Salesmanship

The foundation that personal positioning is built on

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Back when I was researching my new 10 Commandments book, about con men, pick up artists, and among others, door-to-door salesmen, I came across a 10-minute documentary titled, “The Bronzer.”

The Bronzer is about a door-to-door salesman named Stu Larkin, who has been selling bronzed baby shoes his whole life.

(The movie came out 10+ years ago, but Larkin is still at it as far as I know.)

There weren’t any useful door-to-door selling techniques in this documentary. But there was a kind of wake-up call.

Bronzed baby shoes are nice. I guess they sell for $50 a pair? or $100? or $200? In any case, Larkin had this to say:

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The thing about selling that I’m kind of disturbed about, because I know that I’m so good at what I do, is that I think I missed my calling in something else. That I could have made millions and millions and millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars selling something else. Like someone would be going, “We know that guy. He’s the most renowned salesman in the world.”

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There are good techniques for positioning yourself at the top end of your market, and I want to write my next book about those.

But those good techniques are like the blueprints for building a skyscraper. The foundation of that skyscraper, without which even the most sound blueprints will result in a janky leaning tower that nobody wants to live in, is choosing which market you will be in to begin with.

Fact one:

It takes as much skill to sell to people who aren’t interested in buying or who have no money… as to sell to people who both are eager to buy and who have the money to do so. Often, it takes more skill and more work, far more, to sell to the first group.

Fact two:

If you’re selling something right now, then there’s sure to be another market where your exact skills, and maybe even your exact offers, could sell for 5x or 10x or 100x of what you’re selling for now.

Of course, it’s not an easy or light decision to switch markets and to basically set sail in an unfamiliar and possibly shark-infested sea. But it’s worth thinking about, or at least that’s what I tell myself, as I’ve been thinking about it too.

I’ll leave you with that seed for today.

Meanwhile, as that seed germinates, if you wanna see what valuable techniques of door-to-door salesman I did find, and how those tie into related fields like copywriting, standup comedy, and con games:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

X-ray goggles to avoid sales call prospects who like talking to salesmen but never buy

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“They like to talk to salesmen, something. They’re lonely. I don’t know. They like to feel superior. Never bought a fucking thing.”

That’s a line from Glengarry Glen Ross, with two frustrated salesmen talking about “doctors, lawyers, Indians,” and other prospects who simply like talking to salesmen for whatever reasons of their own, but who never buy.

Some of these reasons you can’t do anything about (“they like to feel superior”).

But some you can.

Like I wrote yesterday, if:

1. You do sales calls regularly, and

2. It happens more often than never that the prospect you’re talking to ends up not having the money for the offer you are selling…

… then hit reply.

I have a couple of questions I hope you can help me out with.

In exchange, I’ll tell you about a pair of X-ray goggles, and where to get ’em. These X-ray goggles allow you to peer into places you maybe shouldn’t be peering, like your prospect’s wallet.

The X-ray goggles I have in mind allow you to only get on calls with people who can afford what you’re selling, so you minimize the time you waste and the aggravation you suffer.

About my failed pickup attempt yesterday

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I was walking through the center of Barcelona yesterday. It’s been magically pleasant weather here — warm, breezy, sunny, clear.

I stopped at an intersection to wait for the light.

I saw a girl who stopped on the side of the street opposite me. I’m guessing she was in her late 20s. She had big curly hair, a white summer dress that stopped halfway down her thighs, and black leather boots that reached up to her knees.

And she was looking at me. Furtively. Here and there.

Of course, when the light changed, and as we passed each other on the crosswalk, she stared straight ahead so I couldn’t catch her eye.

That’s okay.

I wheeled around, waited for her to reach the sidewalk, then jogged up in front of her, smiled, and held up my hands to make it clear I have something to say. She took out her headphones with a look of pleased surprise.

If you’ve read my new 10 Commandments book, you know how a street approach like this goes.

I complimented the girl, saying she looks nice, and added something about the boots and dress. She laughed.

Since she seemed ready to talk, that’s exactly what we did.

I guessed she’s French. No, Catalan.

She tried to guess where I’m from (not easy). She was focusing so hard that I put my hand on her shoulder to reassure her it’s okay to guess wrong. She didn’t mind my doing that.

We kept the conversation going for a few minutes during which time we covered the usual gamut of personal stuff along with a bit of teasing and giggling.

In the end I said, “Look I gotta go. But another night, I’d like to invite you out for a drink.”

Suddenly, the girl grew flustered and confused. “Oh ok, but I should tell you, I have a boyfriend, just in case you were thinking…”

“I was thinking,” I said. “But it’s okay.” And it really was. It was nice and positive to talk to her. It made me feel better and loosened me up. And the whole interaction took something like five minutes. We said goodbye and that was that.

And now I’m gonna talk about business, and particularly sales, crass though it might seem.

If you have read my new 10 Commandments book, you know I make an analogy between picking up girls (what I was attempting to do yesterday, unsuccessfully) and other fields, like standup comedy, hypnosis, and, relevant for us today, direct, in-person, nose-to-nose, toes-to-toes sales.

I don’t know if you do sales calls. I’ve done a few on the back of this email newsletter, for people who were interested in coaching I was offering at the time. In my previous career as a freelance copywriter, I did probably a hundred or more sales calls — it was part of my standard process for getting copywriting clients.

If you’ve ever done sales calls, I wonder if the following sounds familiar:

A very promising prospect expresses interest in what you have. So you get on a sales call.

You cover the usual gamut of business stuff along with a bit of getting to know each other and friendly banter.

The prospect seems ready for you to close her. So you lay out your offer including the price. Suddenly your prospect grows flustered and confused. “Oh ok,” she says, “but I should tell you, I don’t have that kind of money to spend…”

Yes, some “I don’t have that kind of money” prospects say it as a ruse, just like some “I have a boyfriend” girls don’t really have a boyfriend.

But in many cases, it’s really true. Your prospect, even though she looked very promising, and even though she probably had a good sense of what you charge, just doesn’t have the money to pay you.

You see why I make an analogy between this and my failed pickup situation yesterday.

Of course, there are also differences between the two.

Failed sales calls tend to take up to an hour to get through, as opposed to five minutes. They are likely to be done in your office over gloomy Zoom, instead of on a sunny Barcelona street. And they don’t leave you feeling nice and energized afterwards, but are mainly a frustrating and draining waste of time.

If you do sales calls regularly, and if the situation above is one you experience from time to time, then I have an offer for you.

Hit reply. I have a couple of questions I hope you can help me out with. In exchange, I’ll tell you about a pair of X-ray goggles, and where to get ’em. These X-ray goggles allow you to peer into places you maybe shouldn’t be peering, like your prospect’s wallet.

The X-ray goggles I have in mind allow you to only get on calls with people who can afford what you’re selling, so you minimize the time you waste.

And if you do get on a call with someone who says, “I should tell you I don’t have that kind of money to spend,” with these goggles you will know to press a bit, because odds are, it’s a ruse, and one that your prospect hopes you will expose.

A tabloidy factoid about Dan Ferrari and Ning Li

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A few weeks ago, copywriter Tom Baines wrote me to say:

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Anyway, I’m excited for your new book, and here’s an interesting tabloidy factoid you may already be aware of: Dan Ferarri and Ning Li have both talked openly about how they first connected in a pickup artist subreddit, where Dan initially mentored Ning as a pick-up artist before eventually bringing him over into copywriting and helping him build his career here… I think it’s a fun little overlap.

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I’m sharing this as a bit of gossip in case you have connections to the copywriting industry. Ning and Dan are both well-known figures there. I never knew the background of how they met, even though I was in Dan’s small and intimate coaching program 5+ years ago.

Beyond gossip, anything worthwhile here?

I heard direct marketing legend Dan Kennedy say on multiple occasions how the top copywriters he knows all have years of “nose to nose, toes to toes” sales experience. And if you look at the famousest copywriters, from Claude Hopkins to Gary Halbert on down to Dan Kennedy himself, all started out in direct or door-to-door sales.

But I think today the “nose to nose, toes to toes” connection has weakened, in large part because door-to-door sales has become a much rarer endeavor.

On the other hand, I know more successful copywriters who have experience with pickup than I can count on my two hands and 10 sticky fingers.

In part, that’s because equivalent social shifts — things like the Internet — which caused d2d selling to drop have also made info about pickup and seduction available to a large pool of eager men.

But it’s more than that.

There are ideas, skills, and attitudes that translate from pickup to copywriting, and vice versa, same as from copy to d2d sales, and vice versa.

All to say:

1. You might have valuable skills and experiences you are not aware of right now.

2. If you want to find out some of the connections between copywriting and d2d sales and pickup, and also seemingly unrelated but deeply connected fields like hypnosis and stage magic and standup comedy, then you might like:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

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+G 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?

More 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+G 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