Selling Context

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/

The Big Store

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I’m reading a book about con men. Ben Marks was one of them. His specialty was three-card monte, hustling cattlemen and miners and soldiers in the streets of Cheyenne.

Marks was good. He’d regularly make $5, $10, sometimes $25 by fleecing some greedy passerby on the street.

Marks made a living. But it was hardly a business. The streets of Cheyenne were too busy and too crowded and there was too much competition. Saloons offering booze. Hotels offering gambling. Brothels offering love.

So Marks hit upon a novel idea.

Why not open his own establishment? Get people to come to him? Do away with the competition?

It’s a concept that became known as the Big Store.

The Big Store became a key part of the big con. A fancy gambling club, or a brokerage house, or in Marks’s case, The Dollar Store — everything for a dollar, including some very attractive and expensive goods, displayed colorfully in the store windows.

But when a prospect stepped inside The Dollar Store, he’d see several lively monte games already in play, with Marks’s shills and “sticks” in place of real gamblers.

The new prospect forgot about the attractive merchandise.

He left The Dollar Store some time later, not having bought anything for $1. But he did leave behind a wad of cash nonetheless.

I’m not encouraging you to grift, conning, or crime of any sort. But I do tell you the above because:

1. The basic idea is usable in non-criminal ways also. Think, how can I get them to come to me? How do I do away with the competition and other distractions?

2. “Get them to come to you, instead of going to them” might sound like a simple, familiar, or even trivial idea. But it’s not one you should dismiss. Marks’s Big Store was the innovation that created the big-money confidence games that netted $75,000 or $100,000, instead of $25 hustles in back alleys and on train cars and street corners.

Do you wanna see a Big Store in action? Here’s a clip (no spoilers) from The Sting, one of my favorite films:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYjyFQS3DWM

Dan Kennedy was hoping for a laugh, but when he finished his joke~!

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I was listening to an awkward moment from a Dan Kennedy seminar this morning.

First, a bit of background is in order:

If you don’t know much about Dan, he is a marketer who has influenced more marketers than anybody else.

Dan got his big break back in the 90s, going around the US as part of the Peter Lowe Success Tour.

That was a bunch of famous and influential people — former US presidents, Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks, Suze Orman — giving motivational speeches to an audience of tens of thousands, in a different city every night.

At the end of each night, after the famous and influential people had finished their speeches, Dan would get up on stage as the last speaker. He would then deliver a blistering 60-minute standup routine that sold you on buying his Magnetic Marketing product.

If you’ve never listened to Dan’s speech, it’s fantastic. It’s worth searching around the Internet to dig it up.

The thing I listened to this morning was something else – a recording of a $12k/head seminar that Dan gave many years later, to a small group of select customers and proteges.

Dan was talking about the audience for the Peter Lowe Success Tour, and how politically conservative they were. So conservative that when Mario Cuomo, the liberal New York ex-governor, joined the Tour, the audience booed.

So far, so good. At least for Dan’s story.

And then, Dan, who is practiced at selling through humor, shifts into an exasperated tone of voice:

“… Mario Cuomo comes out, and everybody’s booing! By the time he’s done, I’m booing too, cause the schmuck’s thirty five minutes over, and people are streaming out in droves, you know???”

Beat.

Nobody in Dan’s seminar reacts. On the seminar recording, there’s a pause. You can hear Dan swallow hard and then move on to the next bit of his educational material.

That’s an illustration of something I just read in a book called Comedy Writing Secrets. “Humor in front of a small audience is very hard to bring off because each individual is afraid to laugh for fear of being conspicuous.”

Sitting at home and listening to Dan’s presentation, the image of him booing put a smile on my face.

In a large 10,000 person arena, the same bit would almost certainly draw laughs, and maybe loud laughs.

But in a small seminar, made up of 12 or 15 people, all it drew was a moment of awkward silence, and a gulp from Dan Kennedy.

That’s something to keep in mind if you’re ever trying to give a humorous speech.

But the bigger point is that the response you draw is not only a function of your message… of the audience you are talking to… or even your relationship to that audience.

There’s an extra thing, and that’s the context in which you are delivering your message.

Big room, small room, medium room… seminar stage, webinar, bus.

Maybe that idea seems super obvious to you. But the only thing that’s super obvious is that even masters of influence, people like Dan Kennedy, will forget about this crucial element to their own embarrassment and loss.

But enough about embarrassment and loss. Let’s talk about gain instead.

Specifically, my Most Valuable Email training, and some most valuable Dan Kennedy ideas.

In the Most Valuable Email training, I pull back the curtain on my Most Valuable Email trick.

And then, at the end of the training, I give you 10 riddles to ponder. These are valuable and interesting marketing ideas, each of which you can use as a prompt for creating your own Most Valuable Email, and applying the Most Valuable Email trick.

Two of those ideas come from Dan Kennedy. And in typical DK style, they are both very ugly truths, but also very insightful and practical…

You know???

To find out more about MVE:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/