Planning out your offers: jam tomorrow and jam yesterday

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Last summer, I was talking to copywriter Dan Ferrari about joining his coaching group.

“Where do you see yourself in 18 months?” Dan asked. I told Dan then what I will tell you now:

I have no idea. 6 months is kind of my horizon. I can’t see much in life beyond that.

Over the years, I’ve tried making long-term goals. But when the long-term rolls around, it always turns out that either 1) my goals were stupid or 2) I changed in the meantime.

That’s why I now feel that projecting more than a few steps into the future is a waste of time.

In fact, you might call it mental masturbation. That’s the term marketer Travis Sago uses to describe “jam tomorrow” plans — not plans for yourself, but for your customers.

I alluded to Travis yesterday. He makes millions in profits each year, and he’s got some unorthodox ways of doing it. For example, the way he plans out his offers.

Most businesses only focus on their current offer. If they’re smart, they think one offer beyond that. If they’re really smart, they think two offers beyond.

But not Travis. Travis says this “smart” way of planning your offers — two offers ahead — is infinitely better than not having any plan. The problem is, it’s hard to guess what people actually want ahead of time.

So Travis advises looking two offers back.

First, figure out who the clients are you want to work with long-term. Then work backwards to figure out what offers you’d need to sell those clients…. so the final, big offer you really want them to take becomes a-no brainer for them.

This might sound like a trivial shift in thinking. But Travis claims this “two offers back” strategy brings in huge results in his business and in the businesses he advises. It means 50% conversions or higher on the back end… and more importantly, it means Travis’s seminars and continuity programs, all of which cost multiple thousands of dollars, always sell out.

But maybe you’re not convinced. Maybe this still sounds vague. Maybe an example would help.

If so, write in and let me know. I’m applying Travis’s “two offers back” approach to a business idea I currently have. If there’s enough interest, I’ll go ahead and share my personal example in a future email.

A marketing executive, two brothers, and a $35 million business

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Kay Kamen ripped the lining out of his coat and spread the money across the table.

“If you hire me,” he said, “all this money is yours. I don’t know how much business you’re doing right now, but I guarantee you that much, plus 50% of everything I do over that amount.”

At the other side of the table, the two brothers grew silent. They retreated to the window to quickly consider Kamen’s offer.

The offer was good and they could definitely use the money. Their business, while popular with customers, was strapped for cash. And it being 1932 and the height of the Great Depression, things weren’t looking up.

So they turned around to shake Kamen’s hand and accept his offer. Only one problem:

Kamen had fallen asleep while Roy and Walt Disney were conferring at the window.

This is a true story of how Disney the company survived and thrived.

Fact is, Disney was struggling in 1932. Cartoons are all right, but the costs are high, the risks are significant, and when you don’t have a new cartoon, you don’t eat.

That’s where Kay Kamen stepped in.

He was the owner of a marketing firm in Kansas City, and he had the idea of licensing Disney characters for merchandise. Roy And Walt were open to Kamen’s idea. They invited him to visit them in California.

So Kamen withdrew his entire life savings, sewed them into the lining of his coat, and got on a train to Los Angeles. He was so afraid somebody would steal his coat that he didn’t sleep for the 48 hours it took to make the trip. That’s why he dozed off during the meeting.

But the deal got done. A year later, there were 40 licenses for Mickey Mouse products.

Two years later, and Kamen was selling $35 million worth of Disney soap, hairbrushes, candy, baseball cards, and of course, watches. Keep in mind this was Great Depression dollars. The merchandise became a much more lucrative and stable source of income than the cartoons themselves.

The marketing lesson of this story is clear:

If Kay Kamen hadn’t created the merchandising machine for Disney in 1932, there’s a good chance none of us would know the Disney brand today.

The problem is most businesses — pre-Kamen Disney included — only focus on their current offer. They struggle and they wonder why. It’s because many front-end offers are not profitable.

That’s why it’s much better to plan a business a couple offers in advance. The first thing you sell to your customer… and then the thing after that… and then the thing after that.

That’s what Kay Kamen did for Disney. But here’s the thing:

There’s another way of planning out your offers that might be even better than this “two steps ahead” method.

In fact, according to a marketer who pulls in multiple millions of dollars of profits each year, this other method is much more reliable, and therefore much more lucrative. But my email today is already running long like a train from KC to LA — so I’ll tell you all about this other method tomorrow.

Stop asking your clients for referrals

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Stop asking your clients for referrals. At least until you’ve read through this article.

You’ve probably heard the Ben Franklin book-borrowing story:

Franklin had a political opponent he wanted to win over. But he didn’t want to butter the opponent up with flattery of tenderize him with gifts. Instead, Franklin used another tactic. He asked his opponent for a favor — the loan of a rare and curious book.

The opponent obliged. Ben Franklin returned the book a week later, with a note expressing his strong “sense of the favour.” After that, Franklin’s opponent opened up. The two eventually became great friends.

What does this have to do with referrals?

Well, as Franklin put it, “He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another.” it’s a matter of consistency, that fundamental human need. If I do you a favor, I have to justify it to myself somehow, and that will affect how I act in the future.

But it goes in the other direction, too. And that’s the connection to referrals.

If you ask a client for a referral — and he doesn’t oblige, for whatever reason — then he has to justify that decision to himself. And like Franklin says, “He that has once done you an unkindness will be more ready to do you another.”

Of course, not every book you borrow will make you a new friend… and not every referral you fail to get will lose you an old client.

But I want to raise the possibility that asking for a referral in a haphazard way can have its drawbacks.

“Just go ahead and ask, it can’t hurt.” Maybe. Or maybe it can.

So does that mean you should get paralyzed with fear and avoid referral marketing?

No. But it might make sense to have a smart system that works.

Such as the systems you can find in the following video. I’ve linked to it before, but I’ll do it again. It’s a recording from a Jay Abraham seminar where various clients of Jay’s shared 93 referral getting-strategies that actually worked for them.

Some of these methods are simple and obvious. Some are involved and very clever. But they’re all worth knowing about if you want more referrals:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_13FI1zE94k

The only currency your reader cares about

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Don’t let the socialists hear about this one:

Back in 1832, a horse-and-man organization called the Equitable Labor Exchange issued a unique currency.

This currency looked much like your everyday money (with numbers and signatures and familiar font and color)…

It also functioned much like money (you could use it to pay at local London shops, several theaters, and even a tollgate)…

But unlike money, which is an abstract, bodyless entity, each unit of this currency represented something hard and definite:

One hour of labor.

This time-currency was conceived by one Robert Owen, a do-gooding factory owner who wanted to unleash prosperity and happiness on 19th-century Britain.

The start of Owen’s plan looked promising. Within 17 weeks, the Equitable Labor Exchange had deposits worth 440,000 work hours.

But ultimately, the project turned out to be a failure. The system was rewarding inefficiency. The Equitable Labor Exchange and its time-money disappeared a few years later.

Still, Robert Owen was on to a good idea, at least for copywriting.

Because even though we all assume copywriting prospects are moved by money, the same problem exists today:

Money remains an abstract, shapeless, bodyless entity.

Fortunately, money can buy you lots of shapeful, concrete things. And so you can convince readers of the value of what you’re selling, not by repeating numbers with a dollar sign in front of them… but by converting money into what it does:

So $0.24 becomes a romantic dinner over a bowl of Maruchan instant ramen…

$12.99 becomes a year’s worth of fun and insight, reading Modern Cat magazine…

And $19.84 becomes 10 gallons of gasoline, which by my back-of-the-envelope math, is enough to power a chainsaw long enough to cut down 280 oak trees. That’s a small forest!

Maybe I’m not tempting you with these dumb examples. But I think you get the point.

As long as you do your research, so you know what your prospect really values and wants, you can figure out a way to translate ugly, meaningless cyphers into that other currency your reader actually cares about.

And that can mean more money for you — and everything else that money can buy.

An easy guiding principle to creating vision in your prospects

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Once upon a time, somewhere in America, there lived a very successful life insurance salesman.

He couldn’t speak, and he was bound to a wheelchair.

And yet, when it came to selling life insurance, the man was tremendous.

He used a marker and a little dry-erase board to communicate. Patiently, he would write his questions on the board, and then he’d hand it over to his prospects. His most effective question, the one that flipped the switch and lit up his prospects’ brains, was:

“If we lose you, where will your family live?”

I read this story in Jim Camp’s Start with No. Camp used it to illustrate the power of painting a vision of the prospect’s pain. “No vision,” Camp used to say, “no decision.”

Of course, in written copy, it’s not always the best choice to start asking questions. The dynamic is different than when you have a real person sitting across from you. But the same principle applies.

Create vision in your prospects.

There are lots of tricks and techniques for doing it. But there’s one easy guiding principle that lords above them all:

Create a vision in yourself first.

Your prospects will pick up on it, however you choose to communicate, and they will make the decision — the one you’d like for them to make.

A return to Mad Men-era Ulcer Gulch?

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There’s a scene from Mad Men that’s stuck with me for years:

Grey-haired Roger Sterling, the senior partner of the Sterling Cooper advertising agency, is on the phone with his wife.

“I am drinking my milk,” he reassures her. And sure enough, he’s got a half-full glass of milk in front of him. He then tops it up with vodka and drinks it down.

The vodka was there because it feels good. The milk, on the other hand, was supposed to treat ulcers. Turns out, ulcers were considered a badge of success on Madison Avenue, because all the high-ranking executives like Roger had them.

In fact, around the middle of the 20th century, Madison Avenue was popularly known as “Ulcer Gulch.” Which made me think of something I heard in an interview with marketer Rich Schefren. Says Rich:

“Most entrepreneurs make the mistake of putting their self-growth goals ahead of their business success.”

This made my long, furry ears perk up. It sounded like Rich was advocating a return to Ulcer Gulch. But no.

What Rich was really saying (as he explained a bit later in the interview) is that you need a business that you can do now, as you are. In other words, you shouldn’t wait to become a different person before you can start a successful business.

This sounds right to me. What business success I’ve had – my copywriting career, those Amazon bestsellers I mentioned a few days ago, a few recent partnerships — used the skills, experiences, and mindset I already had. And that was good enough.

On the other hand, whenever I’ve tried to start some kind of venture that sounded great on paper, but was more than a step removed from where I was currently, I always failed. That’s happened more times than I can count.

So what does this mean for you? Probably nothing. But perhaps, you can get out a pen and a piece of paper, pour yourself a glass of cold vodka-milk, and start listing ideas for services or products you can offer to the world right now — without mastering a new field, becoming a better public speaker, or getting more motivated.

​​Putting these kinds of restrictions on your idea generation can stir up creativity. And who knows, you might hit upon something that leads to real business success, without the ulcers.

General Patton and 4 top copywriters

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“The difficulty in understanding the Russian is that we do not take cognizance of the fact that he is not a European, but an Asiatic, and therefore thinks deviously. We can no more understand a Russian than a Chinaman or a Japanese, and from what I have seen of them, I have no particular desire to understand them, except to ascertain how much lead or iron it takes to kill them. In addition to his other Asiatic characteristics, the Russian has no regard for human life and is an all out son of bitch, barbarian, and chronic drunk.”
— General George S. Patton, August 8 1945

Why is Patton the most famous American military man, at least among those who never became president?

You might say it’s his wartime performance. That might be so. I’m not a history buff so I can’t say. But my guess is there were lots of other great generals in American history who never became household names. Why Patton?

Maybe it’s the Oscar-winning movie that was made about him, which had the Francis Ford Coppola golden touch. But this raises the question, why make a movie about Patton? I’ll tell you my theory.

Patton became famous because people perceived him as a true leader, and they perceived him as a leader because he was (among a few other things) so unflinchingly opinionated.

Look at the quote above. It’s so stupid. Not just by 2020 standards, but by 1945 standards. But the content of what you say doesn’t matter much as long as you say it with enough fury, conviction, and disregard for what others think.

I have another theory: I believe most people (myself included) have this empty socket in their brain. We are constantly looking for an authority to plug into that empty socket, if only for a little while. The appeal of strongmen like Patton is one manifestation of this… but so is our obsession with celebrities… or even the popularity of concerts and clubs.

All of which has clear implications for persuasion. While doable, it might be hard to get to Patton-like levels of opinionatedness and charisma in real life. But if you’re writing, say a sales letter, then you can definitely whip yourself up into the right kind of certainty and frenzy, and channel that across the page.

Speaking of writing sales letters and authority, I listened to an interesting discussion today between four top copywriters. They were Stefan Georgi, Chris Haddad, Justin Goff, and Dan Ferrari.

Odds are, you’ve already watched this discussion. But if you haven’t yet, it’s worthwhile. There’s nothing tactical being discussed on this call, but there’s a lot of behind the scenes thinking that might interest you if you’re into copywriting or persuasion. Here’s the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThUusBt1dIM

My little-known history as an Amazon ebook hack

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A-list copywriter Bob Bly just sent out an email about the National Emergency Library. I’d heard of this initiative but I didn’t bother to look it up until now.

Turns out, the Internet Archive is scanning books and making them freely available online during the corona situation. That’s the National Emergency Library. To which Mary Rasenberger, director of the Authors Guild, said (and I quote from Bob’s email):

“[It is] no different than any other piracy sites. If you can get anything that you want that’s on Internet Archives for free, why are you going to buy an ebook.”

I don’t know about you, but to me this sounds like the old argument about sex and marriage. Why buy the cow, when there’s an app that hooks you up with free milk, even at 3am.

And yet… plenty of people are still getting married these days. How come? Riddle me that, Mary.

But seriously, here’s a little-known fact about me:

For about a year of my life, I eked a meager living by writing ebooks and selling them through Amazon Kindle publishing. (Don’t search for the books because they were all published under pseudonyms.)

I actually sold thousands of copies of these books — but it didn’t mean much. Kindle ebooks sell for a couple of bucks each.

Thing is, had I known as much about marketing back then as I do now, I wouldn’t have failed or given up on my Kindle publishing dreams.

That’s because selling books on Amazon (or really, on any outside platform) is not a good way to make money. It is, however, a fantastic way to get highly qualified leads who have tried a glass of your milk, and who want more.

That means you can get these folks over to your site and sell them more milk — maybe at a higher price than what Amazon encourages you to charge.

Why stop there though?

If somebody likes you and knows you and trusts you, why limit your offer to a carton or two of milk?

Instead, take your new-found customer by the hand to the back of your property… open the barn door… and introduce her to your gorgeous cow. It might be just the bovine your customer has been looking for all her life.

In other words, if the National Emergency Library, the National Milk Authority, or any other pirate institution starts giving away samples of your money-maker for free, it might not be the end of the world. It might even be the start of something great. As multi-millionaire marketer Joe Sugarman once said:

“Each problem has hidden in it an opportunity so powerful that it literally dwarfs the problem. The greatest success stories were created by people who recognized a problem & turned it into an opportunity.”

Sharing news about new in five minutes or less

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There are two things I want to share with you today. One is news, the other is new. Let’s start with news:

I read an article today about how the media failed to predict the corona situation — and that’s why their initial reporting was so complacent.

To which I made the Scooby Doo “huh?” noise. Because from what I’ve seen over the years, the media doesn’t do prediction, at least not seriously. Instead, the media reports on the status quo.

Before the corona situation exploded, the status quo was complacency. Now, the status quo is panic, and the media is reporting accordingly. When the pandemic begins to wane and it’s time for things to go back to normal, the media message will likely be obliviousness that anything bad ever happened.

Which brings up this distinction between news and new. I first heard it from computer scientist Alan Kay. Says Alan,

“News is stuff that’s incremental to what we already know. This is why you can tell the news in five minutes. ‘Hey, a train just crashed.’ We all know what that means. […] New is by definition not like what we already know. There’s no news about new. There’s nothing you can tell somebody in five minutes about what new is.”

So I got two takeaways for you:

First, I’m not sure if it’s possible to do a good job predicting the future. Perhaps, among enough people, a few just get lucky.

But, if it is possible, then like Alan Kay says above, it’s unlikely you’ll find the future on the evening news, on Facebook, or on Vox.

But really, we’re here to talk about marketing.

So the other thing I want to tell you is how this news vs. new business can make you money. This is something I heard from marketer Todd Brown.

I didn’t know who Todd Brown was until recently. Apparently, he’s a big name in the IM space, and he’s worked with Jay Abraham, Clayton Makepeace, and Rich Schefren.

Todd’s message was that, whenever you’re positioning a new offer, you should never present it as an incremental improvement over the status quo (ie. news). Instead, always look for a way to present your offer as something entirely new and different — a marketplace of one.

“But hold on,” you might say. “Your offer should be something new… and yet there is no way to share news about new. So how do you convince prospects to buy in?”

That’s a good question. And it’s something I’m trying to answer in my new book on the use of insight in marketing. I’m making good progress on this book, and I hope to finish it in the next six to seven years (just kidding, hopefully another month or so).

If you’d like to get notified when it comes out, sign up for my daily email newsletter and you will get more emails from me about it.

The persuasion moral of the cock and the jewel

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Let’s start with a short story:

“A COCK, scratching for food for himself and his hens, found a precious stone and exclaimed: ‘If your owner had found thee, and not I, he would have taken thee up, and have set thee in thy first estate; but I have found thee for no purpose. I would rather have one barleycorn than all the jewels in the world.'”

If the old English puts you off, I can understand. And I’m sorry. Please don’t keep reading in that case.

If you’re still with me, what would you say is the moral of this story? Think about it, and we will get back to it in a second.

Meanwhile, let me tell you this is one of Aesop’s fables.

Aesop’s fables have been used for thousands of years to give pithy illustrations to situations we’ve all experienced but we don’t have a good and short name for. Like sour grapes. Or the boy who cried wolf. Two more of Aesop’s fables. I bet you know what those two mean.

But what about the cock and the jewel above? To start to answer that, let me first share a quote with you from a book I’m reading about analogies, written by one John Pollack, and titled Shortcut:

“The degree to which an analogy is or is not ‘accurate’ in a given circumstance is irrelevant, it is the feelings and ideas they evoke that makes them so powerful.”

Fact is, we humans love stories and analogies and fables so much that we are really not too critical about them. We accept the implied meaning and we take it for granted.

Of course, that’s good news for persuaders, influencers, and manipulators of all stripes. As one magician of persuasion, Gary Bencivenga, wrote a while ago:

“This process of transferring the qualities of one thing into another takes place instantly, bypassing critical analysis and resistance. All you do is compare A to B in an effective way and voila! your point is made instantly without disagreement.”

There’s good science behind why this is so, but I won’t go into that now, because I am so concerned with the cock and the jewel.

What does this fable really mean?

The best I can do is to point you to an article titled “The Moral of the Story.”

It was written a couple years ago by an actual poet named Anthony Madrid. If the mention of poetry scares you, as it scares me, then I want you to take a deep breath and relax. Because Anthony Madrid’s articles are all easy to read and fun, and they are mind-opening if you’re interested in language.

​​So here’s “The Moral of the Story,” which explains the moral of the “Cock and the Jewel,” or rather, the half dozen contradictory morals that have been scratched up over the centuries:

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/11/21/the-moral-of-the-story/