S

Marlon Sanders’ “New Wave Direct Mail

uccess System”

Tele-Conference Transcripts

© 2005 by Higher Response Marketing, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This Document May NOT Be Photocopied or Scanned.

Marlon Sanders’ “New Wave Direct Mail Success System”

Tele-Conference Transcript #5

Marlon: For those of you on the call, welcome. This call is recorded. By speaking on the call today, as always, you give rights and privilege to sound and likeness of your voice in perpetuity, worldwide, without recompense or royalty. Who’s on the call today?

Attendee: Bob in Corona.

Marlon: Hey, Bob, how are you doing today?

Attendee: Doing good.

Marlon: Are you getting to apply things yet? Are you making any progress?

Attendee: I just started making some progress. Then, I was on Google and no longer there. So I’m taking everything backseat right now.

Marlon: Were you using specifically-designed search engine pages?

Attendee: Yes, I had Smart Pages and then I had Traffic Equalizer.

Marlon: Let me throw out something, just as a suggestion, not that it’s not anything you don’t know or haven’t thought of.

I have some friends that use TE. And, of course, you’ve got to know when you use a program like this – and Jeff’s a great guy and a really talented programmer – that generates a volume and then you’re going to have a lot of people generating a lot of volume of pages, the chances it’s going to get banned in the future are pretty high.

So the thing that my friends do that so far has worked effectively for them is they use the program, but customize it. And they also try to think like a search engine, on how a search engine might locate and zap the pages.

So they take and use it, but they customize it so that the chances they’re going to get banned are a lot less likely. Does that make sense?

Attendee: Oh, it does.

Marlon: This is nothing new. But anytime you use a strategy like that, you’ve got to think of is A) how are the search engines going to locate these pages and B) what might they not like about the pages?

The thing that bothers me about some of the TE-type pages, not necessarily produced with TE but TE-type pages, is it that the people put very little effort into them. So a lot of times, when

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you search in Google, you just get this page of links. The page looks like crap. It has no design to it. There’s no content on the page, other than just links.

In other words, TE is a very powerful program. It can really be customized. But there’s a lot of people that are just dumb and they just do the barebones minimum possible, which kind of ruins it for everybody. Does that make sense?

Attendee: Oh, it makes sense.

Marlon: So you’ve got to go in there and, like my friends that are doing it, they create pages so like if a human eye looks at them they’re good-looking pages.

And then also, they just customize different elements so that it makes it a lot less likely for them to get banned. It’s all a game, it’s a competition, and it’s who can play the game the smartest.

Attendee: Yes it is. This is what I like about your program here is the fact that it’s stable, and once it’s in place, it’s in place.

Marlon: I try to explain this to people. It’s why I’m not a big search engine advocate. And it’s not that I don’t have friends that don’t make just killings. Some of them make astounding amounts of money. But they also work really hard at it. They’re darn smart, most of them. Some of them are a lot smarter than I am at figuring that kind of thing out, because it’s highly detailed and I’m not a detailed person.

But then the other issue is the rules change a lot. The only rule change you really get in direct mail is maybe a postage increase. But I mean it’s not like today they said you could mail out 4 x 5 postcards, but tomorrow it’s got to be 4 x 7. And then 2 months from now, it’s got to be on a different weight of stock, a different color, and it’s 4 x 7.25. You know what I’m saying?

Attendee: Sure.

Marlon: It’s like a 4 x 5, you’re going to be able to mail it now, you’re going to be able to mail it a year from now, right?

Attendee: Yeah. And what you in place is a system. The system’s not going to change, except for maybe what you said, the postage.

Marlon: I’m not anti-search engine stuff whatsoever, but if you’re going to dance with a beast you’d better know what color beast you’re dancing with and what he’s like and his characteristics. Right?

Attendee: Right. My traffic went down. Well, there is no traffic. It can’t even be found on Google.

Marlon: Good God, you probably haven’t gotten much sleep.

Attendee: Hey, Marlon, we’ve had the opposite problem. We just got front page on AOL.com.

Marlon: Holy smokes! Let us in on the scoop there, Margaret. Let’s talk about that. What happened and how did it happen? Was it just luck?

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Attendee: Well, we’re also front page on Google.co.uk, MSN, AltaVista, the lot really. And it’s been a 9-year battle.

Marlon: Oh really, 9 years? Wow!

Attendee: I don’t want to depress anyone out there.

Marlon: No, wait. Let me say this. I appreciate you bringing that up, Margaret. Dan Kennedy says a thing that I think is funny. He says, “I became an instant millionaire after 25 years of hard work.” This is true.

So what happens in our business, I just think you’ve got to understand the beast you’re dealing with. And in our business, what happens is you have all the success stories. Right? God bless them, I’ve got success stories. Nothing wrong with them.

But a lot of times, behind that “instant success story” was years of study or work or experimentation to be able to get that. So people get discouraged, actually, not because you tell them the truth but they get discouraged because they think that everybody just did it super easy, fast and instant, and overnight. And they can’t do that, and then they get all discouraged and go, “Well, online marketing doesn’t work, marketing doesn’t work. Promoting products doesn’t work.” Right? Because they think it should be fast, simple, easy.

And maybe in some instances it is. I know virtually every big name in this industry, and I can tell you, almost without exception, 1 of 2 things. Either that big giant success story was a result of quite a bit of study and learning over a period of prior time or years; or, in some cases, the person is just absolutely exceptional.

A Michael Jordan is a Michael Jordan, is a Michael Jordan. No average guy is going to be Michael Jordan.

I have friends that were millionaires at age 21 or younger, and they aren’t normal. Right? At 21, I was working in Dairy Queen, making banana splits. One of my friends is flying in a video crew on August 15 to videotape a seminar of mine here in San Antonio. And he’s like 21 or 22, in another country, making more money than 99.999% of Americans. He started the business when he was like 19. Not a lot of people can run a big business at that age. Good God, I couldn’t even make a good banana split.

This is a true story. My bright idea was to make the banana splits up in advance and put them in the meat freezer.

When you sell a product, whatever you do, whether you’re providing a service, whatever business you’re in, the product is not what you touch, taste or feel. The product is the end result to the consumer. Right?

So in that case, the end product to the customer was called a broken spoon. And that was the end product we were selling, broken spoons. You couldn’t eat the thing. And this was my bright idea at age 21. It took me awhile also, Margaret.

So anyways, it was 9 years of hard work, but now you’re up at the top at AOL. Now, are you paying money for that or that’s a just through search engine strategies?

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Attendee: Well, when we first started out in ’96, we went straight to the top of all the search engines. And we’re still there after 3 years.

And then I got an email from the webmaster at Yahoo and he said, “Change it or I’ll drop you.” And I thought, “Who are these people?”

At the time, it was still very, very expensive to change anything on the website – even a telephone number. So we didn’t manage to change it, certainly not in time.

It later sold our positions. But gradually, after that, we tended to drop out of the search engines. We made some mistakes, like when we changed hosts we didn’t put 404 error pages up and that sort of thing. So gradually, we lost our positioning.

And it’s only been recently, after immense keyword saturation and linking and deep research and all that jazz, that we’ve managed to get the results. And with the new version of our websites, which as got an enormous number of reciprocal links on it too, we seem to have done it.

But it’s funny because on our AOL’s front page and I think it’s outplacement portal, it actually gives our address in the UK, almost to say, “These people are on here.”

Marlon: Wow. Now, are you outsourcing what you’re doing or are you doing that in-house?

Attendee: Doing it all in-house.

Marlon: By yourself or do you have a hired person who does it for you?

Attendee: I’ve been doing it, but I have a web consultant who helps occasionally, when he’s not busy.

Marlon: All right, good. Thank you for sharing that. Who else do we have on the call today?

Attendee: Linda Lanks.

Marlon: Okay, Linda. Welcome. How are you?

Attendee: I am fine.

Marlon: Are you making progress? Are you seeing the big picture here and being able to make some progress and get some focus?

Attendee: I got slammed. I released some PR in June. And just as it all hit, my administrative assistant quit without notice, Marlon. Just buried. But the good news is my sales have quadrupled and I’ve got new dealers coming on to take on Boosteroo and do things.

But the bad news is that I haven’t been able to keep up with your program.

Marlon: So we’re hearing this problem more than once. This is good news. We’re having several people going, “God, Marlon, I’d like to be using your stuff but I’m getting so much business I don’t have any time.”

Attendee: I was hoping to beg you to put it on disk, so I can come back into it. I’ve been with you out in Boulder, Colorado and several other different programs, Jonathan Mizel and the System Club and things. So I’m pretty tapped into what you have to say. And I’ve been most

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impressed with how you’ve developed all of these tools, because that’s the one thing I see is really missing.

Everybody keeps talking about, “You need to understand the theory, you need to understand that.” But what you really need are tools to help you save time, to get things done. You’ve done it. You’re the only one, out of all the consultants that I’ve seen, that have really put the tools together in a comprehensive way. So I congratulate you on that. That was very great.

Marlon: And we’re not there yet. I’m a lot like you. I’m a lot like some of the people on this call. I have a programmer in UK, I have a full-time customer service person, and then I have a full-time webmaster/jack-of-all-trades, and myself.

And if you know my philosophy of business, I’m the weakest link in that I don’t work. All I do is think, unless a product’s got to be written or a sales letter’s got to be written. Other than that, I read, I study and I think.

And it’s not the weakest link, if you don’t have vision, if you don’t know where you’re going. But the point is I don’t have a huge staff. So we can’t produce all the products as fast as we would like. I actually want to hire a training person. That’s somebody I’m going to be interviewing later this week. They can’t replace me, but they can do certain types of support stuff in creating product, because I’d like to increase our product flow.

But, talking about your assistant quitting, this is sort of off the topic of what we’re talking about and sort of on topic. Let me explain.

You may have heard me say this, some of you were on my Gold Milcer calls, you can’t do it all yourself. You really can’t. You’ve got to have help.

But one of the mistakes that I made in hiring talent is this. I think it’s an easy mistake you made. I read a book that said, “You’ve got to have systems, systematize everything, but bring it down to the lowest common denominator and hire the cheapest people you can to run the system.” How many of you know that’s bad advice, had enough experience to know that’s dumb? It don’t work that way in the real world.

But I mean I bought into it. I was fortunate enough to run across some really great people, but I also wasted a year messing with some people that I wasn’t paying enough, but beyond that they really weren’t the talent I needed.

It hurts to hire talent, in terms of maybe you got to pay more than you think you should pay, but talent will also drive you and push you.

The reason I say this is relevant to the direct mail calls, a lot of you came on this call for the automation side of it because you heard, “Automate, automate,” and that was really attractive.

But, I read this interesting article in an ezine the other day, maybe part because I’ve been putting out kind of this automation theme. Something that other people do also. And the person made the point, “There really is no automation because there’s always got to be stuff done to maintain the business.” Absolutely true. To me, automation means I don’t do it.

Yesterday, I went to Sea World. Before I left to go to Sea World, I’d already had an $850 order and another $300 or $400 of orders. I didn’t have to do anything. I was gone all day at Sea

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World. I come back, nothing’s fallen apart. Everything’s in place. The stuff is already done for today’s call. That’s the power of having talent.

I was always taught don’t hire people, be scared of people, employees are a pain, and all of this stuff. And really, I don’t see it that way. Yeah, they can be a pain, especially if you hire untalented people with bad attitudes. But if you hire really great, talented people, it frees you up. It’s freedom.

I think that’s part of understanding automation. It means having people that runs systems for you.

And so one of the things you’ve got to look at as you grow your business is, how do I take the things that I’m doing and then bring in talent to do some of these areas?

Now they may be independent contractors. They may not actually be employees. I like to hire people in other countries for that reason.

But just be thinking, “How do I leverage myself?” There’s only 3 quantities that you have to spend in the whole world. I talk a lot about this in my Milcers newsletters, too. You’ve got time, you’ve got money, you’ve got energy, and that’s it. Those are the only 3 things you’ve got in the world to spend. You’ve got your time, you’ve got your money, and you’ve got your energy.

If you’re spending your TME on lower-payoff activities, then you’re never going to make the money you want to make.

The only way that you make money is by shedding yourself of the lower-payoff activities and, over time, progressively moving to higher and higher and higher-payoff activities.

I’m going to submit to you that the highest-payoff activities are mission, vision, beliefs, values and leadership. And that’s the absolute highest value that you bring. The vision, bringing in the talent, even having talent to set your systems up. But you’ve got to have the drive and the vision. I’m talking ultimately.

A level below that is you’re bringing in people to do certain activities or someone that’s an operations-type person, and so forth.

I’m just saying this, Linda, in response to you having some of these pains of having an assistant. I don’t know if you’ve replaced her yet, but if you haven’t, you probably have more money now. In fact, you do have more money now. Go to the next level when you hire the next assistant.

Gary Keller wrote this book called Millionaire Real Estate Agent. It’s a brilliant book. He founded a really large real estate agency in the United States. And Gary Keller says there’s 2 kinds of talent. One’s called capacity talent, the other’s cul-de-sac talent.

Cul-de-sac talent means it goes in a circle. That’s all they’re ever going to be, and they’re never going to be anything else.

Capacity talent means they can grow beyond that.

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Marlon: Let me say this. You all should hire your first assistant or a part-time assistant as soon as you can afford it, almost before you can afford it. If you’re sitting there answering customer service e-mails and they’re really low-payoff activities, you’re robbing yourself.

If you don’t have an assistant, then you are an assistant, and you’re paying yourself $12 an hour or $10 an hour. How smart is that?

Most of you, soon as you get some income coming in, can at least have a part-time assistant to do some grunt work for you.

Little lessons you learn the hard way, along the way.

This is a funny thing about these classes. I sold a lot of seats. I won’t say how many, but let’s say this was a special project. You get a lot on the first call or 2; and by the last couple calls, you’ve got almost nobody on.

Attendee: Why is that?

Marlon: I don’t know. Why do you all think that is?

Attendee: Obviously, the luxury of your calls, Marlon, is the fact that you make materials available through other sources, like we can get the audio feed afterwards, especially those of us on the West Coast of America, where 8:00 is undoubtedly early for our normal day.

Marlon: And believe me, I do sympathize with that. I’m not a morning person.

Attendee: I don’t have client meetings before 12:00 noon.

Attendee: Just a reminder, what is happening about the transcripts?

Marlon: I can’t remember if we got last week’s transcript made, but we’ve got all the others made. The story on that is the first 5 people who signed up get the transcripts for free.

Now, I’ve got to look up who those people are. Everybody else, you can buy them. It costs me about $250 to $300 per transcript. Do you all feel like $100 is a fair price for you to pay for the transcripts?

I constantly try to reward our early responders. I told them, “This is a $100 value. They won’t be sold for less than this. And the first 5 people who sign up get the transcripts for free.

I’m somewhat ethically or morally bound. I’m not talking $100 each. That’s $100 for all 6 of the transcripts. Are you all okay with that price?

Attendee: Well, if I’m not mistaken, I also paid for the transcripts.

Marlon: Now you may have paid for the transcripts up front. And if you did, then yes, you will get them.

Are you wanting the prior transcripts or do you just care that you get them? Or are you already wanting to read the prior ones?

Attendee: I’m just reminding you that we haven’t received them. I also paid for them.

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Marlon: Okay, good. Well, I’m well aware of that. I’m not sure if last week’s have been done, but all the others have been done. And, by the way, I’m having (I think I mentioned) a really great person do them. So the transcripts, I can’t say they’re flawless. But her transcripts, they’re darn good. You’re going to really like them. So, yeah, they all have been done. I can’t remember last week’s, but yes, we will get those done. And last week’s, we’ll get caught up, and this week’s. You’ll get them all.

I’ve already mentioned this on several calls. Let me talk to you just briefly about getting support from us.

The #1 best option is live chat, just because it avoids emails going back and forth. The second best option is our support desk. Now, you access either of those from any of our websites by clicking on the support link.

What I ask you not to do is just send us an email. Because when you send an email, half the time we don’t get the email and half the time you don’t get the email we send back, which translates to zero customer service as an end product, which is not a very good taste because then you aren’t a very happy customer.

So the support issues you a ticket number, and then we have the live chat. We are having a couple of customer service issues. Ultimately, if something happens and you’re not happy, you can email marlononly@amazingformula.com and put support in capital letters or something in the subject line, so I will see it amongst 3,000 spams in my Mail Washer program.

That’s the problem. I’d tell people to email me personally, but the only issue is you get so many spasm. I use Mail Washer and I just scan through the subject line, and I have filters set up. But it’s so darn easy to miss an important email. So that’s why we do the live chat and support ticket. And for the most part, it’s working real well.

What we have up today, I want to take the time to go through some of these other issues. Maybe they’re not exactly on the topics that we’re on, but I think they’re important and relevant to all of us. So let’s go ahead and go to the lesson today.

This is just a big picture review. I promised we would cover every bullet in the sales letter, because I hate it when you buy something and then you don’t feel that your expectation was delivered.

Go ahead and start the class 5 here. And let me mention this in selling your product.

Again, what you’re selling your customer is not a physical product. And this is maybe the most important thing we’ll discuss today. What you’re selling and what people are buying from you – and listen to this, please – is the experience of a product or service.

Now, is the kind of follow-up that you receive in postcards part of your experience of purchasing a product or service? Yes or no?

Attendee: Yes.

Marlon: That’s really part of the experience, isn’t it?

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Now, is the way that you get customer support from a company part of the experience of buying the product or service from the company?

Attendee: Yeah.

Marlon: Is the packaging that you get part of the experience of buying the product or service?

Attendee: Sure.

Marlon: That’s all part. So one of the problems we have in differentiating the product or service is we think of differentiation only in terms of the exact product or service being sold.

But see, you can differentiate in an unlimited variety of ways. Because when people buy a product or service, they’re not buying the thing that you touched. They’re buying the experience of the product or service.

So one of my goals in what we’re doing is to create, in all of my business – and, again, I have vision 100-million times beyond what we can execute – I’m building my business, just like you all build your business. We try to put it in one step at a time and grow systematically, but without growing too quickly.

But the point is all of us have to think from the standpoint of what’s the experience. And I submit to you that if you will implement just these 8 postcard follow-ups – and we’re going to review that today again, briefly – to your customers and you deliver some stuff like I showed you last week, like the little rolodex links or little things of value, and you have one card in there on how to get support from you and so forth, this enhances the experience of your product or service greatly.

On the left-hand side, you should see the box bullets explained. So let’s go ahead and click on that. Let’s just zip through these bullets here.

First bullet: how to quickly, simply and easily build a mailing list of the 200 people most likely to send your sales through the roof, complete with addresses, double checked against the National Change Of Address database.

So you use Address Grabber to create your list of 200 people. We have some people on our call who’ve had some challenges with Address Grabber. You don’t specifically have to use Address Grabber. You can do it by hand, if you have to, or hire somebody inexpensively in another country to do it.

But however you get them, Address Grabber, if you can use it and you have a PC or you use Virtual PC on a Mac and you can get it all to work good, I like it because it’s quick, simple, easy, and fast.

You use that to compile your list of 200 people. And then you go to MelissaData.com. And if you’re mailing United States addresses, then you just run it. They can do the National Change Of Address for you.

Now, if you use the Mailing Online service, they run it against National Change Of Address free, as I recall. But you can also do it through Melissa Data, and it will run it against the National

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Change Of Address. So if there’s been an address change within X period of time, then they get that all cleaned up for you.

Melissa Data comes up on several of the bullets. We’ll see that here in a second. But Melissa Data will also take addresses that are on all kind of different formats and are not properly formatted and, for like a 1¢ or 2¢ a name or whatever it is, they’ll take and put that data all into the same standardized format for you. And they’ll be 15,000 addresses free.

One of my to-do’s is to take our whole entire customer database and run it through this whole system.

Attendee: If people that have short lists want to do it manually, if they’re subscribing in the US to Stamps.com, Stamps.com automatically formats the addresses correctly.

Marlon: Oh, tremendous. Do you use Stamps.com?

Attendee: Yes, I do.

Marlon: Do you like using it?

Attendee: Yes we do.

Marlon: Does it save you time? Do you find it really convenient?

Attendee: It actually saves us a ton of time, especially when we do bulk mailings and those types of things.

Marlon: And you want to give us the 60-second synopsis of what Stamps.com does for you on bulk mailings?

Attendee: Because we have all of our names for our clients in our database, we can just select all of them in one fell swoop, and it prints all of our stamps out and addresses the envelopes, the whole 9 yards.

Marlon: Do you feed those through your laser printer, or how do you feed them through?

Attendee: We have actually one printer solely designed for doing our postcards and envelopes and that type of stuff, so we don’t have to fiddle with changing paper and that type of stuff.

Marlon: Is that an inkjet or is that a laser?

Attendee: It’s a laser.

Marlon: Which one is it?

Attendee: We actually have an HP4500.

Marlon: And how do you like it?

Attendee: For the price, it was right on the money.

Marlon: Is that color or is that black and white?

Attendee: Black and white.

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Marlon: And you just leave that set up for your envelopes?

Attendee: We just have a stack of envelopes and it’s set up that way. We send out about 25 pieces a day. That’s what it averages.

Marlon: Yeah, so you can probably just zip those 25 through there really fast.

Attendee: Yeah. And basically about 11-ish or so in the morning, when I roll out of bed and come from the upstairs to the office, I basically push the button for the day. And by the time the post person comes by to pick it up, they’re ready.

Marlon: Cool. Now are you laser printing the letters, also?

Attendee: It depends on the piece. Some pieces, we do inkjet because we’re going to be doing color. Others we do with a laser, because we’re just going to be sending out black and white.

Marlon: Is that a 1- or a 2-page letter that you use inkjet for?

Attendee: It ranges between 2 and 4 pages, depending on the specific piece that we’re doing for the client.

Marlon: Alright, cool. I appreciate you sharing that. Have you all heard the expression, “The devil’s in the details?”

Attendee: Yes, sir.

Marlon: That’s really true, isn’t it? That’s why I’m trying to focus on implementation. Because have you ever really got excited about an idea, just totally jazzed about it, and then you couldn’t implement the damn thing?

Attendee: Stop. You’re killing me.

Marlon: You go to a seminar and you hear all about JV’s, or something. I remember back when JV’s were new and you got all jazzed up and excited about it, and then you get home and you’re like, “What do I do? And how do I get these letters printed? It’s kind of like throwing cold water on your face. You’re like, “Wow.”

I’ve heard this about the HP4500 from other people, so you’re not the first person that’s mentioned to me that they liked using it. Just for that feedback for all of you.

Let’s go to our next bullet.

The next bullet is the killer service I discovered that automatically captures names and addresses for 70% of your in-bound phone calls, drops these addresses in your database follow-up system in a flash. Within several days, they’ll have their first postcard or letter waiting for them.

Now that service is Arch Telecom, and I wanted to remind you about this because Arch has kind of gotten lost in our discussions here. I haven’t really focused on that. Part of that is because I haven’t set it up personally for my business yet. Again, it’s on our goal list.

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But we have a very aggressive new product creation schedule for this summer. And so some of the things I’m really jazzed and excited about are just getting pushed back a little, and this is one of them.

My vision for using Arch is I really want to do this for in-bound phone calls. One way to do it on your in-bound phone calls, use something like Arch that captures all the addresses of the people calling in, because you can drop them right in your follow-up database. And for sales calls, I just think that’s a dynamite idea.

Arch can custom program, so they can do anything you want. They can capture the in-bound address and then roll that over to a live answer or roll that into a voicemail menu, whatever you want. They can do custom programming, so they’re really robust.

And then, they do the follow-up mailings for you. So they can just drop that right into a database, and they’ll do a sequence of follow-up mailings for you.

Now, you’re going to pay money for it, but it’s hands-off. It’s beautiful technology. They really work hard on their technology.

Arch will do the mailing for you or, if you want, they can capture the addresses and then you can just drop those in Mailing Online.

If you drop them yourself into Mailing online, it’s going to be cheaper than having Arch do the follow-up mailing, in all likelihood, because you’re going to have to pay Arch for the time of their people to manage doing the mailings for you.

However, if you just want a simple, no-brainer, hands-off, then just have Arch handle it all.

How many of you are using voicemail to capture your inbound phone calls off your website or sales letters? Any of you all doing that?

Attendee: No.

Marlon: Are you doing live answers or you just don’t have phone numbers available at all?

Attendee: Live answer here.

Marlon: Live answer is the best, and I’m thinking about going to a live answer because I feel like I’m losing a lot of business in different avenues, especially speaking engagements. I’m losing speaking engagements by not having a live answer.

Attendee: Marlon, I’ve had several people tell us that they chose us over any competition just because we have live answer.

Marlon: Interesting. Now, do you do that live answer in-house or is that just an answering service?

Attendee: Well, during the day we do it in-house and we make sure that we state what our business hours are. But we have an inexpensive office. We’re only paying like $300 or $400 a month.

Marlon: How many square feet?

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Attendee: Well, we’re up in Michigan, so you guys in the west coast or wherever are going to choke at this, but we have approximately 800 square feet for that.

Marlon: My gosh! Are they just giving it away?

Attendee: Yeah, well, Michigan’s had a tough time of that. But they’re not real fancy. They’re almost like pole barns, in a way, that have been fixed up where this guy set them up and set them up for offices and then carpeted them and finished them off and put a ceiling on it.

Marlon: Now how many people do you have in the office?

Attendee: We have a bookkeeper that comes in part-time. We have the receptionist that’s there every day, the administrative assistant, and then we have a part-time packing person.

Marlon: Now you have a receptionist and an administrative assistant or that’s the same position?

Attendee: The same position.

Marlon: And then who else do you have?

Attendee: A shipping and packing person.

Marlon: Do you have dividers in there or is it just one room?

Attendee: One big room. We have it divided up with furniture.

Marlon: That’s what I was wondering is if you got some of those furniture dividers in there.

Attendee: Yeah.

Marlon: And they’re working okay for you?

Attendee: Yeah, it’s a little noisy at times, but pretty much the big Kahuna, who’s my husband, likes old-time rock-n-roll. So that’s the requirement. If you’re going to work in there, you’re going to have to listen to old time rock and roll. And when that’s going, everybody sort of has some privacy then.

Marlon: Hey, it makes a good ad for the paper, though, “Rock and roll,” right? “If you want to work in a casual, kickback environment with some really jamming rock and roll playing, then this is your company.”

Attendee: Right.

Marlon: Now the receptionist, is this a friend, family or just someone you hired off the street?

Attendee: Hired.

Marlon: You run an ad in the paper to find them?

Attendee: Actually, we started out by going to colleges and posting them there.

Marlon: Where did you post in the colleges?

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Attendee: Almost all of them have outplacement offices that both their alumni and students can look at. And we get a good-quality person that way, because generally it’s someone who’s got their degree or is close to getting their degree who’s checking those all the time.

Marlon: So this was just somebody right out of college then?

Attendee: Right.

Marlon: Okay. And then you got a part-time bookkeeper. How did you find your part-time bookkeeper?

Attendee: Networking through friends, but she had her own business. But she ended up coming on. We have 4 different businesses, so she almost works full-time for us. She works 4 days a week.

Marlon: Are any of you thinking or pondering the move to an office, and you have a question you’d like to ask about this? I realize it’s not directly relevant to direct mail, but actually it is. This isn’t just about direct mail, it’s about making money. If you’re going to make money, you’ve got to sell products.

If you’re going to sell products, you got to run a business.

And if you’ve got to run a business, when you start selling stuff, all of a sudden bookkeeping’s got to be done and the phone’s got to be answered and stuff’s got to be shipped. Somebody’s got to do it all. And either you’re doing it all or somebody else is. And me doing it all versus somebody else doing it all, personally, I don’t know about you all, how many of you vote for someone else?

Attendee: Oh yeah, somebody else.

Do any of you all have any questions about this? Like how did she have the confidence to establish her own office or anything?

Attendee: At what point were you profitable before you did it?

Attendee: We did it on cash flow. We started out in our home and we did it on cash flow.

But what was happening was 2 things. As the business grew, it took over our home. And that’s not fun. Because after a while, your family starts to resent it.

And then the second thing was that we thought that we could cost-justify putting it together and adding staff. We had people coming in and working for us in our home before we even moved to the office. So the office is the last step we took.

Attendee: One of the challenges that I had is that it’s hard to get temporary staff to come to a home address.

Marlon: It’s darn near impossible, because of insurance issues.

Attendee: Exactly. That was one reason I got an office, eventually. I closed it down again, but I moved to an office because I couldn’t get temporary help to come in for the day, even to do the books. So, even if you take in an executive suite area is a good step.

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Attendee: It helps a lot with the colleges. I’d strongly encourage you to go to college recruitment placement, because college students are looking for something. And lots of times they’ll say part-time, but they’re taking classes in the evening and maybe one during the day. So they can almost work full-time for you.

Attendee: And you couldn’t get them either. Like co-op students, you can’t get to come to your house, generally.

Attendee: Oh, you couldn’t?

Attendee: No.

Attendee: I didn’t have any trouble with that.

Attendee: Our space is a commercial lot and it’s live/work lot, so we don’t have any problems getting college kids to come here. That’s what we hire exclusively, predominantly MBA candidates.

Marlon: Let’s talk about pricing on talent, if you all would like. That’s always the fly in the ointment, right? It sounds great to hire people, then you’ve got to pay them. I like the idea of hiring the people, it’s just paying them. Let’s talk about these. Are these MBA? Have they graduated or they’re in an MBA program?

Attendee: Ours are in an MBA program and we get them predominantly from UC California at Berkeley. So we’re in the Northern California area, which is fairly expensive.

Most of our MBA candidates, we pay about $20 an hour. But we tend to get our folks on a project basis, versus a per-hour basis. It works out better for us and it works out better for them in the long run.

Attendee: Are you doing that as an independent contractor or as an employee?

Attendee: We did them all as 1099 contractors.

Marlon: And it also helps if you pay them on a per-project basis. It makes a better case for that 1099. At $20 an hour, what is it that they’re doing for you that’s returning you $80 or $100 an hour?

Attendee: Our business is web marketing. Most of our clients are non-profits. So they get the satisfaction of working on non-profit projects. But most of the folks that are the MBA candidates are doing statistical analysis for us.

Marlon: Oh, very interesting. So you need that MBA type person, then.

Attendee: Yeah. I have the talent and I have 2 partners that have the bulk of that analytical talent, but I’d rather pay $20 an hour for that talent than do it myself or to have one of the partners do it and waste a $100-an-hour person.

Marlon: Well, hopefully, your talent is worth more than $100 an hour.

Attendee: Oh, I’m actually billing at $200 an hour.

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Marlon: I don’t want to get too far sidetracked on this, but it’s an interesting thing of how much is your talent worth. Let’s say you multiply out all the money you get in a month and the number of hours that you’re available to work during that month, and that comes out to $200 an hour. Now, does that mean you’re worth $200 an hour?

Attendee: No, I’m actually worth more than that. But when I work on projects, specifically, I bill my time out at $200 an hour.

Marlon: But it is kind of a mindset. And what you bill for your time is really just what the market will bear, for the most part.

Attendee: Correct.

Marlon: In my way of thinking, you’re worth a lot more than $200 an hour. Maybe not currently. But if you don’t value your time for more , it’s going to be difficult to make more.

So I’ve always been an advocate of placing real high value on your time. Just conceptually, just what you believe about the value of your time.

Okay, thank you all for sharing. I think that’s helpful to all of you, because we have everybody listening to this.

Some of our people, they don’t even have a product to sell yet. “My God, Marlon, you’re talking about hiring people – I don’t even have a product yet.” But we’ve got a lot of other people who are very successful. And I think even if you’re starting out, you still need to understand these things because you’ve got to understand where you’re going to go, right? It’s all part of mindset; it’s all part of your education; it’s all part of understanding.

But let’s move on into the bullets.

How to get names and addresses for your email database. You should convert 20% to 30% of your email data list into a mailing database, based on my research. Simple, easy as pie. We’re talking about the Good Contacts program. You drop out an email to your list or to your email contacts and you convert those into addresses.

Did any of you try out either Good Contacts or Plaxo? I know someone sent me an email. I got one of them, I believe, from Plaxo. Have any of the rest of you tried out this program?

Attendee: No.

Marlon: How many of you have email databases?

Attendee: Well, I use the Accu-Card system.

Marlon: Oh yeah, that’s right, you use that other system. How about the rest of you? Do you all have email databases?

Attendee: Yep.

Marlon: Okay. It makes sense to turn those email addresses into mailing addresses, right?

Attendee: Yeah.

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Marlon: And these services are easy, they’re cheap. So it’s just really a common sense thing to do. So it’s one of those things to go on your to-do list.

What the 4 primary software programs I discovered are and how much they cost, where you get them. We didn’t put the prices on here, but there’s a link and the prices are there at the link.

Address Grabber, you can get the base version for something like $60, and then it goes up from there.

Good Contacts and Plaxo, those are like inexpensive or free. I don’t remember.

Arch Telecom is more pricey, but offers total customization and in terms of voicemail and all kinds of stuff, they are just loaded.

And then, the Yellow Page Extractor.

So these are the 4 basic programs that will help you build your database. Any questions on those? I think we covered them real well on prior calls.

How to drop people into one of 4 database follow-up systems with only 2 clicks, that’s Address Grabber. You highlight the Alexa data. You’ve got this on your Address Grabber bar, so you click on Excel, Goldmine, your text program, whatever you’re dropping the data into, ACT.

So that’s one click. And then that brings up the summary screen, where you review the data. If there’s any corrections made, you correct it, and then you drop it into your database with a second click. That amounts to 2 clicks, and now the data’s in your database.

How to make your direct mail postcard large or small, but lets the letter go out automatically, that’s using your Mailing Online. You can program up to 25 days in advance.

Have any of you gone in now and programmed several weeks of mailing or up to 4 weeks in Mailing Online service yet?

Attendee: Nope.

Marlon: You guys have got to do it. I’m going to give you another little side talk here. It’s called familiarizing yourself with whatever the tool is that you’re using. Even if you’re not ready to fully implement it yet, the biggest obstacle in using a new technology is just getting comfortable with it and getting familiar with it.

So you just go there and you just walk through it, so that you feel comfortable with it. And that way, when you are ready to use it, you’ll use it and you won’t be having this, “Oh, I don’t know how it works yet and I’m dreading it,” and all of that. You’ve just got to confront it, you’ve got to get comfortable with it, familiarize yourself with it, and then you’ll be able to plug it in.

It’s kind of a weird thing, but sometimes the fear of something is a lot worse than using it or just the dread of it. But once you do it, you get comfortable with it, “Oh, that was no big deal.”

Have you all ever dreaded something or doing something and then, when you actually did it, it was no big shake? Any of you?

Attendee: Oh, yeah.

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Marlon: I think we can all identify with that. I think that’s the way using these programs are. So I really recommend you go in there, use the service, program in some mailings, and get comfortable with using it.

How to install the 8-week bonding blitz that locks in loyalty from your customers. We have a review here of the 8-week bonding blitz. These are 8 weeks of cards that we prepared for you, our templates.

And last week, I also covered my own personal 8-week blitz that I’m using.

You get my plug-and-go pre-made templates. We have here, in 4 x 6, you received 22 postcard templates; 5 x 8 you got 10, 6 x 9 you’ve got 9 templates. So we delivered on that.

Should you use 1-sided or 2-sided postcard? What works best? Be prepared to find out.

If you’re going to broadcast a lot of cards to a cold list or a slightly warm list like prospects, you may just want to go 1-sided, especially with mailing online, because it’s going to be a lot cheaper.

If you’re going to customer, I think you want to go a larger-size postcard, typically, and you want to go 2-sided.

But if you’re just trying to generate leads, I would test the larger 2-sided card versus the 1-sided cheapest possible alternative.

To get the price on those down, one of our bullets was about doing them for 24¢, you can get them 27¢, 1-sided, through Mailing Online. If you’re going to get the price down to 24¢, you’re going to have to run it on your own laser printer.

How to merge in names to the headlines on your postcards and letters, so that it looks totally personalized. We talked about that a little bit last week, but here’s a little instruction on doing the merge field in Mailing Online. That is the least attractive of using the Mailing Online service. You really have to fiddle with it. Follow our instructions here. I think we also did a video on that for you, as I recall.

It’s tricky to do the merge fields. But once you figure it out, it’s not that bad, and it does add personalization to your postcards and letters.

Attendee: Marlon, this is Martin Wales today. Do they have like mapping data, where you sort of drag and drop?

Marlon: You map your fields, yeah. Piece of cake, too. That part’s really simple.

The tricky part’s inserting the merge field, because I can found you can only insert one merge field at a time and then you’ve got to save it. And you probably have to totally close out of the program and then log back in and reopen the document and do the next merge field. It’s really clunky, the way the merge fields work. I’m just being honest about it.

Attendee: That’s the software equivalent of licking envelopes.

Marlon: It’s not the easiest darn thing to do, to set the merge fields. Once you get them set up, it’s beautiful. And the other tricky thing that I mentioned last week about this is you’ve got to

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use a separate line for the merge field, because it won’t proportionately space stuff and re-space headlines.

So what you do is “Attention Martin Wells,” or “A special message to Martin Wells,” or “Memo to,” first name, last name, “Martin Wells.” And you put that on a separate line. So no matter how long the first and last name is, it’s not going to screw up your headline. Because if you put it in the headline of the postcard itself and said, “Martin discovers blah, blah,” people with long names are going to be all crammed in there and short names there’s going to be a big gap. So you put it on a separate line.

Flawless formatting of your list; how to take your list of customers and prospect addresses, get them formatted flawlessly. Here’s the links to Melissa Data, the specific part of Melissa Data that you use for doing that.

When do you send a postcard? When do you send a letter? What works best?

I think you send a postcard for a couple of things. One great thing to send a postcard for is deadlines and urgency. Postcards really work great for urgency.

You can also use postcards for a big blast, in terms of lead generation. There used to a company called Computer Business Services or something like that, and they used these small 3 x 5 postcards, just offering a free report. And they just sent those things out by the gazillion and used it for their upfront lead generation.

Of course, you’ve got to split-test that versus letters and other forms of the lead generation.

For the customer database, though, I like big postcards and I like the letters. Now, the little 2-page letter, and in this next one we have a screen capture of a 2-page letter I wrote to be a lead generator, you can also use that. I think you would use a letter to more targeted names, if they were prospects. But you split-test that.

The advantage of the postcard is the broad reach. The disadvantage of it is the small postcards tend to get lost in the mailbox. And we have some more data on those 2 things there, that you can read.

How to get your postcards and letters sent to buyers of products and services like yours. PPC traffic’s great, but they’re not cheap. Anyone who says direct mail isn’t effective doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

Through the Mailing Online service, you can mail out postcards for 27¢ each, if you do them on your laser printer, like the HP 4500. You can do them cheaper.

How much are the printer cartridges, Ron, for the HP 4500?

Attendee: They’re about $35.

Marlon: $35 and they’ll do how many copies or impressions?

Attendee: About 3,000 to 4,000, something like that.

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Marlon: That really gets the price of those things down. And then in one of the prior lessons, I gave you some sources for postcard stock. But Ron, where are you getting your postcard stock at?

Attendee: One of our previous partners was in the printing business, so we just basically get remnant stock, which helps us work with our requirements.

Marlon: In that lesson, when we talked about that, I gave you several online sources. You’re going to pay through the nose if you buy it at a local office supply store. That’s just ridiculous. You really need to order it from one of these online paper places, and you’ll save an awful lot of money on the postcard stock.

We’ve got actual examples of my letters and postcards. Pre-done, plug-and-go templates, that’s all there. And that’s in lesson 4.

How to contact potential affiliates and associates about losing sleep, because they might accuse you of spam. Basically, that’s using Address Grabber. I really think you’ve got different databases here. We talked about this before. But one of your databases should be potential affiliates and associates. When you run across them, use Address Grabber and drop them into that database.

And then, you can have a postcard sequence for affiliates and associates. These are the ones that I’m creating for our system. They’re postcards like this: “7 reasons to refer your customers to the Cash Like Clockwork program.” Or, “6 solutions you can refer your customers to in confidence.” Or, “Why you can trust Marlon Sanders to send your referrals to.” Or, “How we treat and reward our referral business.”

These are all things that you can write on one of those 5 x 8 postcards and just drip, drip, drip to your potential high-quality affiliates, centers of influence, and so forth.

Does anybody have any questions or comments?

Attendee: Marlon, I have one question, and you may have covered it. I made up some postcards that I took into a printer with a nice gloss on them and things. Is there anyplace that we can do automated mailing with those?

Marlon: Like the high gloss, like full-color postcards?

Attendee: Right.

Marlon: Let me give you the options.

On the Mailing Online service, they have their standard service and they have their premium postcard service. The premium postcard service is color postcards, and the minimum quantity is one.

Attendee: All right.

Marlon: So, it’s beautiful. I say that’s beautiful, because of the minimum quantity.

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Now, your other options are services. They’re not really much more than the Mailing Online. I think Mailing Online’s a little cheaper on those, but you can use Quantum Mail, you can use Amazing Mail.

Those are some good places to start. So you can either use Mailing Online or you can use Quantum Mail or Amazing Mail, and you can branch out.

The thing that I like about Amazing Mail and Quantum Mail is they already have these pre-done postcards; a lot of them that are really great.

The prices are more expensive, but typically your quantities are lower and they’ve got pre-done stuff that’s really drop-dead.

So it all depends on the value of the customer. If you’re going to survive in business, you’d better have a big backend, a robust backend anyway. Because if you’re living off the front-end, it’s life on the edge. What if the economy turns or something turns or competitors move in and that front-end either dies or gets cut into?

Attendee: Or you get dropped from Google.

Marlon: Yeah, or you get killed off of Google. So you’ve really got to have a robust backend. It’s really just 2 parts to the business; there’s a front-end and a backend, right?

It’s kind of like marriage. Most of you are married, some of you aren’t. I happen to be single and probably the reason I’m single is because in marriage there’s a front-end and a backend. The front-end is the courtship and the backend is actually the big married part. And if you want to have a marriage that lasts, you’ve got to be great at both of those. You’ve got to be good at the courtship and you’ve got to be good at the backend, which is the actual married part, right?

That’s kind of the way the customers are, right? The front-end is the courtship, but the backend is the relationship. In terms of money, the money is made in the relationship with the customer and going deeper with your customers.

It’s a challenge, though. Because when you’re small – and this is why I believe in using some staff and automating and putting these systems together, and I really think this is what direct mail brings to the table, the systems we’re teaching here because of this – the challenge is in the front-end, if you don’t get these referral systems and sources and other things set up. And the nice thing about referral systems is once you get those in place, it’s a system again and you aren’t getting knocked out of Google, right?

Well, that’s the front-end. You’ve got to develop this steady front-end, so you can concentrate on the backend. Because if your front-end keeps falling apart and you’ve got to keep resuscitating and reviving your front-end, do you ever have time to work on your backend?

That’s tough, because you keep wanting to work on the backend but you’re always living life on the edge, trying to keep your front-end going.

A lot of business, in my personal opinion, is about systems and about lead generation and conversion systems. Ultimately, that’s all a business is. Ultimately, a business is lead generation and conversion systems and building relationships with people, and deepening those relationships and providing more products and services to them over an extended period of time,

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based on the depth quality of that relationship and the value proposition that you provide to your customer.

So, this is the value that I think the direct mail brings to the table. It’s a system that’s not high-tech. This is the beauty of it. This is not high-tech. This is not hard to run these systems. You can hire someone out of college to do this. It may be a little harder to hire somebody out of college to do your search engine positioning for you, because they don’t know jack about it. But, anybody can pop in once a week – or pretty much anybody – into Mailing Online and upload lists and select the right postcard and stuff. That’s not a high brain activity. You can’t have somebody dumber than a stump doing it, but neither is it the height of sophistication and difficulty.

Okay, anyway, that’s my soliloquy.

Okay, the phenomenal software program I discovered that allows you to pre-program sequences of the letters, postcards, everything, I recommend that you check out the demo of this program, Top Producer. It’s made for real estate agents, but there’s only one screen on it that applies only to real estate agents. And if you’re doing stuff on your laser printer and you want to do sequences yourself, it’s a heck of a product.

The only problem, to my knowledge, is you can’t export in a format that’s going to interface easily with Mailing Online, which means you’re going to have to print and mail the postcards or letters off your HP 4500 or whatever you choose to use.

But if you want to do that and you’re doing customized stuff, personalized letters and stuff, that’s a great program. It’s really, really slick. If that’s what you want to do, check that thing out because it’s the best I’ve seen. And again, there’s only screen that applies specifically to real estate. Everything else applies to any business.

How to take a database that’s a wreck and whip it into full-blown shape easily. Melissa Data. There’s the link.

Quickly, easily start selling a monthly subscription to your printed newsletter. This is cool because in the Mailing Online, you can mail a 10- or 12-page newsletter easily.

Now, there’s a pre-made fill-in-the-blanks template from USPS for your own newsletter, and you can use that template if you want.

I found it real simple. I uploaded a sales letter that was 12 pages or longer. A piece of cake. They’ll mail those things in a 9 x 12 envelope, if you want.

Now, understand you can’t print on colored stock and that kind of thing. And you can’t have it so it’s 11 x 17’s folded. So it’s not perfect, but if you just want to do a quick and dirty newsletter, front and back on 8½ x 11, mailed in a 9 x 12 envelope, it’s fast and it’s easy and it’s beautiful.

Some of you, I think, can use that to big advantage. Are you all doing a newsletter to your customers or to your database? I’m not talking an ezine, I’m talking a printed newsletter.

Attendee: No.

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Attendee: No.

Marlon: Those of you who are in business, you’ve already told me some of you guys and gals have really robust, highly profitable or very profitable businesses. You need to be doing printed communications to your lists, like at minimum of a 4-page monthly newsletter.

Let me just give you an idea of what you can do. Success stories. The number one thing that you could do to your list is a monthly communication consisting of success stories of your customers and clients.

This is one of my other objectives on our kind of master to-do list. I’m really looking for a desktop publisher to fulfill this. That’s the thing that kind of sucks. I don’t think I can get somebody out of college that’s really good at desktop publishing. Do you all think you could get a good desktop publisher out of college, that knows PageMaker and stuff?

Attendee: Yeah, I think so.

Marlon: Oh yeah? Okay, well I may be out to wash on this and I should probably go down and post it at my local college.

Attendee: Look for an art school.

Marlon: Oh yeah?

Attendee: Yeah, look for an Art Design school. If design is going to be the key thing, then you want to go there. You’re a writer, so you’re probably not looking for anybody to write it for you.

Marlon: Well, for these success stories, I like to work in my business as little as possible. If you knew me, it’s a miracle of God I’m on these conference calls.

Attendee: That’s what I was thinking.

Marlon: It really is. I really just feel strongly about it, that my role in the business is to not work. Think about it. Anything that you do that’s work, pretty much you can hire people to do. Can you not?

Attendee: Yes.

Marlon: Okay, what is the one thing that it’s harder than heck to hire to do somebody to do?

Attendee: Ideas.

Marlon: Think! Think! Ultimately, you only get paid for one thing – to think! That’s it! Everything else is execution and everything else people can be hired for, right? But it’s the vision, it’s the ideas, it’s the understanding of the marketplace. All of that, that’s something that’s going to be really hard to hire somebody out of college to do or even somebody with a lot of experience.

I can’t really say that I think our society is built around thinking. Or at least it seems to me there’s a lot of people that don’t think much.

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So thinking, to me, is what brings value to the business. Everything else is a job that somebody else should be doing other than me.

Ultimately, my goal is to get somebody with like a PhD or somebody that’s just a great person to do the teleconference calls and I’ll design the content for them. I’ll structure the content. But there’s probably people who could conduct these calls better than I can conduct them, to be honest. That’s the other issue of it. When you hire people, you can typically get people more talented in that specific area than you are. Like I could probably hire an educator that could do a better job on these calls than I could.

Now, I create the content but they could do a better job at delivering the content because that’s what they’re trained in; that’s their profession, delivering and educating people. That’s not really my specialty, although I do have some training in it.

Attendee: You know, I have to disagree with you on that concept, Marlon. I think people are paying to be able to pick your brain, to be able, on these conference calls, to be able hear your perspective on how you’re putting it together.

When I work with an educator or a trainer, either I’m doing it with someone who has their own original content or someone who’s teaching a concept, but not something where I want to work with the individual person.

I wouldn’t let go of your conference calls, because I think that’s a real key for you to build the depth of your business. If you’re going to do anything, keep the conference calls.

Marlon: Well, I can agree with you, but it’s an interesting thing, isn’t it? Let me share this with you. If I’m doing conference calls, I probably have a limit of doing 1 or 2 a week. That’s about all I want to do. It’s a miracle of God that I don’t miss them, because I have no schedule. I don’t keep a schedule. I don’t use a Daytimer, I don’t wear a watch.

My status symbol is I don’t carry a pager, I don’t carry a cell phone, and I don’t wear a watch. And it’s kind of odd because people are like, “God, you never wear a watch, how come?” And I’m like, “Well, that’s my status symbol.”

Jonathan and Dec and I did all these seminars on the road, and that was our status symbol was we never needed to wear a watch. You had to be kind of careful or you could miss an airplane flight.

So I understand what you’re saying. But now think of this, if I had educators doing my content, could I not potentially have 30 seminars going in a week?

Attendee: Yeah, but I think the point that she brought up, Marlon, is really good – getting real life experience feedback from you versus talking to an educator. Yes, someone else could probably present the seminar for you, but you lose the capacity of having live feedback.

Marlon: True. The point’s well taken.

Attendee: This is Bob. If it’s a job for the educator, then you’re going to lose that connection.

Marlon: Well, but who’s job is it, in a business, to install vision and passion and to hire people with vision and passion?

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Attendee: That’s the owner.

Marlon: That’s your job. You’re right, and that’s an easy trap to fall into. But you’ve really screwed up if you haven’t installed vision, purpose, values, beliefs and mission into your staff and if you haven’t hired people with that ability upfront, to have passion. You’ve got to hire passion upfront, or you’ve already screwed up.

Attendee: It works for awhile. I think you can mix it in. If you’re the President and CEO, you can pop in on the teleconference. I host teleconferences for companies, and I’m responsible for the pace, productivity of the teleconference. And you can pop your head in the door and make contact in relationship and give 5 minutes of feedback and then go away, and then I start going through the list of “Here’s the software that Marlon uses, here’s how he does it.” But you pop in and I say, “First, we’re going to hear from Marlon.”

No, even better, “At the top of the hour, we’re going to hear from Marlon and he’s going to come in on the last 10 minutes.” So, I keep them on the line, I educate them, I keep referring back.”

Attendee: Marlon’s going to still need a watch to make sure he’s on time.

Marlon: I swear, it’s like it’s a miracle that I don’t miss calls.

Attendee: Well, I almost sent in a support ticket.

Marlon: One day, I almost did miss a call. Lisa was calling me frantically going, “Marlon, you’ve got a call, where are you? Wake up!”

This may sound like, “God, Marlon, this is not relevant to what we’re doing,” but it is relevant. All of this is relevant because it’s not just about me thinking, “What product am I going to deliver and how am I going to deliver that?” Every one of you have the same question, do you not? What is the most value that you bring to your business and how are you going to delver that value to your customers?

That’s called your value proposition. And that’s what you should be thinking about, right? That’s what you should be spending your time thinking about a lot is, “What’s my value proposition to my customers? How do I improve the value proposition, but also how do I leverage the value proposition?”

Ultimately, I spend a lot of time just thinking about what is business. What is a business? And I’ve already said, from one angle, a business is a lead generation and conversion system.

Another way of looking at business is it’s simply a value proposition. It’s, in essence, a barter. You’ve got money, I’ve got value, and we decide to exchange it. Right?

So, another way of looking, it’s just what you bartered. It’s your value proposition.

That’s what your business is. And the more you understand that and the more you work on that, build it and improve it and differentiate it, the more you really have something that’s going to last.

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That’s another way that I think in the last Gold Milcers call, I talked about your business is really the business of delivering differentiated value to customers. Anybody can deliver value, but the problem is your value can also be knocked off and copied.

So, you’re really in a business of continually differentiating the value that you offer and the experience of that value. And that’s where the postcards come in. Part of the postcards is in that follow-up to your customers, you’re differentiating the experience of the value that you’re offering to your customers. You’re building on that value, reminding them of the value, providing them additional value, and building a relationship and bonding which is part of their experience with your business.

Does that make sense? Did I lose anyone?

Attendee: No, I’m listening. I’m absorbing it and writing notes.

Marlon: You’ve got to continually reinvent yourself and your business. Let me explain this.

When I first came out with Amazing Formula, I sold products like crazy – highly differentiated product. Right?

Now, slowly but surely, competitors started chipping off bits and pieces and basically knocking those things off, putting them in their own products and so forth. Inevitable.

So all of a sudden what I did have that was differentiated value became non-differentiated value. All of this is the law of supply and demand. So when supply goes up, what happens to demand?

Attendee: It goes down.

Marlon: Demand goes down. What happens to price?

Attendee: It goes down.

Marlon: Price goes down, right? Now, what happens when you differentiate your product or service? In essence, you’ve just limited the supply because you’ve become the only person offering that supply. Right? So supply goes down because then, when it’s highly differentiated, you’re the only person offering it. So what happens to demand? Supply goes down, demand goes up. Right? And then, what happens to price? Price goes up.

So you’ve to continually be in the business of reinventing your value proposition and the value that you offer to customers, and you’ve got to be constantly differentiating the offering of your product or service. Because, if you come out with highly-differentiated products or service that successful, as sure the sun rises and sets, what are your competitors going to do?

Attendee: Copy you.

What happens when somebody on TV came out with a reality show and it was a big hit? What happened?

Attendee: It got ripped off.

Attendee: Copycats.

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Marlon: All of a sudden, you had more darned reality shows than you could stand? Is this not true?

Attendee: True.

Marlon: All right, so if you have a value proposition that’s successful, what are your competitors going to do?

Attendee: They’re going to copycat them.

Marlon: They’re going to knock it off. So then what happens to your differentiated value offering? It becomes knocked off, which then means supply goes. Where does supply go then?

Attendee: Commoditization.

Marlon: Up. The supply goes up, value goes down, price goes down.

So you either reinvent yourself or you just slug it out as a commodity.

Attendee: That’s when you came out with a second product.

Marlon: Yeah, and we keep reinventing our products. Not as quickly as I would like, but we keep reinventing them. This will mean a lot more to you 12 months from now, when you see what we do over the next 3, 4, 5, 6 to 12 months. I’m kind of on a mission and a warpath about this.

Attendee: Don’t you have to be in a position to be able to produce different backend products or different products? In other words, if you’re selling a used car, that’s all you’re ever going to do.

Marlon: No, no. Let’s talk about this. When somebody buys a used car from you, is that all they’re buying is a used car?

Attendee: At the moment, yeah.

Attendee: They’re buying transportation.

Marlon: No one in the world ever buys a product or service, period, end of story. What do they buy? They buy the experience of buying the product or service.

Attendee: And relationship.

Marlon: They buy an experience, they buy a relationship. Relationships are part of the experience, is the way I describe it.

So now, let me ask you this. Maybe you can’t differentiate the used car you’re selling. But yes or no, can you differentiate the experience of buying the car?

Attendee: Yes.

Marlon: You can always differentiate any experience, because there’s an experience. It’s an emotion. It’s feelings. It’s how you’re treated. It’s the whole package. You can always differentiate the experience.

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Attendee: Local tickets to the water park, oil changes, JV, backends of all sorts. What happens to a used car? It breaks down sooner than a new one, supposedly.

Marlon: There’s always ways to differentiate it. But those are some good examples. Who else has an example of how you could differentiate the experience of buying a used car?

Let me give you a good story. In Dallas, there’s this guy that runs these ads that I just think are classic. I don’t know what town the guy’s in, but he’s not in Dallas. He’s like in the town you’ve got to drive to. And you’ve got to understand, this is Texas.

The guy comes on, he’s got this Texas kind of drawl. And he says, “My name is John Doe. I’m the owner of So-and-So Cars, out here in Timbuktu, Texas.” He says, “You need a car? You come down here day or night. You call me anytime, day or night, and I’ll meet you down at our car lot, and I’ll give you the best deal on a car you ever got. Now listen, you’ve got this car, no matter where you’re driving it in the United States, you got a problem with the car, you call me day or night, 24 hours, and I’ll handle it for you.”

Attendee: Wow!

Marlon: And he says, “I’ll handle it for you.” And you know what?

Marlon: You’ve just got to believe the guy. I believe the guy will handle it for you.

It’s his USP. Do you want to buy a car, or do you want to buy the car from the guy if you’ve ever got a problem anywhere in the United States he’s going to handle it for you?

Attendee: Where is he? I’m calling Billy Bob.

Marlon: I’m telling you, it’s the simplest commercial you’ve ever heard. There’s no music. It’s just this dude talking. But, I just think they’re world-class commercials. You could take every slick, “We’re blowing them out” radio commercial ad that they run or just this man that’s believable and tells you he’ll meet you down there at the parking lot 24 hours a day, and he’ll beat anybody’s price. And if you’ve ever got a problem, he’ll handle it for you.

Now, did he differentiate the experience of buying the car?

Attendee: Yes. He’s avoiding commoditization, because people are afraid to copy him.

Marlon: Yeah. Okay, you bring up a point. This is another point that I make about this. It’s called a barrier to entry. See, how do you keep your product or service from being knocked off real quickly? You create a barrier to entry. What’s a barrier to entry? A barrier to entry is something that keeps it from easily being knocked off.

Is that not, to some extent, what you do when you implement direct mail into your business; that you make it more difficult for other competitors who don’t know these systems, don’t know these tricks, don’t know these tools, don’t know these resources, you make it much more difficult for them to knock off and copy your marketing?

Attendee: Yes.

Marlon: Yes. If they don’t know it, right.

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Marlon: It makes it much more difficult for them to copy it and knock it off. Absolutely, it does.

Attendee: They’re always going for the easy sale, anyway.

Marlon: Yeah. But see, they don’t know how to do postcards automated. They don’t know these tricks. And so they’re going to see it, but they’re not going to know how to knock it off.

Attendee: They don’t know the shortcuts. They pay more money to expensive services. So every time they do one, it cost them $25,000.

Marlon: That’s exactly it. So what you’ve done is you’ve created a barrier to entry for competitors copying you.

So not only are you in the business to deliver and differentiate a value, you’re in the business of delivering differentiated value with a barrier to entry. And that’s really the business that you’re in.

Attendee: We actually produced, based on the analysis that we produced and stuff, we produced some pretty impressive reports. And there’s a company that actually wanted to copy our model, and they’re paying us $5,000 to come up and train them.

However, the training that we’re going to do for them is only training on how to interpret the reports we produce because we created such a high barrier to entry of creating our own custom programming to produce these reports.

And then, on top of that, they’re going to pay us to produce the raw data for them on an ongoing basis.

Marlon: Very interesting. See, if it had been easy for them to knock off your report, if you were to have taken the easy way out and you hadn’t done the custom programming and you had made it easy, would they have already knocked you off in a heartbeat?

Attendee: Oh yeah, in a heartbeat.

Marlon: Yeah. How did you create a barrier to entry? So one, you did custom programming. What else did you do?

Attendee: In addition to that, we have area experts. All of our business analyst have a background in the type of industries that we’re analyzing and the specific core data sets that we’re picking up.

Marlon: Very good. So that makes it pretty hard for somebody else just to copy you or knock you off.

Attendee: That’s correct. And then the bulk of our programmers are all programmers that worked for companies like Macromedia, Adobe, etc. And they outsource us, because of the tax, the non-profits we’re working on.

Marlon: Beautiful. Now do you think that we use graphic designs on our sites and html emails and stuff that’s not easily copied?

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Attendee: It’s a lot harder to for people to replicate your process.

Marlon: Yeah, the barrier to entry, right?

Attendee: Right.

Attendee: Marlon, this is kind of related to that. If you take a look at eBay.com today, they’re using like a template of that girl leaning on the subscribe. So like the big guys are copying the little guys now.

Marlon: Oh that’s funny, isn’t it?

Attendee: If you look at eBay.com. I forget her name.

Marlon: Let me check it out. Hold on.

Attendee: We used her on our old 1shoppingcart.com site.

Marlon: Oh my gosh.

Attendee: See it? I’m like, somebody sold eBay a clipart picture. Because we’re talking about barrier to entry and stuff.

Marlon: It is interesting. But this is really what I get more into in the Milcers newsletter and in our calls and other things. But I think it’s important to bring up here, because it shows you some of the under-pendings about why you do the things you do and how direct mail itself can be a differentiating of value for you.

We’ve got to pop through the rest of these bullets.

How and why to cultivate a top-of-consciousness database. I’ve got the whole chart there that we covered in the whole entire call, so that really describes the whole thing.

Ultimate movers and shakers database is not just websites of high Alexa rankings, but these can be speakers, newsletter writers, product offers, developers. Anyone who’s a mover and shaker can go on a movers and shakers list, and you can drip on them once a month, once every 2 weeks. Minimum, probably once a month.

How to use postcards to get referrals. You just send a referral postcard, and we’ve got some examples in our things. We also talked about. I think the way you get referrals is either you provide incentive, you ask people to join your affiliate program – which is what I personally do and you have my sample postcard for that, in my 8-week system that I covered last week.

I think the best way to get referrals is with an affiliate or an associate program. I should use a #10 envelope or a 9 x 12. I like 9 x 12’s to customers. I think if you’re going to a less-qualified list, that you’ll probably want to send a letter that gets people to act.

I think 9 x 12’s really gets some attention when they show up in your customer’s mailboxes. And I like them for higher-ticket items sent to your customers.

We give you a comparison of cost here, through the Mailing Online service. Now, that’s the existing cost. In the future, those costs may change.

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We’re using a laser printer to print your postcards, because it works and is cost effective. We’ve already answered this just in terms of Ron sharing what he’s doing with the HP4500.

If you’re doing the color postcards, they are more expensive and are not particularly cost-effective. The nice thing about some of these black and white laser printers is $35 for an ink cartridge, compared to $400 or $500 for these color cartridges. It makes it darn cheap.

Where to get more postcard ideas than you can handle. I use the postcard mailings sites themselves, like Quantum Mail, like Amazing Mail. And there’s a bunch of others, if you just search for postcard sites in Google, postcard mailing services.

Remember that you cannot steal or directly copy their ideas. You got to take it, be inspired by it, create your own creation, but use it to be inspired.

How to put out a 27¢ postcard newsletter. It’s really cool, because you can do your little mini newsletter. Michael Kimball does this. He calls it the world’s smallest newsletter. I’ve seen a few other people do it. They actually just have these little bullet points on a postcard. They can be the 5 x 8 or it can be the 4 x 5. You just have the little bullet points there and you send it out as a little mini newsletter. A nice little way to get the attention of your customers and it’s something they’ll read and look forward to, if you send it out to them monthly.

We have access to some of the earlier lessons here. So if any of you missed some of the lessons, there’s how to access the prior lessons.

That covers all of our bullet points today. Who has some comments at this point?

Attendee: Marlon? Is the chap still on the line who’s had the Google issue?

Marlon: The Google issue, yes.

Attendee: Is there any way I contact him or he can contact me? Because I just got a threat here on a forum, where a representative from Google explains what to do in order to get your site reinstated.

Marlon: Who was that that had the Google issue? Are you still on the line?

Attendee: Yeah, this is Bob. Please send that, by all means, to Bob@onlinebob.com.

Attendee: Okay, no problem.

Attendee: Hey, thank you very much, I appreciate it.

Attendee: Cheers, Bob.

Marlon: That might be a lifesaver for you, Bob.

Attendee: Yes, definitely. I’m willing to do anything and everything.

Attendee: Marlon, I heard you talking about traffic building. I got an email on Traffic Hurricane. Do you know anything about that?

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Marlon: Let me just give you my 2¢ on all of this stuff. Let’s say that there’s a cheap, fast, simple, easy way to get traffic to your website. Okay? Do you think that you’re going to be the only person that finds out about fast, simple, easy way to get traffic to your website?

Attendee: No.

Marlon: Do you think that everybody’s going to find out about it, pretty much in short order?

Attendee: I’d be worried about getting banned by the search engines.

Marlon: Okay, but I’m just talking apart from that. Let’s say you don’t get banned. If there’s a fast, simple, easy way to do something, what’s going to happen to the supply of whatever it is that’s fast, simple and easy? Does the supply of it go up or down?

Attendee: Up.

Marlon: Up. Everybody’s going to start doing it, right? So the supply goes up. What happens to the demand of whatever the trick is that’s being produced?

Attendee: Down.

Marlon: The demand goes down, right? That’s the answer right there. So most all traffic gimmicks are going to have what in terms of a life span?

Marlon: There’s no barrier to entry for people to use them. Typically, it’s a $100 program or something, so there’s no barrier to entry.

So the only sustained success of a system like that, typically, is if you find a way to put the law of supply and demand equation in your favor. How do you do that? Barrier to entry. How do you do that? Use it by becoming more educated about the search engine techniques than the people that you’re competing against.

Knowledge, in our economy, is the magical elixir that makes money. People don’t get that. That’s the reason that you’re paying for the teleconference today.

Specialized knowledge is the magic elixir that makes money. But it is no magic elixir, because it’s works and there’s a cost to obtain the knowledge and the information.

The only way, in my opinion, you get a lasting advantage in the search engine is that if you’re smarter than your competitors, you’re more educated, you have more knowledge. Typically, you work harder at it, and that’s how you get an advantage.

There is no magic button that makes money and continues to make the money. Because if there was a magic button that made money, everybody would find out about it, and everybody would use it. The supply would go up, demand would go through the floor, and pretty soon the magic button wouldn’t work anymore. That’s my opinion on magic buttons.

It’s all understanding. But you see how important that is? That’s why we spent time today talking about the supply and demand, the differentiation of value, and barriers to entry. This is the guts of business. That is the gut. Knowing what people want, supplying their wants, but being able to supply differentiated value.

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Those of you that aren’t members of Gold Milcers, I do recommend it because we do a quarterly call and I have a newsletter. The other issue on it is if you understand and have a prioritized list of your customers’ wants that your competitors don’t have, you can better supply the wants of your customers than your competitors do.

And that alone allows you to create and provide differentiated value that’s difficult for your competitors to rip off and knock off because they don’t understand what it is. They don’t have the list.

So, one of the things that you’ve got to learn to do is to do effective market research that allows you to get a prioritized list of exactly what people want. And then, when you have that list, you can supply and create a value proposition based on that priority of wants and needs that your competitors don’t have.

And because it’s not a simple one value equation, it’s a multi-value equation based on a prioritized list, your competitors can’t easily copy it or knock it off.

But, in essence, making money’s really simple. It’s the law of barter, law of supply and demand. But it goes beyond that because then it’s a value proposition, knowing exactly what people want. And beyond that, differentiating the value and creating barriers to entry.

If there is no barrier to entry, you can be assured that everybody’s going to do it. That’s why you have real estate agents on every corner. There’s just not much barrier to entry to being a real estate agent, you know. Anybody that takes a little licensing course can become one.

And then, it becomes really difficult to provide differentiated value. Not that you can’t do it, because there are real estate agents out there that find ways to differentiate themselves in the marketplace. But it’s hard to maintain a barrier to entry because the competitors, the smart ones, will find out about that and copy it unless there’s some reason that it’s hard for them to copy.

Why do you think I did a triple-your-money-back guarantee on Amazing Formula?

Attendee: No one else would do it, barrier to entry.

Marlon: Don’t you think that it makes people just a little bit darn nervous to go out and offer a triple-your-money-back guarantee?

Why do you think we went to daily commissions on our affiliate or associate program? The answer is because we spent a lot of money and time changing our infrastructure to allow us to do it. And most of my competitors literally cannot pay daily commissions because they don’t have the infrastructure and software to do it.

So did I create a barrier to entry? Yes. And pretty much, I went through some trials and tribulations and pain to do that. It was not an easy experience. It’s not one I’d want to do again.

See, if something is not easy, that’s good. Because that’s a barrier to entry to your competitors doing it. And you’re just hoping that they’re lazy enough that they won’t want to do it, they won’t want to figure it out.

Attendee: Makes sense.

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Marlon: Who else has comments and questions? Let’s go back to the topic of direct mail. This is kind of our big-picture overview of where we’re at.

Now, next week I think we’re up to postcard critiques. So hopefully, you guys and gals are going to create some postcards for me to critique next week. Otherwise it’s going to be a quiet call.

Attendee: Marlon, how big do you think the market’s going to be for direct mail? I’ve got a coaching client who is a printer and packaging chap by trade and is interested in putting together the sort of service you’ve got in the U.S., but for the rest of the world?

Marlon: Well, that’s a risky business because you don’t necessarily know the demand in the rest of the world. But just off the cuff, I’ve got to say there’s a big demand. It’s quick, simple, and easy, to some extent.

I think the advantage of it is there is a barrier to entry to doing this, even though the services do make it quick, simple, and easy. The barrier is it does cost money. It isn’t free to send postcards out and to do the designs on them and stuff. Right?

So that’s why there’s a barrier. I think there’s going to be a huge demand for it, but I would selectively target countries.

Personally, I would target UK and Australia. What we see, in terms of our business, the 3 major players are UK, Australia, United States, and then Canada’s in there, too. And then after Canada, I guess it’s probably New Zealand. And after that, it’s pretty much a free-for-all.

Every country in the world, people are buying our products. Every city in the world, buying our products. But the major players would be UK and Australia, New Zealand, Canada, US.

Attendee: Then again, Marlon, you only speak English.

Marlon: This is true, and you bring up a darn good point. If we had Spanish products, my God, we could probably increase our sales 10-fold.

It’s not that I can’t get my products translated into Spanish. The problem is I don’t have anybody doing Spanish customer support.

Attendee: Right, I understand that.

Marlon: I personally think that another huge business is like outsourcing Spanish customer support. Just think of how many companies are going to be needing that in the next 10 years, and Spanish translation of products and everything.

Of course, I live in San Antonio and it’s 70% or 80% Hispanic. That’s going to be the language. And then you have other countries. I don’t want to limit it just to that, because there’s just some huge markets out there.

China, I think, is getting on the verge of exploding. Oh my gosh. I think that economy is really going to ignite. In 3 to 5 years from now, all the entrepreneurs aren’t going to be talking about internet marketing, they’re all going to be doing seminars on how to sell to China. Pretty soon,

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internet marketing will be forgotten and it’ll be, “Oh my God, you’ve got to sell to China! Come to our seminar.”

Attendee: Import/export.

Marlon: Yeah, it’s going to be huge. Who else has comments or questions?

Attendee: Marlon, this is Ron. I will not be on the call next week. I’ve actually got a conflicting deal that I have to attend.

Marlon: Well cancel it. God, Ron, it’s me.

Attendee: Yeah, I know. If I didn’t happen to already pay a couple of thousand dollars for it, I would have gladly cancelled it.

Marlon: Well, ask for a refund. I’m just teasing you, Ron. Hey, we’ll miss you, but you can get the recording and the transcripts.

Attendee: Yeah, thank you.

Marlon: Guys, I am going to get these transcripts taken care of. So no sweat on that.

Thank you all for being on the call. This call was a little different today. We did cover the bullets, but I wanted to cover some other topics that I felt would be of real value to you and give you some insights. Was that all helpful to you all?

Attendee: It was super. Thanks, Marlon.

Marlon: Okay. I also like covering the stuff and I appreciate those of you who contributed some ideas and thoughts on hiring people and hiring staff and building an office. Because, again, you are in business, make no mistake about it.

And at some point, you’ve either got to buy a bigger home or you’ve got to get into an office, 1 of the 2. I bought a bigger home and, pretty soon, it’s like I have no choice but to go to an office.

Attendee: Can’t sell product with spaghetti spilled on it.

Marlon: Yeah, there you go. Hey guys and gals, thank you for being on the call. I want to see some sample postcards next week. We have multiple systems here. One is the 8 follow-ups to customers, and then one is the 25-, 35-touch that we talked about.

But start out just implementing 1 a week for 8 weeks, a follow-up system to your customers. I just cannot recommend that process too much. It’s just how does it not make money, because it’s your customers? And you’re just bonding, top-of-consciousness. It just makes all the sense in the world. And if you only do that, you’re going to pay for this class many times over.

So thank you all for being on the call. I guess it’s not next week, in 2 weeks is our next session, and that will be our final session. It’s not next week, it’s 2 weeks.

Thank you all. You were wonderful. The contributions to this class today were wonderful. I think it’s going to help the people that listen to it who weren’t on the call, and the people who

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listen to this in the future. I appreciate all the contributions. Go out and implement this 8-touch follow-up and let’s hear some success stories on it.

- End of Tele-Conference #5

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