Salesmanship

How to handle phone interviews with prospective clients

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Earlier today, while chipping away at my upcoming book, I remembered an important client-getting lesson from my days of getting on calls with prospective clients.

From 2015-2019 or so, I worked with dozens of copywriting clients, mainly via Upwork.

To get those dozens of clients, I had to get on hundreds of sales calls or job interviews, depending on how you look at it.

A typical call would go like this:

The prospective client and I would get on Zoom — or maybe it was Skype then — and we’d exchange some pleasantries.

Then the potential client would say, “Ok John, why don’t you tell me a little bit about your background?”

I’d take a deep breath. And then I’d launch in, telling the client all about the projects I’ve worked on… the results I’d gotten for previous clients… my methodology and philosophy of writing sales copy. Plus if I had the opportunity to do so, I’d slip in a few hints about being smart and reliable and easy to work with.

When I thought I’d covered all the most important and impressive stuff about myself, with my face a little red and my lungs empty of air, I’d finally pause to see if the client had any other questions I could answer.

I used this strategy for a long time.

It was a very instinctive and natural thing for me to do. It probably went back to elementary school days, and being quizzed and tested by the teacher to see if I knew the right answer.

And yes, this approach did work on occasion — if I delivered a great pitch and all the stars lined up.

The typical response would be something like, “Sounds great, John. We really like what we hear. We’re still talking to a few freelancers but you’re definitely at the top of the list. We’ll get back to you in a few days once we make the decision.”

Sometimes that meant I got the job. More often, it meant I didn’t.

Fortunately, I soon discovered a much better response to “Tell me a little bit about your background.”

I don’t have concrete stats to back it up, but I estimate this much better response doubled my closing rate, meaning that for every three or four sales calls I had to get on, I closed two new clients, instead of just one.

Plus, this new way of responding made the whole sales call dramatically easier to do.

Perhaps you know what my new response was, either because you know enough about sales, or because you’ve heard me talk about this before.

But in case you don’t know, and you’d like to know, then I have an offer for you.

This offer is only good for the next 24 hours or so, until tomorrow, Thursday Mar 20, at 12 midnight PST.

The offer is a guide I’ve written about the mysterious, unfamiliar, and sometimes dangerous business side of copywriting, the side of managing clients and making a name for yourself.

This guide is called Copy Zone.

I’ve only made Copy Zone available a few times in the past, and only for a day or so, like today.

On page 94 of Copy Zone, you can find the strategy I started using on sales calls with prospective clients instead of trying to wow them with my credentials.

On the other 175 pages of Copy Zone, you can find my best advice on how to make a good living as a copywriter, all the way from getting started, even if you have no clients and no experience, to becoming seen as an A-list copywriter, if that’s your ambition.

Warning:

Copy Zone sell for $197 right now.

That’s very expensive, considering it’s just a PDF of 175 pages.

All I can say to defend that very expensive $197 is this:

If I could go back 10 years, and talk to myself in the first days when I had the idea to start working as freelance copywriter, then this would be the most condensed and practical info to shortcut those first few days, few months, and few years of working. It would also be my best advice about moving forward, as far forward as your ambition will drive you.

I believe this information would have been worth tens of thousands of dollars to me over the years, or maybe more.

Maybe it can be the same for you.

In any case, if you are a copywriter or you want to become one, then just one small copywriting job, which you win thanks to the ideas inside Copy Zone, could completely cover your $197 investment, and then some.

Of course, it’s your decision. But the clock is ticking. If you’d like to grab a copy of Copy Zone before it goes back into the cave again:

Copy Zone

Competition contradiction

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A paradox? A contradiction?

As part of the research for my new book, I’ve been going through a book by Sam Taggart. Taggart is the founder of D2D Experts, an online education company for door-to-door salesmen.

Taggart has a long but distinguished career selling door-to-door, everything from knives to solar panels to security alarms. His door-to-door selling career started at age 11, and culminated around age 35, when he finished as the #1 salesman in a company of 3,000 reps.

Anyways, grok this, if you can:

On page 44 of his book, Taggart’s top recommendation for motivating yourself is to look at all the other salesmen around you, to start tracking their results, and to start thinking of them as competition you have to beat.

And then on page 64, Taggart says how the best salesmen only view themselves as real competition.

Huh?

It’s easy to dismiss this as just contradiction or fluff inherent in a lot of sales material.

But I don’t think so.

A while back, meaning 3 years ago, I wrote about 6 characteristics of people who manage to do the seemingly impossible.

These 6 characteristics came out of a study of pro athletes who came back from devastating injury to compete at the highest level again… as well as star Wall Street traders who managed to beat not only all other traders, but the randomness inherent in the market as well.

One of the common characteristics of such people was that they simultaneously had a short-term view of the task to be accomplished, as well as a long-term view.

In other words, these folks looked at their situation from both 3 feet away, and from 3,000 feet up in the air. They did so the same time, or at least switching constantly between the two.

And so I think it is with Taggart’s advice — and so it is in many other situations in life.

We all want the “one thing” to cling to.

But quite often, particularly in the most important things in life, you gotta hold two opposing thoughts in your head, and you gotta live by both of them.

Of course you don’t really gotta. You don’t gotta do anything. But if you are currently worried by competition, whether that’s other businesses who target same audience as you, or other solutions or trends that tend to wipe out what you’re doing, or simply people within your own company who try to outperform you, then it might make sense to:

1. Make a list of all these villains, to keep track of their activity, and to start viewing them as competition to be beaten

2. To ignore them and to focus on doing the best you can

Anyways, I’ll have Taggart’s advice — not this, but something less contradictory — in my new book, full title:

10 Commandments of Con Men, Pick Up Artists, Magicians, Door-to-Door Salesmen, Hypnotists, Copywriters, Professional Negotiators, Political Propagandists, Stand Up Comedians, and Oscar-Winning Screenwriters

My goal is to finish and publish this book by March 24. The way things are going, I might have to shave half my head, like Demosthenes, to keep myself from leaving the house until the book is finished.

In any case, I will be writing about this book and how it’s progressing, plus what I’m thinking about doing to make it a success when it comes out.

If you are interested in the topic of this book, and you’re thinking you might wanna get a copy when it comes out, click below. I’m planning some launch bonuses and I will be dripping them out early to people on this pre-launch list:

​​Click here to get on the bonus-dripping pre-launch list for my new 10 Commandments book​​

Do you want to play the Questions game?

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Have you ever heard of Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead?

Did you read the play? Or did they make you watch the movie, like they made me, in high school English class?

Do you remember the Questions game that R+K play?

Was it more like badminton? Or more like tennis?

What were the rules? I mean, what else was forbidden, besides lobbing a statement over the net?

Why were repetitive questions not allowed? What counted as out-of-bounds “rhetoric”? And how long was an invalid hesitation?

Most importantly, why am I telling you all this?

Do you think it might have something to do with persuasion and sales and marketing?

Would you be surprised if I told you it did?

Have you heard me talk recently about sales trainer David Sandler?

Have you heard of Sandler’s “Silver Dollar” game? Can you see how it’s basically the same game as the one that R+K played?

And can you think of at least a few good reasons why a hard-nosed salesman like Sandler would encourage his students to spend time fooling around like this?

Do I have you confused? Would an example help? Why not click below then, and see if this clip makes things clearer?

Confidence kills

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This morning, I saw a chocolate Labrador run up to a couple at a streetside cafe.

The couple — a man and a woman — were sitting in the sun and having coffee and sandwiches.

At first, I thought the dog knew the couple. He frolicked around them, wagged his tail excitedly, and let them pet him.

But it turned out no. This was their first-ever meeting.

The dog’s owner came up, leash in hand, apologizing to the couple, and tried to collect the dog.

The lab evaded the owner. He ran to the other side of the table. And then he put his entire head on the actual table, right next to the sandwich the woman was eating.

The woman started to laugh. She wagged her finger and in a mock-educational tone, she told the dog, “La confianza mata!” Confidence, as in trust of others, kills. I’m not 100% sure, but I think she slipped the dog a little piece of jamón from her sandwich as the owner yanked the beast away.

Maybe there’s a persuasion lesson in there?

Maybe. Let’s see.

Dogs trust strangers instinctively.

Humans don’t.

“Confidence kills!” That’s what we tell ourselves, our kids, and even those same dogs, though we can’t beat it out of them.

This lack of confidence is a problem, particularly if you want strangers to trust you and to do as you want.

Solution:

Do as the dog did.

Trust people first. Even if they are complete strangers.

This is what master persuaders, the ones who have persuaded thousands or even millions of strangers, have found to work the best. In the words of one such master persuader, Claude Hopkins:

“Ask a person to take a chance on you, and you have a fight. Offer to take a chance on him, and he might slip you a piece of jamón.”

And now, can I ask for your help?

The fact is, I don’t have any offer to promote today. Maybe even tomorrow.

So if you’re okay with it, can I ask you a rather personal question? Here goes:

What’s one thing on your todo list for today that you’re dreading?

It can be big or small. Important or trivial. The only thing that counts is that you’re not looking forward to doing it. ​​

Let me know. Maybe I can figure out or find a solution to help you get rid of this troubling todo item. Thanks in advance.

How to create value from a broke, flaky, uncommitted audience

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This week, I’m promoting Newsletter XP, a course on how to build, grow, and monetize a successful newsletter.

The undeniable star of the Newsletter XP show is co-host Alex Lieberman.

​​In 2015, Lieberman started Morning Brew, an email newsletter covering the day’s business news. Within five years, he built up Morning Brew into a 9-figure company. In 2020, he sold a controlling stake in Morning Brew for $75 million.

There’s a bit in the monetization section of Newsletter XP where Alex is asked to give an example of how he pitched big brands like IKEA on buying six-figure ad packages in Morning Brew.

​​Alex obliges.

He delivers a 1 min 24 second masterclass — the pitch he performed 10 times a day, every day, for three years.

​​His pitch is truly impressive because what he is really selling is an audience of 18-30 year olds, largely broke, uncommitted, and flaky — not an audience any serious business would be excited to advertise to.

And yet, Alex does it with such enthusiasm, cleverness, and conviction, that by the end of his pitch, I bet the IKEA marketing execs were begging him to run their ad, versus the other way around.

Once again, this pitch was how Morning Brew got to tens of millions of dollars a year in ad revenue, before Alex cashed out for $75 million.

You can use Alex’s IKEA pitch to inform your own sales strategy if you want to start a newsletter and you’re bent on selling ads to big brands for a lot of money.

Or, you can use Alex’s pitch to guide where you take your newsletter.

Because you might not be getting into the newsletter business to hang out on LinkedIn and pitch marketing managers 10 times a day.

​​The good news is, Newsletter XP gives you real options for both the ad-supported path to monetizing your newsletter, as well as the no-ad path, where you simply create content you love and get paid well to do it.

It’s all there inside the course.

​​I’m promoting Newsletter XP until Monday, Feb 25, at 12 midnight PST. During this promotion, you can get $200 off the usual price of Newsletter XP. Here’s how:

1. Go to the Newsletter XP sales page at https://bejakovic.com/nxp

2. If you decide you want to get Newsltter XP, then use coupon code JB20 at checkout.

3. Make sure the coupon code works — that you see the price drop by $200. This is not my funnel, and if you end up buying at full price, there’s nothing I can do about it.

The seedy underbelly of every industry ever

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This past Wednesday, the BBC ran an article with the headline:

“The seedy underbelly of the life coaching industry”

The article features the story of a woman named Angela Lauria, age 50. Lauria went in search of weight loss and she wound up with a life coach who charged her $100k and got her to spend thousands more on trainings by other life coaches.

We don’t actually find out what happened to Angela in the end, but presumably she did not make her $100k back via new and bigger successes in her life.

I guess the BBC published this article because life coaching is a booming industry and because it’s still relatively new.

The point, the article says, is not to discourage people from seeking a life coach’s services — because there are good life coaches. But it’s the Wild West out there.

I personally think it’s the Wild West everywhere, and always has been.

My estimate — based on having seen behind the curtain at hundreds of businesses while I was a for-hire copywriter — is that 80% of people doing any job are at best mediocre, and more likely, they are actively bad.

Only 20% of people in any industry are genuinely dedicated, skilled, and get good results on any kind of consistent basis.

So what to do? Well, if you’re looking for a life coach, the BBC article has the following good advice:

“Ask the coach how much of their business is referral, call at least three former clients and don’t buy from anyone who won’t do a call with you directly beforehand. And don’t buy from anyone who needs an answer now – scarcity and urgency is made up.”

Meanwhile, if you want to write a personal email newsletter — to distinguish yourself, to prove your credibility, to promote your products and services — then look at my Simple Money Emails program.

​​Most of the sales for that program came via referrals. And if you’d like to see what a few previous customers had to say, take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

Dating and business advice to a needy blackbird

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A few days ago, I was minding my own business, washing the dishes. The weather was warm so I opened the window.

Just as I was in the middle of scrubbing the salad bowl, a little blackbird landed on my windowsill.

“CHEEP,” said the blackbird.

“Oh hello there,” I said. “How do you do?”

The blackbird paced for a moment and then sat down on the windowsill. He seemed to be getting comfortable, which made me frown and pause my dishwashing. And then the blackbird spoke:

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Interesting that you ask that. Very interesting.

Something I am really struggling with at the moment is securing a mate.

I can’t get a mate for my familybuilding services. Even when I catch the eye of female blackbirds, they seem to smell my neediness from a mile away even if I don’t reveal it intentionally.

I wanted to ask:

How would you go about getting a mate if:

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… and then the blackbird listed his unique mate-getting situation, which happens to be the same unique situation faced by all single blackbirds, crows, and seagulls, as well as by all individuals, whether human or avine, who are hoping to go from zero to one in any endeavor that involves selling yourself.

I’ve long ago decided that I don’t want to be in the business of taking people or birds from zero to one.

So I just nodded to the blackbird in understanding, picked him up, placed him on the outside window sill, and closed the window shut.

That said, I do have one piece of advice.

I’m only sharing it because it applies to anybody who is looking to do anything new and frightening, whether they are beginners or much more advanced.

It applies to newbie copywriters looking for their first client… to experienced copywriters looking to send their first email to their own list… to business owners looking to go into a drastically more upscale market and charge 2x or 3x or 10x of what they are charging now.

It also applies to securing a mate. In fact, this piece of advice is something I heard from the infamous pick-up coach Owen Cook, aka RSD Tyler, the villain in Neil Strauss’s book The Game.

Owen was talking about the horrifying prospect of flying up to an attractive and unfamiliar female blackbird, in the middle of a park with lots of other blackbirds around, and striking up a fun and natural interaction.

Perfectly easy if you have total belief in yourself and your worth.

Perfectly impossible if you are overwhelmed by fear and self-doubt.

So here’s Owen’s observation:

“The halfway point between fear and total belief is indifference.”

You can’t go from fear and neediness to total belief and confidence.

But you can go from fear and neediness to indifference.

One way to do it is repeat exposure in a short enough period of time.

Go and cheep at seven attractive and unfamiliar blackbirds today. Each of those interactions might go horribly, though they probably won’t.

But whatever the outcome of the interactions, by the end of the seven, you will realize you are still alive. In fact, you are perfectly fine.

Do this a few days in a row, and those innate survival mechanisms, which underlie both fear and neediness, will begin to get habituated and calm down. You will start to get indifferent. And that’s the halfway point to total belief and confidence.

In other words, if you think you have a neediness problem… what you really got is an activity problem.

That’s all the free advice from Bejako’s windowsill for today.

If you’d like to buy something from me, I can recommend my Simple Money Emails training.

​​No, Simple Money Emails won’t replace the need to actually write and send emails, whether for your own business or for a client business.

But Simple Money Emails can teach you my effective one-two system for writing emails, much like this one, that make sales, keep readers reading, and keep birds chirping. If that’s an outcome you’d like as well:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

Two main chain cutters that delink price from product

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The past few days, I’ve been reading the eye-opening “No B.S. Marketing To The Affluent” by marketing coach Dan Kennedy.

​​​​As you can imagine, one of Dan’s main points is that you should charge a lot, and that you can, because with a bit of thought and preparation, it’s easy to break the heavy chain that links product to price in most people’s minds.

Dan suggests two main ways to do it:

“The two biggest chain cutters that delink price from product are 1) who is buying and 2) the context in which the product is presented, priced, and delivered.”

There’s a lot in that one sentence. So let’s get specifical. Let me tell you just one specific way to create a high-price selling context.

It’s to assume authority.

In the olden days, this meant getting a soapbox… walking to the the northeast corner of Hyde Park… putting your soapbox down on the ground among the chestnut leaves… stepping onto the soapbox… and starting to talk.

The modern-day version of this is creating your own digital platform of any kind and using it to communicate.

Because there’s some shortcut in the human brain, so that when you speak from a platform, the rest of us listen.

Sure, some of those listening will walk away after a time. But others will continue to stand there, transfixed, nodding their heads.

And if you, the speaker, ever deign to directly address me, the transfixed audience member, I’ll get a flush of excitement. I’ll look around to make sure others saw it too. “Did you catch that? He spoke to me! He made me an offer, directly! It’s expensive, but what else would you expect? He’s an authority!”

I know I react like this. I imagine that if you are honest with yourself, you will find you react like this too.

All that’s to say, get your own soapbox if you haven’t got one yet. Or get me to create one for you. ​​

And on that note, today is the last day I’ll be talking about my done-for-you newsletter service.

​​Your own newsletter is good for business, good for authority, and great for delinking price from product.

So if you have a business, but you haven’t got a newsletter, then take a look here for more information on this service:

https://bejakovic.com/announcing-done-for-you-newsletter-service/

Discipline in print

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Last night, I got a 4-word reply to my email about how quickly memory fails. A reader with a pseudonymous email address replied with just the following aimless question:

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John How r u?

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I got out my 3-ring binder of previous reader replies. I flipped through the pages in search of this reader’s email address. Sure enough, at the bottom of page 22, I found it. This reader had written me before. On January 24 of this year, in response to an email about teaching people to value your offer, this reader had written me to say:

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Who the fuck do you think you are?

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Now I remembered. I even wrote an email about that reply back in January.

Back then, I decided to keep this guy or gal on my list because 1) I don’t get many abusive replies from readers, and I’m more amused than bothered when it does happen and 2) I thought this reader might provide me fodder for an email in the future. That’s just what happened.

I proactively unsubscribed my “How r u” reader last night. Again, not because I was annoyed or bothered by the pointless reply.

“How r u” reader simply became a noble sacrifice to demonstrate an immensely important and fundamental point about all marketing, and in particular, about email marketing.

I honestly cannot overstate the importance of the following point. Even more so if you’re somebody like me — far from a born marketer, salesman, or promoter, and coming from a rather permissive and lax family background.

The point is this:

A key to all marketing, and perhaps the key to email marketing, is to train your audience.

Once upon a time, when I was very naive, I thought marketing was simply about getting the word out about what you have. “Whole frozen turkey, 16 lbs., $25.91. Walmart.”

Later, I figured out that marketing actually changes people — creates new desires, habits, beliefs. “Welcome to Marlboro country.”

But for some reason — again, I’m far from a born marketer or salesman – it took me a long, long while to connect the fact that 1) if you are creating marketing and 2) since marketing changes people then 3) you should consciously create marketing that changes people in a way that suits you.

This is what I mean when I say, train your audience. Tell ’em what to do. Reward those who do it. Punish those who don’t. And make an example of ’em.

100 years ago, John E. Kennedy said marketing is salesmanship in print.

Today, John E. Bejakovic is telling you, marketing is discipline in print.

Of course, maybe you don’t agree with me. Maybe you think I’m saying something offensive or crude or just wrong. In that case, I invite you to write in and tell me so. I promise to read what you write me, and to reply as politely and thoughtfully as I know how. Perhaps publicly.

In any case, let’s get on to the discipline:

For the past couple days, I’ve been talking about a group coaching program I’m planning for the future. The goal of this coaching program is to get people writing daily emails, regularly and well.

Right now, if you’re interested, you can get on the waiting list for that program. The waiting list is the only place I will make this program available.

And as I say on the optin page for the waiting list:

If you do sign up to the waiting list, you will get automated email from me with a few questions. Answering those questions will take all of two minutes, but it will give me valuable information to see whether this group coaching could actually be right for you. Please reply to that email within 24 hours with your answers. I will take anyone who doesn’t do this off the waiting list.

So far, a good number have signed up for the waiting list and have written me in reply to that automated email. I wrote back to each of them individually to say thanks.
​
​But a few people have signed up to the waiting list, and then failed to reply to the automated email within 24 hours.

Maybe they changed their minds about the coaching. Maybe they simply forgot. Maybe they were testing me.

Whatever the reason may be, I took them off the waiting list, and I prevented them from getting back on. They might be fine people, but they are clearly not good prospects for a strict coaching program, which is what I intend for this program to be.

If you’re interested in this coaching program, then the first step is to get on my email list. Click here to do so.

Maybe this email will finally melt away your resistance

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I was talking to a girl a few days ago, and she was complaining about an annoying guy who had hounded her at a club.

The guy stopped her on the way out of the bathroom. Then he came up to her at the bar. Later he sidled up to her on the dance floor.

“Why are some guys annoying like that?” she asked me.

I shrugged. “Because it works.”

My ex-girlfriend once told me her perspective on why she decided to go out with me. I’d gotten her phone number once, during a brief interaction. And then, for about 6 weeks, I texted her every few days. Each time, she had some reason not to meet. She never said no flat out, so I kept texting her. “You were very persistent,” she mused later.

“Yeah sure,” you might say, “but there’s a big difference between being persistent and hounding somebody in an annoying way.”

Maybe so. But based on what I’ve seen, that’s a line that’s often drawn after the fact — after somebody decides either to give you a hard “no” or to take you up on your offer.

In the second case, the person who took you up on your offer will often say that it was your persistence that really won them over, that they found most attractive.

I took a break just now to check Google Analytics. Right now, as I write this, somebody’s on the third and final page of my Copy Riddles sales letter, and two more people are on the first page.

I don’t know if any of these people will decide to buy in the next few minutes. But I have noticed a trend.

I usually promote my existing offers in one-week stretches. For example, last week it was my Most Valuable Email, this week Copy Riddles.

Early in those week-long stretches, I get some sales. But I’ve noticed it takes a few days to get the wheel rolling, to get momentum built up, to get sales coming in unexpectedly and at odd hours and in bunches.

Today is day six of my Copy Riddles promo period. I’ll see if my theory about sales bunching up will be borne out.

In any case, the basic idea stands. As copywriter Gary Bencivenga said once, persistence melts away resistance.

Incidentally, this is something that ties into the very first big a-ha moment I got while following the road that eventually led me to creating Copy Riddles. In case you’d like to read more about that a-ha moment, you can find it on the sales page bwlo, which I’ve shared previously many times, and which I will continue to share:

https://bejakovic.com/cr