
drive better automobiles--Cadillacs, BMW, Mercedes, Lexus--you can rent the names of
owners of Cadillac, BMW, Lexus, etc. If you know they tend to play tennis or golf, you
can rent the list of people who subscribe to tennis and golf magazine or people who buy
tennis and golf products. And then you can also subcategories those people by requesting
that they only give you the names of those people in certain affluent geographic areas.
Let's say you want to reach very highly defined people, maybe computer department
heads or personnel or human resource managers. The first thing you would do is you
would get a hold of an SDS list directory or you can also get a hold of list brokers. These
are men and women in companies around the country who specialize in accessing and
organizing and acquiring, for people like yourself, mailing lists or lists of names,
addresses and phone numbers for telemarketer to use. You get the directory, or you
contact the broker, you would identify those lists which most closely parallel your
profile and you'd review the descriptions.

At the same time you'd look under the category called Trade Publications, because
almost every business category you're trying to reach, for example, human resource
manager, transportation manager, financial officer, etc., etc. has a trade magazine or a
trade newsletter or an association they are a member of or they subscribe to, and all of
those organizations make their list of members or subscribers available for rental or
purchase.

But there are other ways to reach these people. You ask yourself what other things do I
know about them? What else do they buy? What else do they do? What other
organizations are they members of?. What other lifestyles or business activities do they
engage in that allow me to identify them from another point of view? And you start
looking at other known factors that will let you access that market differently. For
example, if chief financial officer also tends to be the managing director of the
company's pension and profit-sharing plan, then you might rent a list of pension and
profit-sharing plans and get them to furnish you with the managers or with the trustees.
If you're a professional, and let's say you want to reach people for elective type
surgery--and I'll use plastic surgeons, because I do a lot of work with them--rent the
subscribers of the more affluent type of publications in your city.

In Los Angeles we rent the subscribers to Los Angeles magazine or Architectural Digest.
Or we rent people who buy certain kinds of vanity-based products or services by mail.
Or people who tend to own certain kinds of upscale status-representative items,
automobiles, jewelry, homes because they are a far greater prospect than other people.
So what I want you to do right now as you're thinking about how qualified mailing lists
can transform your business, marketing and selling effectiveness is start making a list of
answers to this question: What critical factors do I know about the buying habits, the
business activities in the area of business or personal interests of my customers and
prospects? And start making a list.

And then once you've got that list established, start looking through the Standard Rate
and Data Service Directory or contacting list brokers. And you can find good ones listed
in almost every Yellow Pages in America. And if you can't do that, you can go to the
Standard Rate and Data Service Directory and see in the front a listing of about 70
different lists brokers you can choose from. If you don't want to go to the trouble of
getting the directory, you can call the Direct Mail Marketing Association of America, I
think their offices are in New York and also in Washington D.C., and you can ask them
to recommend to you three or four reputable list brokers you can confer with. There is
another very different approach to accessing qualified customer list and one that many of
my clients use but no one else that I've ever talked to seems to understand. Simply put,
all you have to do ask yourself this question: The kind of customer or client I want to
deal with, who else are they buying from before they would typically buy my type of
product or service? What other products or services go along with my product or service?
What do they buy after they buy my product or service?

When you identify the answers to those three questions usually you'll come up with a
generic answer. In other words, a type ora product, a type of a service. Then all you have
to do is take those answers and identify specific names and addresses and phone
numbers of the companies who are providing those kinds of products and services, and
most of those companies will not be direct competition to you.

Then all you have to do is call and contact the owners or the highest-level decision
makers at those companies and work out some kind of arrangement where those
companies share with you, for some kind of a share of the profits or fee, the names of
their customers and their prospects. And don't be at all unwilling to receive names of
unconverted prospects they have not yet sold because the names they furnish you will be
one of the highest-valued prospect lists you'll ever get your hands on.

I have a very aggressive son who is a salesperson. He used to work for one of the
nation's foremost copier companies. I really don't want to reveal their name but they are
somebody you'd know and respect. He had a territory in southern California he worked
in, but the way he worked his territory was so inefficient and unproductive I felt
compelled to help him. I sat down with him and pointed out that from my point of view
here's how he was working his territory, and I want to share this with you because there's
a high possibility that you can benefit from what I'm about to say.

In essence, what my son was doing was taking every suspect in his territory and treating
them all as being equally important. By that I mean he would just take a section of his
territory and from morning until night call cold on office after office after office and
store after store after store almost indiscriminately. His results were at best, mediocre.

I sat him down and 1 said, let me ask you this curious question. Does your company
have information or data that would tell you what kind of industries or businesses or
professions tend to be higher than normal prospects for copiers? In other words, there
must be certain kinds of businesses or professional practices that have about ten times
the probability of needing one or more copiers or going through copiers faster and more
frequently than others. He said, well probably. And I said why don't you go back to your
company and ask them for that data?

Jay He did. He came back to me, it became evident to me that there were about ten
industries that were, on average, ten times better at being prospects than all the rest. And
I said, well, it seems to me that we ought to, first of all, isolate who those primary
prospects are, get a list of who and where those kinds of companies are in your territory
and call on them first before you call on the less likely prospects. He immediately
agreed, of course.

We got a list, a qualified mailing list of the names, the addresses, the phone numbers and
the key decision makers at those businesses. He was able to call ahead, make
appointments, organize his day so he had the most productivity, the most efficiency, and
guess what? He started working about half the hours and his commissions tripled. Why?
Because he used his time and his efforts more effectively and efficiently. That's what
happens when you identify and use qualified mailing lists. And when I say mailing lists,
it's not limited just to mailing. You can use the mailing list for calling ahead, for
telemarketing, for calling after a mailing.

With that said, let me give you some other examples of how clients of mine have been
very successful using qualified mailing lists in their businesses and practices. I have a
client who's become the foremost real estate work-out attorney on the west coast. Let me
tell you what a work-out attorney does. He works with either the owners of the property
or the financial institutions who end up taking properties back when people go bankrupt
or go into foreclosure. And he works with both sides or with one or the other side
helping them make the transaction work. Whatever work means for them. Anyhow,
this attorney decided about two years ago that he was going to become the foremost
authority in an emerging field.

No one really had a lot of expertise, including himself, but he decided that he was going
to position himself as being the foremost authority, so he acquired a number of lists of
financial institution work-out specialists--these are the men and women who run the
work-out departments at banks, at S&L's, at insurance companies who made these huge
multimillion and hundred-million dollar loans to hotels, to apartment complexes, and
ended up getting those properties back when they went into foreclosure.

And he approached them very systematically by mailing to them an offer every month
of coming to an event he conducted on their specific situation: Either hotel work- outs,
apartment work-outs or shopping center work-outs. And he sent them information. And
he sent them ideas. And he sent them each and every month a mailing designed to give
them information that no one else had provided and to establish clearly and inarguable
his distinction as the pre-eminent specialist.

hen he started two years ago, he didn't even know that much about it, but he learned as
he went. He picked somebody's mind, he turned it into an article. He'd send the article to
his list of qualified target prospects. Make a long story short, today his firm is generating
millions and millions and millions of dollars in fee income just because he identified the
key decision makers at 1,200 prime financial institutions and mailed them a valuable and
informative letter each and every month for two years. A nominal investment of about
$600 meager dollars a month has turned into over $10 million worth of fee income a
year to his firm. Now if you think that's the high end, let me go to the other end.

I had a chiropractor for whom we targeted the fifty primary personal injury attorneys in
his marketing area, and every month for the next year we sent a letter to everyone of
those attorneys telling them about what my client chiropractor specialized in, telling
about cases he worked on, suggesting ways the attorney might be more effective in court
trials they were doing and in suits they were filing. Within a matter of nine months, my
chiropractic client picked up fifteen of those fifty attorneys as clients, and his practice
tripled. I had an architect in Australia who specialized on redesigning retail store fronts.
I had her target all the owners of every major chain of retail stores in Australia.

There were approximately 100. Every month for the next year her job was to write them
a letter sharing with them her insights on how to make retail stores more attractive, how
to keep customers in those stores for a longer period of time, how to make the stores
more inviting, and how to psychologically make the customers more comfortable and
more attached to the store and their offering. After mailing that target list for not quite
one year, my client added ten big chains to her clientele, and it added over a million
dollars a year in additional design fees to their practice revenues.

I have a physical therapist who built the second most successful physical therapy
practice in all of southern California through a simple process that began by first
identifying the 1,200 primary perspective physicians and chiropractors in all of their
marketing area who are most likely to be in a position to have the right kind of patients
and the right kind of motivation and the right kind of maladies to refer physical therapy
patients to my client. We then took that prospect list and systematically mailed them and
called and mailed them and called over a period of approximately a year. They picked up
over 400 of those 1,200 physicians and chiropractors as referring clients and the list
keeps growing and growing.

Pretty exciting, doesn't it? And it's easier and more logical than you ever dreamed
possible. But this is just the beginning. It's going to get even easier, even more enjoyable
and far more exciting. And again, let me remind you: don't try to absorb all this at one
time. What I'm doing right now is introducing you to all the options and possibilities and
opportunities you've always had available to you to grow that business or professional
practice. At the end of this session I'll give you guidelines on how to take fullest
advantage of what you've learned about the first of the three ways to grow your business.
And we're going to do the very same thing after we've talked about the other two ways to
grow your business or professional practice.

Then in future sessions we're going to tie all those three ways together into what I call
your optimal business strategy and we'll explain how to apply and how to simplify it at a
much higher level. But for right now, let's return to the 12 ways you can increase your
number of customers, inquiries, prospects or leads. And let's look at number ten. USE
U.S.P. is an abbreviation that stands for unique selling proposition. In a nutshell what
that means is this.

Your company or your practice has to offer your customer or prospective client a unique
and a distinctive benefit or advantage above and beyond that of your competitor or they
have no motivation to do business with you instead of the competitor.

Let me make a very important point to you at this juncture. Our goal together is to make
your business distinctive, positively distinctive. To get your prospective customers and
clients to see your business or professional practice as offering them a superior benefit or
advantage that no other competitor offers them, something very valuable, very desirable,
very important, very precious and meaningful to them that's not available to them
anywhere else. This is the essence of what a unique selling proposition is all about.
When I go to cocktail parties and social gatherings I get into a lot of conversations with
business owners and professionals. I ask them a simple question. Can you tell me why
your customers or clients buy from you instead of your competitors? Most of them really
don't know the answer.

If you don't know the answer that means one of two things. Either: a) you offer a
customer or client a unique set of advantages or benefits, but you've never identified it
yourself so you're not clear on it; or b) you offer that customer or client no unique
advantage or result and you're just lucky as heck that you have the business in the first
place. There's no basis upon which you're keeping it. Anytime your competition wants to
offer your customer or client an advantage you don't, they can take that customer or
client away from you. I want to help you determine the most powerful benefit or
advantage you can possibly offer an existing customer or client and any future customer
or client you ever appealed to so it will be totally irrational for them to choose anyone
but your company or practice to deal with in the future.

And here's how you do that. You identify what advantage, benefit, result or protection
your customer or client wants the most. You identify what they're not getting from
anyone else they could be dealing with and perhaps what they're not even currently
getting from dealing with you. And then you offer it to them. And you just don't offer it
to them subtlety, you incorporate the fact that you are now offering them this unique
advantage or benefit in everything you say and everything you do. Let me give you some
real-world examples that you can easily relate to.

Let's start with two that I mentioned when we were reviewing your questionnaire in
session two. The first was Federal Express, who started by saying, When it absolutely,
positively has to be there overnight. That was their U.S.P. When Fed Ex started using
that U.S.P., shipping companies were not delivering packages overnight. They weren't
even guaranteeing when a package would be delivered. They offered customers a unique
advantage, certainty that the package they needed to ship would be delivered at the
doorstep of their intended recipient by 10:30 a.m. the next day, absolutely guaranteed,
period.

I also mentioned Domino's Pizza. What did they offer? Hot, juicy, delicious pizza
delivered to your door in thirty minutes or less or it's yours absolutely free. Back when
they started no company was delivering pizza in a half-hour guaranteed. Few companies
delivered pizza that was hot and absolutely if the pizza was delivered late and cold you
lived with it, you owned it. There was no protection or guarantee or risk reversal
attached. But Domino's was the first and the only company to do that when they started,
and guess what? That was so distinctive they virtually owned the market for years and
years.

When Avis was struggling to come up with a marketing approach that would gain them
the market advantage that they desired, they needed a unique selling proposition that was
very powerful. After all, Hertz was heads above them in size and in market share.
What did they do? They came up with the U.S.P., We're number two. We try harder.
And they demonstrated that by extending themselves, by working harder, by giving
better rates, by being more cordial and courteous. And they made incredible progress
and growth because of that U.S.P.

Nordstrom built their department store success through one basic unique selling
proposition. If you have any problem, for any reason, at any time in the future, bring it
back for a no-questions-asked, 100% money-back refund any time in the future. Any
time in the future. Not in three days, not in seven days, not in thirty days; if a year later
you're dissatisfied; if five years later you're dissatisfied--it's no problem.

Howard Ruff built a $20 million newsletter empire back in the '80s by putting himself in
a unique and a distinctive position in his marketplace. Most of the other financial
advisors took the position that they were big-time Wall Street pros and they were trying
to appeal only to the affluent investors. Howard took the opposite approach. He said, I
am the financial advisor to the middle class and I want to protect your interests at a
different level. I know how hard you work to make a dollar. I know how important it is
that you don't lose it. I know how critical your retirement moneys are to you. I respect
and I approach your situation differently than anybody else. That U.S.P. rang so true that
hundreds of thousands of middle-class investors flocked to him.

Paddy Lund, the dentist we talked about and whose interview I played for you,
distinguished himself by having a dental practice that was different than any other dental
practice in all of Australia. He locked his front door. He took out, he absolutely removed
the conventional waiting room and replaced it with a series of what are called salons.
Basically they are a bunch of booths like in a restaurant. He had tables there. He got a
full-time chef. When you walked in you could always smell the aroma of rolls being
baked and of gourmet food being cooked. Before he'd ever go into his examination room
and work on their mouth, he would sit down with them and talk to them in a very
familial and friendly way and have a cup of tea and a crumpet or a biscuit or breakfast
roll or bread with them. He changed the entire image of what a dental relationship was.

You've got to ask yourself this question: What superior benefit or advantage or improved
result am I or is my business or practice in a position to give to my customer? Here's
another question: What superior benefit or advantage or result am I already actually
providing or supplying my customer or client with that is so subtle that they aren't even
aware of it, and I'm doing myself and them a supreme disservice because they are not
even aware of it? I'm not making it known. They don't even appreciate it. I'm not getting
credit for it. Neither of us is benefitting fully.
Your goal is to identify and telegraph to every customer or prospect or client you ever
deal with from this point forward. That they can expect to receive on an ongoing basis a
unique benefit or advantage by doing business with your firm or your practice instead of
your competitors.

We'll revisit U.S.P. later in this program as we start putting together your optimal
business strategy, but right now I want you to focus on what you either are doing that
your customer or client is unaware of or what you can start doing for that customer or
client that provides them with a unique, distinctive and superior benefit or advantage or
result over any other business or professional they could choose to do business with.
Method eleven: Increasing the perceived value of your product or service through better
customer or client education. This is so disarmingly obvious that it's amazing more
companies and professionals don't utilize this. All you have to do is recognize that the
more people understand and appreciate why and how a product or service can benefit or
improve or protect their life or their business, the more they desire it and the more
closely they get connected to the person who educates them to this fact. In many cases
you can even think of this as an elaboration of your U.S.P. Whatever business or
profession you're in, I guarantee you of one thing--your customers or your clients don't
begin to understand everything you know about that business or that profession. They
don't understand how it benefits them, they don't understand all the implications, they
don't understand all the opportunities, they don't understand all the ways to avoid
problems.

They don't understand the many opportunities available to them to multiply the benefits
they are already getting from the utilization of your product or service. You have an
opportunity and an obligation to educate and inform them at a far deeper and higher
level than anyone else does. Why? Because the more people understand something, the
more comfortable they are with it and the more desirous they are of having it, or using it,
or continuing it.

Education is your greatest ally. Let me share with you how a number of my clients and
other companies and professionals you're undoubtedly familiar with are using education
and information to give their companies or their practices significant advantage over
everyone else they are competing with.
First of all, almost every area of legal specialization offers prospective clients a free
initial consultation with no strings attached. Most notably personal injury attorneys. You
come to them, they sit down with you and for an hour or an hour and a half they'll go
over your case and they'll tell you what they think your legal rights are. They'll help you
understand what your options are and the best strategy to take. You have the choice, you
don't have to use them. However, in 80% of the cases that I have studied, when an
attorney gives you an incredibly good and comprehensive and objective education, you
tend to be so connected to them that you desire them to protect your interests and to
follow through for you. So attorneys in over 20 different specialties that I have worked
with and studied have all used free education, free information and free consultation as a
key component of building very successful practices.
I'm sure you've seen on TV over the years the ads for NordicTrack, the exercise
equipment, or Solaflex, the exercise gear that you use to build your muscles. Both of
these companies do hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Both of these companies have
developed as their primary selling process sending people a free videocassette. Not only
do these videos demonstrate to viewers the exercise equipment in action, they go out of
their way to educate that viewer in all the ways they can get the desired physical results
they want, whether that be losing weight, building muscles, toning up various parts of
their body.

The key to understanding the success of the Solaflexes, the NordicTracks and about 20
other very successful exercise equipment manufacturing companies is that they are not
selling the equipment, they are educating people first and foremost in the fact that there
are expedient ways that equipment can reduce the amount of time and effort it takes to
get the desired body or physical attributes you want. Education is the key. There is a
software company I worked with who sells very expensive, $20,000 to $200,000
software packages to retail merchants, store owners, shop owners, etc., around the
country. They do all of their selling by first conducting day-long, free training sessions
where they educate shop owners and store owners and chain stores and chain store
executives in better ways that they can manage the data and the critical information and
the inventory control aspects of their business. This education is invaluable to them
irrespective of whether they buy the software from my client or not. However, over 50%
of the companies that attend end up buying the software and the average purchase is
about $45,000.

My client has tested, under my direction, five alternative ways of selling. The most
cost-effective, the most profitable, the most powerful and the most attractive way they
have found is to first educate their customer, deeply and continuously. I'm sure there has
been more than one night that you couldn't sleep and you turned on TV and you saw a,
guess what, an infomercial. Those thirty-minute part-information, part-education,
part-entertainment shows selling various kinds of products. Well, the key success factor
in making an infomercial work is the level of demonstration and education they
incorporate into the show. The more you tell, the more you sell.

Let me give you some other examples. I have a client that sells aroma therapy-- essences
from flowers and herbs that are used in all kinds of health applications. It's a relatively
new form of alternative health therapy. The only way my aroma therapy clients have
been successful is to align themselves with other alternative but established health
professionals--chiropractors, physical therapists, cosmetologists, etc.--and demonstrate
and educate and explain the origins and the processes through which aroma therapy
works and then allow prospective customers to try it out for themselves free of risk.
They have been a $10 million business built in Australia through the simple process of
information and education.

Years ago, Evelyn Wood, the speed reading training organization, built a $60 million
business almost overnight by bringing people into a room without risk or obligation and
in 90 minutes giving them an education, an explanation, and a demonstration on how
and why it was easier to read fast than it was the way we currently read. People would
leave that room learning to improve their reading speed by at least 50% and often times
250%. Fifty percent of the people who sat through that free demonstration and lesson
converted to their $1,000 training program.

I have a real estate trainer who goes around the country being sponsored by financial
institutions. Mortgage companies, title companies, escrow companies bring him to their
real estate agent customers because they want to teach those agents how to sell more real
estate. If they teach the agents how to sell more real estate, the agents will do more title
work, they'll place more mortgages, they'll do more escrow work.

My client who teaches the agents the fundamentals of real estate selling gets about half
of the people in attendance to buy his additional, more advanced products and his live
training programs. Why? Because once you give somebody a basic education, human
nature wants more. They want to become more skilled, more proficient. They want to
improve their ability to benefit from what you've taught them.
It's ironic, but about half the people I've worked with who are trainers or consultants or
advisors or experts of any kind, when they conduct expensive, live training programs,
between 20% and 50% of the people in the room come to them at the end of those
programs and ask them to consult privately with them. Now you ask yourself, why in the
world would somebody who spends $1,000 or $5,000 or $10,000 to be trained in a group
after receiving that training seek out the trainer and ask him then to consult privately?
Because they want more. Education is the pathway to more business, and it's also the
pathway to a deeper connection between you and a client forever.

Method number twelve: Using public relations. Public relations is a frequently

overlooked and a valuable method to add to your customer, prospect, client or inquiry
generation activities. Why? Because there are publications all over your marketplace,
whether you are local, whether you are regional, whether you are national, whether you
are consumer or whether you are business-to-business or whether you are highly
technical or professional. There are publications, there are organizations with house
organs--newsletters, etc.--and there are media--radio, TV, special alternative
communications--that are insatiably hungry for information and ideas they can share
with their customers, their members, their employees, their listeners, their viewers or
their readers.

All you have to understand about PR to be extremely successful is one simple fact. It's
the same fact I introduced to you earlier in this program and that fact is this: It's all about
them, it's not about you.

Any public relations activity you embark upon must be based on this simple fact. The
marketplace you're trying to reach must gain an important benefit, an advantage--either
information, education or entertainment--out of what you're trying to share with them or
it has no value to them. Frankly speaking, nobody cares if you're celebrating your 50th
anniversary. Nobody cares if you've just moved to new facilities. Nobody cares about
most things that are important to you. What they care about is what's important to them,
what will help improve their life, what will expand their comfort, what will make them
more enriched, more entertained, more fulfilled, more protected. What will give them
some advantage in their business for day-to-day life.

Understand this, public relations will work for you as long as you keep your focus, not
on the organization or the entity or the medium you're trying to reach, but on the people
they cater to and what will benefit those people's lives or businesses the most. Let me
give you some specific examples of how various clients and companies I've worked with
have used public relations extremely effectively.

A book publishing company I worked with uses the radio stations around the country to
give their specialty cookbooks and coffee table books enormous free publicity. They'll
go on the shows, they'll talk about the uniqueness of their subjects, and again, coffee
table books are fascinating, really colorful, beautiful books that are basically on travel or
on very interesting activities. And they'll go on the radio show or on television and
they'll talk about it, and they'll describe it, and they'll go into depth on why it was
chosen, and they'll take you into that subject or activity and make it real or dimensional.
And after they do the show, guess what, the bookstores are besieged by people wanting
copies for their own homes and coffee tables.

I have a client who's in the furniture business. He sends articles every month to all the
consumer publications about his more innovative design products. Particularly notable
was a recent PR release he did about a chair. Its design was orthopedically different than
any other chair on the market. More importantly, not only was it functionally superior,
but as a work of art, it was beautiful because it was upholstered in one of the richest,
rarest kinds of leather known in the world. Its price tag was also nose-bleedingly high
and the combination of factors, when incorporated into an article, got picked up in 10
major publications around the country.

My client sold an extra $100,000 at wholesale of those chairs for that one press release.
He does press releases each and every month. Over half of them have been picked up.
He attributes over $3 million in annual sales to this process. He has a part-time employee
that does nothing but find the most interesting, fascinating, informative and intriguing
aspects of his products and his furniture, and send releases to all the consumer
publications on a regular basis.

A bookkeeping service I advised did an incredible press release recently, where they
talked about the changing climate for out-sourcing accounting services and they helped
people understand the advantages and the cost effectiveness. They are leaders in the field
on a national basis. The article got picked up in 30 different business publications and,
guess what, they gained over 100 new clients in the process.

A CPA I work with, who also happens to be a tax attorney, started writing columns in
trade magazines 30 years ago. Each and every month he writes a column which is now
picked up in over 90 separate trade and business publications around the world on the
subject of what's called secession planning. This is a very specialized area of business
accounting that is key to being able to transfer ownership of a privately owned business
from the owner to either their children, their heirs or their employees with the lowest
possible tax consequences. He's written these articles each and every month for nearly
30 years.

In the process of doing that, his firm went from a non-decrypt, unknown firm that was
ranked about 12,000th in the entire country to the number 33 largest private accounting
firm in America, all attributable to the fact that each and every month he has become a
familiar and a prominent expert solely through the press releases and articles he writes.
I want to make another point about press releases. Using press releases offers you two
distinctly different business advantages. Number one is the obvious one. For no real
cost, for very little effort, you can get more exposure to more people in business or in
specialized markets. The right press releases can produce for you immediate and
continuous flows of business or inquiries for whatever business or practice you operate
for years to come.

The other benefit press releases offer is usually overlooked. It's credibility. I've been
very fortunate. I've been written about in business publications around the world. Here in
the United States, I've been written about twice in USA Today's money section. I've
been written about in Success magazine, Entrepreneur magazine, the New York Times,
the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, and articles
have appeared about my clients in Inc. magazine and a number of other very impressive
publications. That's done a lot for me. When those articles came out, I got direct business
and quite a substantial amount. However, the direct business I got from those articles
was secondary to the amount of ongoing business I get when I send to prospects
collections of various articles that have been written about me in the past.

You've got that opportunity, too. Any time a positive article appears about you, whether
it's in a national publication, whether it's in the newsletter that an association sends out to
their members, whether it's in a house organ that a big company sends to their
employees, you should reproduce it, you should send it to every prospect, you should
send it to every customer, you should incorporate it into every sales package you ever
send out, you should post it on the wall in your place of business. And again, your goal
in doing business or operating as a professional is to gain distinction, an edge, if you
will, a superior advantage over your competition. If they don't have this press and this
credibility and you do, what do you imagine it does to predispose your customer or
client to doing business with you over your competition? Public relations can do two
wonderful and continual services for your business or practice. All you've got to do is
remember this fact: People are primarily interested in things that benefit themselves.
That's human nature. That's how we are. There's nothing wrong with it, and that's your
biggest opportunity. Whenever you're creating a press release, always focus it and its
content on benefits to the end user.

Let's summarize your options here. You can send a regular release to the formal
press--and that can be newspapers, magazines, trade magazines, specialty publications,
radio stations, television stations, public broadcasting. You can send press releases to
trade organizations. That could mean associations; that could mean trade publications,
magazines that are read by very specific industries. You can send press releases to all
kinds of civic or community organizations. That can be fraternal groups, that can be
ladies' auxiliaries, professional chapters.

Public relations also means extending yourself in the community. It means committing
yourself to doing public services. It means engaging yourself on a deep level for
charitable organizations. It means making your facilities or your resources available for
noble purposes. It means getting involved in recreational or social or charitable
activities. I have a client, for example, who one time raised $1 million for a major
charity in a city. The exposure and the distinction and the goodwill he got was
incredible. A car dealer client of mine in Rochester, New York, home of Kodak, sent a
press release to all the media basically saying, if anybody at Kodak gets fired when they
buy a car from him, he will make the payments on that car until they get rehired, no
matter how long it takes. That article got picked up, not only in the press, but it got
picked up on the Today Show, it got picked up in seven other states. He got so much
good will, everybody in this community loved him for it, and he sold 500 extra cars in
the next six months.
The point is this. There are numerous traditional and nontraditional ways to get public
relations benefit. You have to ask yourself: How can I extend my business or my
practice into my community, into an industry? How can I do greater service or benefit or
provide advantage or information or education in the press, through my actions, through
my company, through my positioning, through my contacts? The answers will open up
broad opportunities. And there's a bonus benefit. When you get involved in your
community and charities in recreational activities and with the press, it feels so good
because you get connected to the market place and to people. You touch people. You get
feedback. You are respected and appreciated and revered at a very high level, and that's
very important because it gives greater purpose to what you're doing, not just for them
but for you, and it's so much more deeply satisfying than sitting on the sidelines. It's the
difference between playing a sport or pursuing a hobby and just being a spectator.
Think about the words for a moment--relating to the public, public relations. It's getting
connected, getting involved, contributing, touching, meeting, helping, sharing. Look, it's
not just about putting on an attractive face to get more customers. It's about genuine
interest and involvement in your community and in your industry so that everyone
associated with you and your business or practice is proud of that association.

That concludes the 12 basic methods I recommend for increasing your number of leads,
inquiries, prospects and customers. Now here's what I would like you to do over the next
two or three days.
First, listen to this session once again as you did last time and review these last seven
methods with your own enterprising mind. With each one, ask yourself: How can I adapt
and apply this?. And write down your ideas in the space provided in Section 3 of your
guidebook.

Second, think about this concept of educating your customers. I'd like you to isolate it
and experiment with it. By experiment--what do I mean? I mean try a bunch of different
approaches on how to educate your customer, client or prospect. Simple, you might tell
them what distinguishes your product from your competitors' to start with. Then you
might tell them how and why your product is made or created the way it is and what the
implication of that creation or design or construction process has on them and their
result. Then I think you should give them some facts, some figures, some contrasts. But
be sure you do it in an informal conversational way. Just explain to your customers or
clients the advantages and benefits of your product or service and it will be important to
them. And watch them respond positively to what you have to say. The more people
understand, the more comfortable and confident they are about buying specifically from
you. So, go out and have a ball. And watch what happens between now and the next time
we get together in session four. See you then. End of Session Three

SESSION FOUR TRANSCRIPTS

ay Hello and welcome to session four. We're midway through our second week
together and we're making great progress. In our last two session, we covered 12
methods for increasing your number of leads, inquiries, prospects and customers, and I
asked you to begin putting them to work in your own enterprise. Assuming you did, you
should be feeling really encouraged by the results you're already seeing and, therefore,
eager to continue. I know I am. So you're off to a great start with what you've learned
so far about the three basic ways to grow any business or professional practice; however,
under the first of the three ways to grow your business or profession, which is to increase
your number of customers or clients, there's a sub-category that is almost instantaneous
in its positive impact. It's overlooked by most people I work with and it's arguably the
easiest growth mechanism you have available, no matter what business or profession
you're involved in. What I'm talking about are ways to increase your customer retention
rate. They're very easy and they're very powerful. Let me explain for a moment what
customer retention rate means. Every business or profession I ever look at, and I'm
confident yours is no different, has an overlooked aspect to it that almost nobody focuses
upon. That factor is attrition. Attrition is the opposite of retaining or continuing buying
relationships with customers or clients. Attrition is the number of customers or clients
who stop doing business with your enterprise. They're inactive customers or clients, they
are people who move out of the area, they are people who for whatever reasons stop
dealing with your company. Most people I work with don't even have a clue what their
level of attrition actually is.

Until and unless you first identify how many of your old customers or clients are no
longer actively dealing with your company or your practice, you can't begin to
immediately improve on that figure. By just knowing the percentage and by also
knowing exactly who those customers or prospects who are no longer actively doing
business with you are, you've got a long way to reducing your attrition rate and the
opposite of attrition is customer retention.

So our goal first and foremost is to identify and understand that whatever business or
practice you' re engaged in, you have some level of customer attrition. You want to
figure out what that level is and who those specific customers or clients are who aren't
doing business right now with you. Then you want to recognize the reasons customers
stop doing business with an enterprise. There are many. But most of the people stop for
one of three reasons. One, they stop being in a position to need or benefit from that
product or service. If it's a business-to- business, maybe they're in a different business.
Maybe they stopped being engaged in an area of activity that required them to deal with
your enterprise or your specific kind of enterprise. Maybe they sold the business to
somebody else who either eliminated or consolidated somewhere else. The first reason
people stop doing business is that they no longer gain a significant benefit from using
your product or service.
That tends to be a less significant factor in attrition than the other two. Those two are the
following: One, people had an unsatisfactory experience with your business or practice.
Either they did business with you and they didn't get the exact outcome they wanted, or
they dealt with someone who was offensive, or the product or the service didn't
perform exactly what it was supposed to, or they tried to get an adjustment or they tried
to get it redone or they tried to get some service or they tried to get some improvement
that wasn't fully made or wasn't made to their complete satisfaction, and they're
dissatisfied.

They're unhappy. They don't have a pleasant feeling about doing business with your
enterprise, but that's a problem that can be readily resolved. The third, and frankly the
one that I find in most cases is the biggest culprit of them all, is that a change occurred in
somebody's business or personal life at a point in time in the past that caused them to
interrupt their buying practices with your enterprise and they never started again. Maybe
they got sick; they maybe went on vacation or got sidetracked on some other project or
area of interest, or they have temporarily become over saturated with either your product
or the result of your service.

None of these, by the way, is a negative. It's just a psychological and a transnational
reality you must become aware of and recognize that each and every one of us in our
lives and in our business practices get to points of time where we either get diverted,
segued, overwhelmed, over saturated with some product or service and temporarily
stopped using it. And our intention, our desire is to go back and start a buying
relationship again, but we never get around to it. When this occurs, and it occurs
more often than not in most businesses I look at that have substantial attrition, you have
a responsibility and an obligation to your customer and to your client who has become
inactive to nurturously help them regain and rebuild and reestablish an ongoing buying
relationship with you. So understand this, if you can cut your attrition rate in half, it's
obviously just like adding that number of new customers to your business or your
business or to your practice. So if you've been losing 20% of your customers every year
and you start with a customer base of 1000 customers or clients, and you've been losing
200 customers or clients a year, if you cut your attrition rate in half, that's like adding
100 new customers every year, isn't it? In ten years you'll double just by reducing
attrition. That's a powerful thought to contemplate. Do nothing else but reduce the
amount of attrition, and every 10 years you double the size of your business. That's
exciting. It's an easy little shift, so let's look at three ways to do that.

The first way is so obvious, it's amazing to me that people don't do it, but few people do.
It's to contact your inactive customers or clients and ask them, Is anything wrong? Call
them up, visit them or write them, and communicate to them the fact that you are
concerned, and you're contacting them because you want to know why they are no
longer doing business with your firm. Did something happen? Is something wrong in
their business or in their life? Do they have a problem? Or did they have an
unsatisfactory experience the last time they did business with you?

hatever is wrong, you want to know. If they have a problem, you want them to be aware
that you are supportive. You are there to help in any way possible. If they have a
problem with you, you want them to absolutely know that you're unaware of what went
wrong and you stand ready to correct and to guarantee that that problem will never occur
again. By taking the time to contact all of your inactive customers or clients and
communicate with them, you have the effect of impacting and impressing these inactive
customers and clients at a level you can't even fathom.

Ask yourself this question: Did you ever have a bad buying experience with any
company or any professional you ever worked with? Did they ever call you? I doubt
seriously if they did. On the rare occasion and in the unusual event that they did, I
suspect that if they contacted you earnestly, if they were open and they were humble and
they were sincere in trying to understand and identify what caused you to stop
transacting business with them, more likely than not, you started buying again from them
because you appreciated them and you were honest with them and, whatever the
problem, they made it up to you, right?

Think about that. You may have actually reestablished a buying relationship at a far
deeper and closer level than you had originally. If you've ever had this experience,
understand this fact. The same dynamic can work for you. There's another exciting
element to the picture you should recognize. You've probably fallen victim to this
situation yourself. In my experience, and I have a lot of it to draw upon, well over half of
the people who become inactive customers or clients don't do it intentionally.

They don't do it because they had a bad experience. Rather, they do it because something
occurred in their life or their business that caused them temporarily to stop transacting
business with you. They always intended on starting up again, they just got sidetracked.
So when you call them up or visit them or write them, you get their attention again,
perhaps for the first time in months or years or decades. And guess what? They're
embarrassed. They feel terrible. You're concerned about them that they have forgotten
totally about you.

Guess what happens. The laws of reciprocity intercede, and the people become more
eager than even you are to start doing business with your firm again. So just by
contacting and communicating with every inactive customer or prospect you have, a
wonderful thing occurs. You can bank on the fact that certainly 20% and probably more
like 50% or 60% of all of those inactive customers will almost immediately start
repurchasing or repatronizing your business or your practice again. And, once they start
repurchasing from you, there is a high probability they will actually become the most
loyal and profitable customers or clients you have.

So the first thing you're going to do is identify all the inactive customers and clients
you've got and you're going to contact them. If you have the time and the occasion,
you're going to do it in person. If that's not practical, you're going to do it by phone. If
that's not practical, you're going to have a secretary or assistant do it. If that's not
practical, you're going to have your salespeople do it.

If that's not practical, you'll do it by letter. Right? Right. Now, the next thing you're
going to do is make sure you are delivering consistently higher-than-expected levels of
service to each and every customer or client you deal with. Now this means different
things and different applications. Depending on the business or the profession you're in,
you have to ask this question: What does my customer or client ordinarily expect to
receive when they do business with my firm or my competitors? The key here is the
word ordinary, because you want to move beyond the ordinary into the realm of the
extraordinary in terms of the product or service you render to your customer or client.
Okay. So the first question you have to ask yourself is:

What is the ordinary service or product or transaction or process or experience or

expected results that a customer or client has when they deal with, not just my company,
but anyone of my competitors? There may be several. Write them down. Because the
moment you got that list in hand, your opportunity becomes clear. Your challenge is to
take what everyone ordinarily does and make it extraordinary, either by vastly improving
upon it or by adding to it.

Now, depending on the business or profession you're involved in, it could be many
things. Look at when Federal Express, the company I relate to a lot because they're a
great example for a lot of these practices, look at when they first started. Not only did
they deliver on time, not only did they guarantee to do things none of their competitors
did, but they had a follow-up system, they had a confirmation system. They called you.
They had a tracking system that no one else had. They protected you. They tracked it.
They could tell you what the status was at any time. They set a standard that most of
their competitors haven't even yet come close to living up to.

Let's look at pizzerias, for a minute. Before the advent of Little Caesar's, a pizza
company maybe gave you some free toppings, maybe added a salad to the deal, but
basically you bought a single pizza. But Little Caesar's changed all that. Everyone else
was selling one pizza for a certain price. They gave you two with multiple toppings, and
Pizza Hut have had to match suit. the leader in that kind of added value. They gave you
two. They Guess what's happened?
Now Domino's They set a new standard and they became I have a client who is a
dental supply company. We took them from number nine to number one in their market
in about a year and a half through one very simple process. Every other dental supply
company was only trying to sell dental supplies to dentists. We took a much different
point of view. We concerned ourselves totally about the well-being, the financial
security, the peace of mind, the stress reduction of that dentist. We offered that dentist,
in addition to dental supplies at very competitive prices, assistance at no charge to help
them manage their practice better, grow and market their practice better, manage their
moneys better, build their investment return better, motivate their staff and their morale
better. And what we did was we gave them a level of service and attention and concern
for their well-being that no other supply company even came close to offering. It was no
contest. Self-servingly, they had more to gain for themselves by dealing with my client
than dealing with his competitors.

You want to maneuver your business or practice into the same position. That may mean
that you give you customer or your client so much more follow-up, so many more
bonuses, so much more technical support, so much more attention and acknowledgment,
so much more specific performance commitment that no customer or client would ever
consider doing business with anyone else.

Let me give you a couple of examples of how my clients have done this. A men's
clothier I work with offers free alterations for life. You come in any time you want and
you get styling and fashion tips. They will press your clothes for you while you wait if
you're going out going out or if you happen to be there and your shirt or your tie or your
pants are wrinkled. They'll give you a robe to wear. They just extend themselves at the
highest level possible. They also have wardrobe consulting, absolutely free. They'll go
to your house, they'll look at everything you got, they'll make notes, they'll come back,
they'll lay out all kinds of possible matches and contrasts and compliments. They'll
come to your home at night. They'll do whatever it takes to serve you at a higher level
than the competition. And guess what? They own their market.

A company I worked with in Australia sells of all things forklifts, and he owns his
market. Why? Because he discovered a simple way to lower the cost of operating a
forklift. And, for your information, if you have no familiarity with forklifts, the
difference between it being operated efficiently and inefficiently can be a savings or a
waste of tens of thousands of dollars a year to an industrial-type company. So what my
client did was work with the forklift operators to educate them, to teach them how to use
the forklift trucks most efficiently. He also set up programs where the forklift operators
got rewarded, both financially and with awards and distinctions, for turning in superior
levels of both performance and efficiency.

The owners of the businesses he worked with and the senior managers became the
loyalist possible customers imaginable because they appreciated how much more he
extended himself in their interest than any of his competitors.

A CPA I work with sends his staff to the client's place of business at no charge to help
them collect all their important papers, to set up systems for them. Most CPA's charge
through the nose. My client realizes that the more efficient, the more organized, the more
strategic he gets his clients, the more valuable he will be to them and the more loyal they
in turn will be long-term to him. He has three times the referral rate of any other CPA I
know. He has one-half the attrition rate. This should give you an idea. You got to ask
yourself: How can I move my company or practice from the ordinary to the
extraordinary.'? How can I vastly improve upon the way everyone else in my industry or
my profession does business7 And finally: What can I add, both tangible and intangible,
that makes it so much more beneficial and enjoyable to do business with me it virtually
guarantees I'll have that customer or client forever?

The third way to increase your customer retention rate is to communicate frequently to
nurture your customers or clients. It's a simple concept, it's a powerful concept, it's an
incredibly enjoyable concept, and yet it's a concept that's not understood and practiced
by very many of the businesses or professionals I get the opportunity of working with.
So before I explain how to do it, let me explain to you why you must do it. It's very
simple. You've heard the statement, out of sight, out of mind. That couldn't be truer than
it is today.

Why? Because people are bombarded by more information today than at any other time
in history. That causes you a real problem. Why? Because the moment they have
transacted business with you, their minds immediately revert to some other concern or
issue or challenge or problem or need or desire, and you drift out of their mind. Your
challenge and your biggest opportunity, if you're going to retain and sustain a lot of
customer transactions, is to keep those customers constantly connected to you and your
business or practice, to keep them constantly thinking about how good you are, how
valuable you are, how much you care about them and their well-being, how much they
enjoy and desire and value the products or services they acquire from you and to keep
that connection alive and flowing. There are a lot of different ways to do it.

Let me explain a couple of the more powerful methods my clients have been using. I
have a dentist I taught to contact his patients continually. Most specifically, he calls
every patient after they've had a procedure. He calls them up, he checks to see how
they're doing, how the procedure worked. He does it right after it's been rendered. He
marks on his calendar to do it again in a week. He marks on his calendar to do it again
one more time about a month later. Have you ever had a dentist do that?

What do you think would happen if your dentist called you two or three days after he
had done a major filling in your mouth? It would be pretty impressive, wouldn't it? What
do you think would happen if he called you a week later just to make sure that the pain
and the discomfort were totally gone? It would be shocking. What do you think would
happen if he called you 30 days later just to make absolutely positive there is no
recurrence, no problem, no irritation, no inflammation? Do you think it would
demonstrate that he cared about you at a level much, much, much higher than any other
dentist you had ever worked with?

Do you think you'd be inclined to think about him often and tell a lot of your friends? Do
you think you'd be inclined to keep your appointments and not break them with this
dentist? Do you think you'd be wanting to take all of your family members there and tell
everybody you worked with or all your neighbors about the dentist? Of course you
would, and that's what happens. This man's practice has boomed since I got him to do
the simple, little procedure. And guess what? He enjoys it thoroughly because it
connects him in a far deeper level than he's ever been able to do in the mere confines of
his offices. He says it's wonderful when he calls up patients and they talk.
They appreciate him. He gets connected to them and their families. And he says what
happens is a transformation. The relationship improves and changes at a much higher
level than he ever thought possible. This can easily happen in your business also. I
have a luxury hotel owner in the Southwest who makes it a point to not just send
mundane solicitations to his past guests. Every month he sends them updates of the
wonderful and delightful activities going on at his unique resort hotel. He sends pictures
of how other people are celebrating and enjoying. He shares innovative ways people use
his facilities to celebrate--couples coming for their 50th anniversaries, people who have
come up with really neat new ways to enjoy getting away with their whole families. He
introduces them to people who come from afar.

He makes your connection with that hotel very deep and very different than any
connection you may have ever had with any other hotel you stayed at. He makes you feel
welcome. He makes you feel like one of the family.

Another client I work with in Palm Springs does the same thing, and they have five
times the repeat customer level of any other hotel in Palm Springs because they make
you feel like you're one of their family. You're not just a charge-card deposit they
process. You are an important, fascinating, unique human being that they thoroughly
appreciate and enjoy, and they relish the chance to serve you. You are a guest and, as a
guest, they treat you accordingly, and that treatment and that respect is conveyed by all
the communications they share with you. So those are the three ways to increase your
customer retention rate.

Now remember, we're still looking at the first of the three ways to grow your business
which is, of course, increasing your number of customers. Now under the same heading,
let's look at the four ways you have to increase what I call your inquiry-to-sale inversion
rate, and here is where we'll cover direct sales in some detail, which is one of the main
pillars of profitability in our Parthenon of marketing methods and approaches. But first
let's recognize that almost every business and professional practice has a fairly constant
flow of prospects and leads either coming to them or they go after. Ordinarily, a
number of those prospects and leads never get converted or turned into customers or
clients. Why? There are many reasons. Probably the most important reason is that you
don't have a system in place to intelligently and effectively convert a larger portion of
those prospects over to customers or clients. What happens normally is, almost
accidentally, just through the sheer force and magnitude of their appeal or their desire for
your product or service, customers convert themselves.

So I want to help you develop a simple system that will turn more of your leads and
prospects into customers and clients. It's that simple. If can do that and that alone, you
are going to get a lot more efficiency out of everything you do, because you're not going
to waste opportunity. Opportunity wasted is when 10 great prospects who have a
capacity of turning themselves into wonderful, ongoing customers or clients aren't
converted by you.

Boosting Sales Conversions

So let's look at four easy methods you can implement to increase your inquiry to sale
conversion rate.

1. Increase the sales skills of your staff This is probably the easiest, most powerful and
significant instant transformation your business or profession will ever embark upon.
Because the moment you get your staff trained in better selling principles, methods and
understandings, every prospect or lead or inquiry they ever deal with will be handled
differently, will be respected at a higher level; it will be converted far more effectively.
Improving the selling skills of your staff members is really easy to do and produces
instantaneous improvement.

Now, you have to realize a couple of really fascinating points. The first is this. Almost
every business owner and professional I work with has never had formal training in
selling techniques or strategy. They have no understanding about the psychology of how
people make decisions, they don't understand the dynamics of persuasion and influence.
They don't understand any of that and yet, they have installed themselves in a business
where persuasion, influence, selling is a critical factor. I guess they think that by some
Divine guidance everything will be made okay for them and they're going to all ora
sudden wake up one morning with these supremely competent selling skills. It doesn't
happen that way. And yet, developing your selling skills and those of your staff is one of
the easiest processes you'll ever embark upon.

First of all, I've got to define what I think the key fundamental and improving selling
skills is. There are two different schools of selling thought. One is technique-based; one
is strategy-based. If you have to choose, I would always recommend you choose strategy
over technique. Strategy is the big picture, the intent, what you're trying to accomplish,
the big strategic purpose or basis behind everything you do. Technique-based selling is a
little more manipulative. I advocate a consultative or advisory form of selling. Basically
speaking, that means what you're doing for your client is leading and guiding and
educating and directing them into what's in their better interest than anybody else might
guide them to. You're working with them, you're nurturing, you're learning about them.
You're giving them your best reason, best experience, most expert ideas,
recommendations, counsel and direction on buying decisions, products or services to
choose, strategies for them to use.

Selling strategy is really easy to learn. There are about five easy ways you can do it. The
simplest is probably to buy a tape set. And the best people I think that offer them, and
I'm not saying this because they happen to be my publisher, is Nightingale-Conant. They
have five or six really fine sales trainers that they represent. I think any of those would
be extremely valuable. I've known a lot of my clients who have purchased products from
them, and they've improved their selling skills two, three, four, 500%.

If you can listen to a set of eight tapes in a week or less and you can have those tapes
listened to by your staff, and instantaneously it could improve their ability to close
prospects by two or three or five times, as I've seen done over and over again, that's
incredibly significant. So get your hands on at least one set of sales tapes. I'm not
going to make a specific recommendation of whose tapes. I'll only suggest that you try to
focus first on strategic selling skills, not technique.

2. There are some fine books on the market. You can go to any good bookstore or
library. And if you just sit down and get any decent book--and a great old one is How I
Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling by Frank Beaker, it's a classic. It's been
around 30 years or so and is a great book How to Win Friends and Influence People has
been around for 40 years, and I would recommend it to you almost above any other
book. is a great book too, and that's a classic by Dale Carnegie--if you read them and
every one of your staff would read them, you can't imagine the instantaneous
improvement it will have in your selling skills.

And when those selling skills improve, so too will your ability to close more prospects
and leads and turn them into customers or clients. Another important point to realize is
this: Most business owners and professionals don't realize that their entire organization is
a selling machine. And by that I mean you don't just teach the direct contact, the man or
woman or the men or women who sell directly. Everybody in your organization is an
extension of your selling philosophy.

The person answering your phone, the person delivering the product or service, the
person moving somebody from one room to another, if they're going through a waiting
or examination room process, the person who follows up and calls, the person who
makes a confirmation of an appointment, the person who goes out and installs a product
or service, the person who handles the customer-request or the customer service
complaint, the person in the billing department who calls to make sure they're getting
paid, the person in the repair department who goes out whenever there's a problem, all of
those people, if you can get them skilled in strategic-based consultative sales training,
will add dramatically to the effectiveness of your business and to your ability to convert
prospects and leads over to customers and clients.

3. Identify and transfer the selling skills of your best producers over to everyone else in
your organization. Most people I work with seem to think that selling is more an art than
a science. It is not. It's very easy to identify, to isolate and to transfer selling skills from
one person to another. But you can't do it until you make the commitment to do it.

So here's what I recommend. Identify within your organization those men or women,
those salespeople or other individuals who are instrumental in converting prospects and
leads over to customers and clients, and start looking at the processes they use, the
methods, the techniques and the elements of their particular conduct, what they say, how
they say it, inflection, processes they use, and identify them and isolate them and try to
interview them and find out if they even know how they approach a prospect, what they
say, why they say it, what their strategy in doing so is. Try to identify and document
what that is so that you can take what you have learned and teach it to others who don't
do it that effectively.

One time I grew a company's business by over 100% in three months just through this
process. We brought all the sales managers in a room from around the country. We
methodically went around the room and asked each sales manager to stand up and tell us
the most powerful sales technique they used. We asked them the basis behind it. We
asked them how they got trained in using it. We asked them the experiences they've had
where they've used that most effectively. We asked them what went through their mind
when they were doing it.

We asked them if they could summarize it into three critical skills and processes that had
to occur for that technique to work. When we interviewed 50 different sales managers,
we got 45 totally separate systems of selling. Almost every one of those we could
combine and add together to improve the selling skills of each one of those sales
managers. When they all went back to their respective territories, we armed them with
the best elements that we have learned from all 50 of them and reduced it down to a
simple basic essence. We picked out the most powerful elements and we started
concentrating just on those 10.

We asked everyone of the sales managers to try using those 10 sales elements that we
had identified by analyzing the best selling skills of each one of them and we put
together a hybrid selling strategy, which was the combined essence of the best elements
we'd learned from all of them together. And instantaneously, to the delight and surprise
of every one of these sales managers, their volume and production and closings went up
and up and up.

When we brought them all together, we told them our goal was to double sales in the
next three months, and they looked at us like we were crazy. And yet, with little effort,
because they didn't do anything differently except the way they conducted themselves,
what they said, how they said it and, most importantly, how they thought about the
customer or client prospect.

This is really important. I got into everybody's mind and I asked them to share with
everyone else in the room how they saw that customer, how they saw that prospect, what
they thought about, what they were trying to accomplish, and very few of them were
trying to manipulate or maneuver. They were almost to the person trying to find a way to
help solve the problem, trying to find a way to enrich that prospect's life, trying to find a
way to bring greater value or benefit to that person's situation. When they shared what
they were trying to do, it turned on so much opportunity for so many of the other sales
managers it was shocking.

What I recommend you do is a similar process. Regardless of whether you're a business

or a professional practice, you have certain staff members who are better than others at
converting or closing prospects or leads into customers or clients. Step back and try to
find out what it is they do, transactionally, why they do it--in other words, what's their
motivation; how they see their goal, their purpose and their function in connecting you to
the customer or prospect, and then, what about that could be shared or learned or
embraced by everybody else in your organization. I recommend you do not do it
privately. Getting everybody together in a non-threatening, sharing, brainstorming-type
setting, after hours, before hours, or at lunch, when it's quiet, when the phones aren't
ringing and when they're fully attentive to this purpose and this purpose only, is a very
effective process.

Getting into peoples' minds, drawing out of them nurturously and with respect, how they
see life, how they see their purpose, how they see their function, how they see what you
do helps everyone else and, frankly, helps you enormously see your role and your
purpose at a much higher level than perhaps you have in the past. It's a tremendously
satisfying process and it instantaneously enables you to transfer whatever natural or
trained selling skills your best producers or performers possess and transfers those skills
over to everyone else in your organization instantaneously.

4. If you don't already have one, adding a dedicated sales manager, man or woman,
whose full-time job function it is to direct, to motivate, to improve, to increase and to
train your salespeople to perform more effectively and profitably for you can be an
invaluable asset. 5. Go out and let yourself and your staff get sold. Go to all kinds of
businesses and professionals, including your competitors, and let them sell you. Observe
and document and record and make careful detailed notes of the processes they use, the
things they say, the methods and strategies they employ. As you are experiencing and
observing and being sold make careful notes, either mentally or, preferably, by taking a
pad and pencil or a tape recorder and documenting what you see and what you
experience as you encounter it.

The point is this. If you go to stores, if you go to professionals, if you go to service

companies, if you go to car dealerships, you should be able to learn so many procedures,
so many processes and so many sales techniques and strategies that you can directly or
indirectly apply to the way you transact your business to the way you go about
converting leads and prospects into customers and clients. And the best part is that most
of the companies you're going to go to are strong, aggressive, skilled selling
organizations invested mightily in their training.

They have training managers, sales managers, general sales managers. They subscribe
to all kinds of training services. They bring professional consultants on constantly. By
doing nothing more than being a customer or prospect of those two firms, you can get
the combined essence of what they learn and have it presented to you literally, not even
figuratively, by watching and experiencing it in the role of a prospect or customer and
you can learn so many wonderful and powerful things you can apply to your own
business.

One of my proudest accomplishments occurred when I got a client of mine, an industrial

supply company that specializes in selling soap and cleaning supplies to hotels and
motels around the world, to teach not only their salespeople but all their customer
service and billing staff intelligent sales training procedures. They did that and they also
taught them a lot about the different types of people, and we can get into this deeply, but
there are four or five different selling types and depending on the kind of a person the
prospect is, you must deal with him or her differently. Some people are very auditory.
They think in terms of hearing things.

Some people are visual. They think of how they see things in their mind and in reality.
Other people feel things, and you've got to deal with them differently, and it's a whole
depth of understanding of the psychology of human nature. But the point I want to make
is I got this client of mine to put not only the selling people but their customer service
and billing people through this very exciting training process. It all took about two days.
And in the first year of having everybody work together with a standardized strategy that
was unified, their business went up 35%. That's the only factor to which they could
attribute that increase. Everybody in their organization, not just the salesmen and women
but the customer service and the billing department also, and I might add, we also put
the receptionist department through the training process, because everybody was skilled
and committed to a sales-based training philosophy, and they all shared a unified
strategy, sales increased 35% in one single year.

How much of a difference could it mean to your business or practice? I don't know, but
if one two-day training process added 35% increase in sales at about double profit, I'd
say it's at least worth your while to give it a try.

End of Side Jay - The second of the four ways to increase your inquiry-to-sales
conversion rate is to qualify leads better up front. I'm going to give you a really
interesting understanding of the four critical processes in lead generating, and almost no
one I work with understands this. Most people just look at generating leads or prospects
as if every lead or prospect has the same relative value to them, and they do not.
Depending on where they come from, depending upon the reason that they responded in
the first place, depending upon what they are responding for--there's a difference
between reason and what they're responding for.

The reason may be an ad or a letter that you sent out offering something very attractive.
What they're responding for may be a specific product or service. Until you have the
answers to all those questions, you don't know anything. Likewise, most businesses and
professional practices who have a lot of leads and prospects coming to them never stop
and think about what a lead or Prospect costs them to acquire. If you start looking at
acquisition costs, it is enormous.

Let's talk about that for a minute. Leads come to you from a lot of different sources. If
you run a Yellow-Page ad in the phone directory, you may spend a thousand or two
thousand dollars a month. Perhaps that one or two thousand dollars expenditure produces
40 or 50 phone calls or visits Each one of those inquiries costs you whatever 40 is
divided into one or two thousand. If you are a retail store and you have very expensive
facilities in a high-traffic shopping center, you may be spending $10,000 a month for
your rent. Now, $10,000 rent may generate for you 50 or 150 or 550 new prospects or
leads every month. People who are not existing customers who walk in off the street
because they're in the center and they see your facilities. Each one of those prospects
costs you a fortune.

They cost you whatever 500 is divided by your rent just to get them to walk in your
door. You have an enormous imbedded cost to acquire them. You have invested
mightily to generate them. You owe it to yourself to convert them at the highest level.
The first rule of lead generation is to qualify people more effectively. Why? Because
quantity does not matter in lead generation.

Quality and convertibility are the key factors to look at. Quality refers to the quality of
the prospect, meaning their capacity to buy your product or service, their desire to buy
your product or service, their motivation factor. Somebody could desire your product or
service, but not be motivated to do it right now. You get people qualified by modifying
the selling strategies you used to generate that lead or prospect in the first place. In
other words, if you run ads in magazines or publications, those ads should offer very
specific qualifying propositions so that the men or women or the companies responding
to those ads very clearly are responding because they are qualifying themselves. They
are saying yes, I want that information because I have an abiding interest in that product
or service or I want to get that result.

Too many companies I look at run ads or send out letters or make offers at trade shows
that are not qualifying enough, so they generate a lot of leads, but the quality and the
convertibility of those leads are very low. It costs you an enormous amount of effort, of
human capital, of real expense in dollars to travel, to send out samples, to go and bring
somebody to your facility, to spend the time and the effort and the technical investment
that often times you have to make to get somebody to the point of saying yes, I want to
be a customer. You can't afford to waste that opportunity on people who aren't sincerely
interested. You are always better off to get higher quality, rather than more quantity of
prospects.

So you do that in many different ways. When you run ads, make sure those ads offer
information and inducement that tie in exactly to the product or service or benefit you
provide. For example, if you were a savings and loan company and you're running ads in
the newspaper, I would never run ads saying how great you were. I would always run
ads offering a booklet and the booklet would be 25 things you must do before you
refinance any home. Or a booklet that says 10 critical mistakes most people make when
they're buying a new home. Or, how to finance a new home or refinance an existing one
and save $15 thousand or more over the life of your mortgage.

Every one of those examples only appeals to people who are seriously interested in
either making a purchase or making a financing or refinancing decision. Why would you
want people to call you who aren't interested? It's a waste of your time, you have to work
much harder just to bring them to the point of closure. When you get them there, you
find that by and large most of them aren't ready or even interested or even qualified to
buy whatever product or service you offer.

Every thing you do, if you send 10 letters off, don't make the letters general. Make the
letters always specifically refer to some product or service or sampling or process the
recipient of that letter, the prospect, can take advantage of, but those should only be
products or services or offers that that prospect could have a very strong interest in
acquiring. If you are a manufacturer and you're looking for prospective new customers
to buy your finished goods, it's useless to approach people who aren't in the business of
selling the products you produce. So you've got to first of all qualify it by going to the
right markets; second, you've got to offer the people you contact information about your
specific product so they don't inquire about anything other than something they can
benefit from; third, you've got to make sure they are genuinely interested and they aren't
wasting your time.

One of the biggest wastes of time and opportunity that I watch is people who do not
qualify the mailing list that they target. Instead of running lists to the primary prospects,
they rent lists of suspects. The difference between a suspect and a prospect is quality. A
suspect is anybody who maybe, possibly, somehow could might or someday, squint your
eyes, has the capacity of buying your product. A prospect is somebody who's qualified
today. They need your product. They're at a business or situation in life where they can
benefit from that product. They have the capacity to pay for it. They have the ability to
make a decision now. They have the need. They are prime qualified targets for what you
do.

ere are a few examples of how clients of mine qualify their leads. First of all, let me give
you a professional example because it's rather interesting. I have a client who is a
psychotherapist, and she does a radio station talk show. When anybody calls in to talk to
her, before they're put on the air they are asked if they'd like to be on her private mailing
list of products and services and private events that she conducts. If they say yes, that
person is about a ten times greater prospect for becoming a client or a seminar attendee
or a tape set buyer than not. She's found that by putting people through this qualifying
process, she doesn't waste time, effort or money on people who are not really eager to use
her products or services.

I have a friend in the business-opportunity field. He sells a franchise for a very

innovative service that teaches people how to reduce people's expenses, taxes and
operating overhead. It's a fabulous business. It costs approximately $15,000 to acquire a
franchise for. He's got a very small, directed organization and he cannot afford to waste
time or manpower on people who are what he calls lookey lives. So what he does, he
runs very qualifying ads. His ads appear in the business opportunity publications,
Entrepreneur, Success, and in the Wall Street Journal. Sometimes, occasionally, he also
runs in USA Today in the business section. In those ads he tells about his business and
he understates--he does not overstate--the business so he knows someone responding is
not hyped up on it. They're not deluded optimists. Then he very clearly says there is a
minimum of a $15,000 starting investment plus you must have your own funds to
operate on for at least three months before the business starts generating a positive cash
flow. Again, he's qualifying. He's not saying you're going to make a million dollars
overnight. Finally he says, if you can qualify, if you are comfortable with that
investment, if you have an interest in making a decision in the not-too-distant future and
you are dead serious about going into some enterprise of your own, please contact us and
we will invest time and effort in helping you evaluate whether or not this concept has
merit.

What he does is about ten times more qualifying than saying, hey, maybe you can make
a million dollars. Hey, if you're alive and you're interested, send in a coupon. He doesn't
want to waste time on unqualified people, ninety percent of the people who respond to
him are qualified. He converts often times one out of two. Compare that to people I
know who convert one out of 100 loosely qualified or unqualified respondents. It makes
a big difference.

The third method is to make irresistible offers. Along those lines, I've got to make an
important clarification for you. In most peoples' businesses, and I suspect your business
or practice is not dissimilar, a customer or client has an ongoing value to you. You don't
sell a single transaction and then never deal with them again. In the very worse case,
they have value to you as a prospect to refer or introduce more customers or clients to
you. In the best case, they come to you and they start a succession of purchasing
transactions that continues for years to come.

Consequently, you have an enormous motivation and incentive to do whatever is

necessary to make it easy and irresistible for them to want to start the purchasing
relationship with your business or practice now, immediately, not some time in the
far-distant future. The way to do that is make it harder to say no than to say yes. Make
it more irresistible than resistible. Eliminate all the hurdles prospects have to jump over.
Make it more appealing than unappealing to do business with your organization.
Different clients of mine do it in different ways, and I'm sure you will, but let me share
with you a couple of examples of some truly irresistible offers my clients are making. I
have a clothing store, this is another one, who makes a simple offer to anybody they ever
meet. Let us consult with you free for 90 days before you ever buy anything from us. Let
us teach you how to dress more powerfully, more fashionably and more effectively. Let
us go to your home. Let us bring you to our facilities.

Let us teach you the difference in fabrics. Let us teach you what colors and fabrics and
designs compliment your body in the most fashionable way possible. And then after
we've done that, if you decide that our merchandise serves your purposes, we'd be very
pleased to have your business. In essence, what my client does is say, let us invest in
you first. Let us make you a fashionable man or woman. Let us improve the way you
look in anything you currently own or anything you ever buy, irrespective of where you
buy it from. If after we've helped orient and educate and teach and train you to be a more
fashionable dresser, to look better, to look greater, to be your very best, if you wish to
favor us with some or all of your business, we would be flattered, but that's not
necessary or expected. It's an irresistible offer, isn't it? How can you say no to a
knowledgeable expert who's willing to extend himself and his organization in your
behalf to make you the most fashionable, the most beautiful, the most becoming man or
woman you can in any clothes you ever wear? You can't. And out of a hundred people
that would say yes, guess what? About 65% become customers and of those 65%,
nearly half become extremely great customers who buy over and over again because
they got attracted to the fact that my client was more focused on the prospect's or
customer's best interest than they were their own. That's the key to irresistible offers.
They're all about you, the customer; they're not about me, the seller.

Let me tell you some other ways clients do it. An automobile dealer that I worked with
sold every car he ever offered at his cost. He made no money on the transaction. How
could he afford to do that? He made a lot of profit on accessories-- tape recorders, CDs,
special wheel covers, warranty packages--he sold. He made a lot of money on arranging
the financing, but he attracted far more customers because he was willing to get the
initial sale without any profit. Here's an important fact to understand when it comes to
thinking about irresistible offers to make. It costs you a small fortune in most cases to
attract a new customer or client in the first place.

It costs you very little to resell that customer or client over and over again. So your goal
has got to be to get them to the position where they are an active customer as quickly
and as easily as possible so you can start making money on the additional transactions
you do with them. You don't want to make it difficult. You don't want to give them a
reason to think about it. You don't want them to put off making their initial purchase
with your organization. So everything you do should be geared toward making it easier,
more attractive and appealing to start that buying relationship.

It doesn't matter if you don't make any money initially if you know that once you bring
that customer in or that client, they're going to be coming back over and over again five
or ten times a year forever. So, put a pencil to these two questions: One, on average, how
many additional transactions can I expect to get from a new customer I bring into my
business or practice in year one, in year two, and over forever. If the answer is a lot,
you've got so much motivation to bring people into your organization now. It's shameful
if you're not making irresistible offers.

If you only sell one basic product or service one time to customers, the question you
must ask yourself is: Can I, in doing a true service to that customer, offer them an
improvement or an upgrade in either the size or the quality or the combination of the
product or service they're buying that would make it mutually profitable? Now I have to
clarify. Don't think I'm talking about conventional bait and switch because I am not.
Look at it this way. If you know that a customer or a client comes to you for a basic
product or service but you know in your heart that a superior form or size of that product
or service could produce a far greater result, benefit or advantage for that customer by
offering them the opportunity but not the obligation to choose up a higher level, you may
actually be doing them a greater service. For example, if somebody came into your car
dealership and what they were looking at was a four-cylinder, four-speed basic
automobile, but for $500 additional you could upgrade them to an eight-cylinder,
automatic with air- conditioning and you knew that by doing that, yes, you would make
a little bit more and they would spend a little bit more, but the time they would spend in
their automobile would be much more enjoyable and they would enjoy driving it at a
much higher level, and besides the pleasure that that larger-sized version of the car
would give them, that car would maintain far greater resale value whenever they wanted
to trade it in, you would probably be doing them a disservice instead of a service if you
didn't at least offer them the opportunity to upgrade.

The same thing in services. Maybe you are a CPA and they come to you for a basic tax
return, but they don't have a financial plan or they don't have a well- prepared financial
statement or they don't have their other financial affairs in good order or they never had
their business properly appraised in value. If you offer them all of those services or the
upgrade in the transaction you're doing, they have the right to say no and you have the
obligation to deliver the basic product or service you offered at the price or rate you
offered it for. But if you've got a superior way they can benefit from an improved
version of that product or service, you owe it to the customer to at least offer it to them.
When you do you will find that a high number of those customers or prospects will
convert up. If it's better for them than for you, you should offer it. If that's the case, a
lot of people will take advantage of it, and it's worth your while to make them an
irresistible offer to come in. Remember the blind and curtain company? They offer a
wonderful basic curtain or blind for a very attractive price.

But when people realize they can customize the drape, they can color coordinate it and
the fabric to their furnishings to their accessories, more of them than not want to do that
because they get greater benefit, greater value, more satisfaction and pride out of having
their room be fully coordinated than not. So the question to ask is this: What kind of
irresistible offer will attract the largest number of qualified prospects to my business or
practice and compel the largest number of those prospects to take full advantage?
Because your goal in using this method is to persuade the largest number of prospects to
become customers and clients. You do that by making the initial transaction so
irresistible it's hard for anyone who's qualified to say no.

And finally, four, educate your customers by giving them reasons why. Human nature is
very, very predictable. People are silently begging to be led, but they want to be led by
people who genuinely care about their best interests, not self- serving people. Most
prospects that are not yet customers or clients haven't crossed the line and purchased
because they are unsure. They are unsure of a lot of things--the suitability of your
product or service to their situation, the performance of your product or service, the level
of benefit they'll get our of your product or service, why your specific product or service
is more appropriate or superior or desirable for them than either someone else's or of not
acting at all. Your opportunity is to help that prospect understand as many reasons why,
tangible and compelling and meaningful reasons why they receive a greater benefit by
moving forward and making a purchase.

There are a number of ways you can do this. When you focus on reasons why,
understand this. Unbeknownst to every prospect you ever deal with, they are all asking
you the same question. It's a silent question, but a burning one. That question is why?
Why, why, why. Why should I buy from you? Why should I buy this product over
another over another? Why should I buy today? Why should I spend this amount of
money? Why should I put my faith in your product or your company or your
manufacturer? If you can help them understand and appreciate the reasons why, they
will be so bonded to your business or practice it's scary, because you'll be the only
company or the only professional who takes the time to educate and explain to people
how things work, how things are created, how people are trained, how people go about
doing what they do. It's a very powerful process.

Another way of looking at this is you'll be practicing what I call preemptive marketing.
Preemptive marketing is the process of educating people to how and why things are done
the way they are. A classic story that will help you appreciate the power of preemptive
marketing has to do with a beer company in the '20s that rose from number eight in their
market to number one in six very, very short months by using the same preemptive
techniques I want you to consider and apply.

The company was Schlitz Beer. In the early 1920s, Schlitz Brewery was a very
unsuccessful brewing company. There were eight or ten different brewing companies
that were aggressively competing for the same market. Everyone yelled and screamed in
their advertising the same basic message. Our beer is pure. They didn't explain to the
beer drinker what pure really meant. They just said pure, pure, pure. Schlitz was not
doing very well. They were introduced to the concept of preemptive marketing by a
brilliant man named Claude Hopkins back in the early '20s. In six months of applying it,
their business soared from number eight to number one in their market.

All they did was this: They explained to people the process by which they made their
beer. They wrote ads and made announcements all over the country that explained the
following. Number one, their facilities were right on the base of Lake Michigan;
however, even though they were right there and the water back then in the '20s was very
clean, they sunk two 5,000-feet deep artesian wells right on the shores because they had
to go deep enough to find the right combination of water with the mineral content to
make the best possible beer. They explained how they went through 1623 separate
experiments over about five years' time to identify and develop the finest mother yeast
cell that could produce the richest taste and flavor. They showed people how they went
through a process of distillation of the water before they used it to brew the beer where it
was heated to 5,000 degrees F. and then cooled down and condensed, and they did that
three times to make sure it was absolutely purified. They told about the bottling process
where they steamed each bottle at temperatures of 1600 degrees F. to kill all bacteria and
all germs so that they could not possibly contaminate the rich hearty taste of their beer.
Then they explained that they had every batch tasted to make certain it was, in fact, pure
and rich and hearty before they would ever bottle it and send it out the door.
When the management of Schlitz was told to do that, they were incredulous. They said,
why would we want to tell that to anybody? That's how all beer is made. And the genius
who understood preemptive marketing said to them, But no one in your industry explains
it. The first person who tells the stow and explains how and the reasons why you do
something will gain distinction and preeminence in their market place from then on.
Schlitz was the first and the only company that ever told the story of how their beer was
made. It made the word pure take on a very different, a much more dimensional and
tangible meaning in the eyes and the mind and the palate of all beer drinkers around the
country. Everybody started flocking to Schlitz' beer because they saw in the description
of the manufacturing and bottling process that Schlitz went through to make this
premium beer something totally different and far more valuable and appealing than any
other beer process they'd ever been introduced to.

The preemptive marketing process has direct applications to your business or profession.
Ask yourself these questions: What is it about what I do and how I do it and the people I
use to help me do it that my prospects and customers would find valuable and appealing?
How could I explain better the process we go through to create our product or service,
the components we use, how we choose them, the engineering standards we created and
their performance expectation? How could I explain the process of elimination we went
through to reject all kinds of components or manufacturers before we settled on the
handful of ingredients or composition products we use to create the product or service
we sell? How many ways can I explain the training process we put our staff members
through or that I went through myself to gain the knowledge, the experience and the
expertise I use to produce this produce or service for you? How can I explain the reasons
why this product or this service performs more advantageously or beneficially or
tangibly for a customer or client than an alternative one?

The answers to these questions will provide you with the reasons why and the basis you
can use to educate your customer on a far higher and deeper plain than any of your
competitors do. Think about this point. In your business or consumer life there are a
number of companies and professionals who have taken the time to carefully explain to
you how their product works, how they got their experience, how they became experts,
how you can use their product or service more advantageously. When those people did
that, you were probably attracted to them at a higher level than you were their
competitors and you undoubtedly did and are still doing business with them for that
reason.

I want you to take advantage of this same educational power and use reason-why- based
education to convert far more prospects or leads over to customers and clients. It's very
easy to do. Let me share with you a few of the ways my clients are using reason why
education to convert many times more prospects over to customers and clients in their
businesses. I have two different clients in the expensive business software industry who
both have used the same process I created for them. They will not try to sell any
prospect until they first invite them to attend a day-long extensive seminar program.
During this program, my clients start at the beginning and explain thoroughly to all the
prospects in attendance how and why and where their software can produce the greatest
advantage to a client.

They explain how the software was created; why the software was created; all the
benefits and functions that were engineered into the software. They tell them how other
companies in those prospects' fields are using that software today. They cite for them
specific performance expectations they can expect to occur when they start using that
software in their businesses. And they answer every question a prospect attendee could
pose plus they introduce questions the prospects never even though to ask. At the end
of these seminars, they then offer the prospect the chance to experience the software in
their operation, side by side their existing sol, ware, for 30 days. They put a pilot
program in operation.

They also introduce them to at least a dozen other people in the same business who are
successfully utilizing the software and they arrange private interviews between the two
so the prospect can get a candid, objective assessment, firsthand, from actual real-life
users of the benefits and advantages they can expect to receive when they start using that
software in their own enterprise. I have a chain of beauty salons that educate women
before they ever take them as a client. They teach them about the role makeup and
hairstyle has in complementing and improving the design of their facial structure.

They talk about how other clients have used different styles, they show them pictures,
they ask them a lot of questions, not only about what will look the best but their lifestyle
so they can appreciate how and what the best recommendations might be to give them
the best looks, the best feels for their active or inactive lives.

When they are done they then let their prospects ask all the questions they might want to.
Then they put them in a room for at least ten minutes with existing clients that are there
in the salon having treatments and they suggest that they ask those clients what kinds of
improvements they've had occur in their life, in their look, in the feel and the way people
in their lives relate to them. When they're all done, they find that 70% of the prospects
they put through this process convert to clients, and most of them keep coming back
every month for treatments.

So now you have four different methods to increase the inquiry-to-sale conversion rate
in your business or practice. All four of them are easy to use, they're very powerful and
simple to apply, and they will work in almost any business or practice you operate.
Now as we come to the close of this session, let's look at what's beginning to happen
here. You'll remember earlier I said that typically your business or practice is built and
depends almost entirely on only one traditional method for generating customers and
clients. And if you look at the illustration in Section 4 of the guidebook, you'll see the
diving board, which is the graphic illustration of what a lot of businesses and perhaps
your business have come to look like.

There's an entire business or practice that's being supported by one single precarious
method of generating clients and customers. But as you begin implementing and
applying all these additional marketing approaches I've been explaining to you, your
business or profession starts looking more like the famous Greek Parthenon with all sorts
of additional pillars of strength and support being added to it. Each one of those pillars is
an entirely new and fresh and powerful source of additional or replacement customers
and clients and profits for your enterprise.

This produces two obvious advantages. One, it stabilizes your enterprise, giving you
greater security and certainty. Because now, instead of depending upon one single
support pillar, you're adding many support pillars to reinforce one another. And if the
one you've built the business on in the past happens to fail you because of changing
market conditions or competitive circumstances, you're inconvenienced but you're not
compromised. Your business continues to endure and thrive.

But you know what, there's a second advantage that's even better. Because the moment
you start using multiple pillars to build customers and clients, your business or practice
starts growing geometrically. Think about it this way. If you've been operating your
business or practice like a diving board and now you start organizing and operating it
more like the Parthenon, it's like the difference between addition and multiplication. It's
how you produce quantum leaps in your business or practice in an amazingly short
period of time and with surprisingly little effort. I have every confidence you can be
like the plastic surgeon I helped who, once he implemented a formal referral system and
started using direct mail along with qualified mailing lists, saw his practice revenue
triple in less than a year. Or, you could be like the real estate agent I helped who, once
she started using a formal referral system along with a guarantee of results to her clients
plus host- beneficiary to find them, saw her income skyrocket from $20,000 a month to
$82,000 a month, each and every month the first year she did this. You could be like the
retailer who started using special events and promotions along with a very different form
of a U.S.P. and watched sales skyrocket 140% in less than one year. Or you could be
like the little hardware store I helped in South Carolina who grew from $1 million to
over $5 million in less than three years through a simple combination of irresistible
offers and strong educational information.

The point is this, if you'll only do this for me, promise you'll start using combinations of
these new methods and add them to whatever source of business you've ordinarily been
depending on, you can't help but grow your business geometrically. You have my
promise on it. You can take that promise to the bank.

Now, before we close for today, let me explain what I want you to do over the next two
or three days. It's going to sound very familiar, but I'm sure the results you've gotten
from what you've done so far have given you some strong momentum and enthusiasm to
build on. So first, review this session as you did before, making additional notes on how
you can apply what you've learned to your own enterprise.

Second, start with those methods and strategies that are simplest and easiest for you to
apply and begin using them. Third, and this is going to be a lot of fun, at least one time
make someone--a prospect, a customer, a client--an irresistible offer, something that's
harder to say no to than anything that you've offered before. I don't care how you do it.
You can give them more bonuses, you can give them a deal and a half the first time they
buy with a reason why or any combination in between, but make at least one person, one
prospect, one customer, one client, one person an irresistible offer. And if they say yes,
and you haven't given away the store and you stand to make a profit over the long run,
which most likely will happen, do it again with another prospect. And then do it again
and again and again.

Try a number of different customers and clients and enjoy the results. Okay, that
should take us to the end of week 3. Now, just so we're not accused of being out of
balance, I want you to be sure to spend some good quality time this weekend with the
people close to you, and I'll see you back here again next Monday. Till then, have fun
applying what you've learned today.

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