David Sandler

17 ideas for charging more

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I wanna write a new book about the art of charging higher prices:

How to overcome your own mental blocks around charging more…

How to make the technical changes that need to be made to your offers and positioning…

How to get people to happily pay you at new and higher prices.

I don’t know yet how I will organize this book. But I do have a bunch of ideas for the content to include.

Since one of my ideas for charging higher prices is to give away stuff for free in certain circumstances, here are 17 ways to charge higher prices, for you to use and profit from today:

#1. Just double your prices right now, without waiting, and then make whatever changes this new price forces you into

Yes, ​it can be done​.

#2. Specialize

People will pay more for an all-black German shepherd than they will for a mottled mixed-breed mutt, even if both ultimately have two ears, four legs, one tail, and the ability to bark.

#3. Sell an outcome, not deliverables

In other words, ​sell the house, not the hammer​.

#4. Deliver a more complete outcome

(I heard this advice from a “sales closer agency” that takes people’s $5k offers and turns them into $50k offers, and makes their clients and themselves tens of millions per year.)

Example: if you sell a live event, then instead of selling just entry to the event and what’s inside, sell a package that includes a hotel room, a flight, transportation from the airport, and maybe dinner at a fancy restaurant with the organizers of the event. And charge a premium on top of each.

#5. Sell a bigger outcome

instead of helping people get a client worth $1k, help them get a client worth $10k. Instead of helping them close one $1k client, help them close three $1k clients.

#6. Guarantee the outcome

My $31k auction went to $31k ​in large part because of the guarantee​.

#7. Sell something scarce vs. something common

You might have something legitimately scarce (“the last five copies ever that will ever be printed”) or you can have something artificially scarce (“only five spots open this entire year”).

#8. Sell yourself vs. selling your solution

If you have an audience and your audience likes you, you can sell yourself first and foremost. This is a special and easy kind of scarcity that nobody can take away from you or challenge you on.

As an example, consider the dozens of “how to write emails” courses that popped up over the past 2-3 years. Many of them sold, and well — to the audiences of the person creating the course, and to nobody else.

#9. Go after the Maverick segment rather than the Goose segment of your market

For more on this distinction, ​check here​. Or ​read this​ to see where I first got the idea.

#10. Go to a richer market

Example: ​people wanting to learn improv comedy vs. trial lawyers​. Who will pay more?

#11. Position yourself as the premier solution

A few examples: ​Rolex, Harvard, Jay Abraham​.

#12. Offer “real-world value” bonuses vs. “valued at” bonuses

The information in this email is “valued at” $10,000, by me personally, based on my extensive research and deep introspection.

Do you think I could use this “valued at $10k” email as a bonus for a legit $10k offer, and make the $10k offer feel effectively free?

No?

You don’t think so?

Well, maybe you will, after I take this information and turn it into a 4-week cohort I start charging $10k for, and start selling over and over to my list.

#13. Ask for future money rather than present money

The most money I ever made while working as a freelance copywriter came to me after I asked a client to let me write emails for them for free, on commission only.

They agreed, and offered me 20% of the profits made.

In this way, it became routine for me to get paid $500 for an email it took me 15 minutes to write, and $1k per email was not unheard of either.

There’s no way the client would have agreed to pay me such rates out of pocket. But out of profit? Different story.

#14. Get your prospects thinking what it costs not to buy rather than what it costs to buy

This is ​a classic lesson from sales trainer David Sandler​.

#15. Reframe or repackage your core offer into something valued more

I once put on an entire $197 training about this… but for just one example, ​take a look here​. (Just don’t write me asking for the offer at that link.)

#16. Charge for things you do for free now.

Research… replying to emails… sales calls…

… who says you have to do them for free?

Charging for such things automatically pushes everything else up also. Your perceived value rises. Plus you now have something you can anchor your other offers to, or offer as a real-world-value bonus.

(On the other hand, it can be better to give things away for free than to discount them. I’ll just leave it at that for now.)

#17. Change format

Books sell for $-$$. A one-evening Zoom training sells for $$-$$$. A course sells for $$$-$$$$. An in-person training sells for $$$$-$$$$$.

Same info, same outcome, but the format affects how people value that info, and what they are willing to pay for it.

… and that makes 17.

Did I miss anything? Do you have extra ideas for how to charge more?

Let me know, and maybe I will include your ideas in my new book, and put your name up in the “acknowledgements” marquee, with lights shining on it, right at the front. Thanks in advance.

50 ways to leave your back spasm

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Yesterday I asked readers for suggestions in dealing with an old-man back spasm that gripped me a few hours earlier.

Well I got suggestions.

Let me tell you some of ‘em, in the style of Paul Simon’s song 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover:

Limber up your hip, Chip

Take a magnesium pill, Bill

Stand more and sit less, Wes

Just listen to me

Roll on a massage ball, Paul

Become a supple leopard, Shepherd

Get some physiotherapy, Lee

And get yourself free

The people who wrote in with suggestions were not trying to sell me anything (thank God) and were just offering help.

(I appreciate everyone who took the time to write me. If I haven’t replied yet to you to say thanks, it’s only because I’m traveling today and am writing this from a plane somewhere between Vienna and Zagreb.)

That said, even though this was not a sales situation, I noticed something inside myself. It might be useful to you if you ever do try to sell people something.

Yesterday I said I’d entertain all suggestions for getting my back spasm to pass.

But today, as I was reading the suggestions my good readers sent in, I noticed I was immediately resistant to some.

It wasn’t because of the suggestions themselves, or because of the people who were giving the suggestion.

Instead it was the way those suggestions were made — with some small detail that simply didn’t fit with my actual situation.

For example:

One person mentioned lower back pain. That’s not where my pain is.

Others talked about chronic back pain. My thing is acute.

Sales trainer Dave Sandler called this “painting the seagull,” as in, forcing a seagull into your prospect’s mental vision of a beach, where the prospect doesn’t see one naturally.

Force the seagull in there, says Sandler, and you create a clash that makes the whole vision disappear. That was my experience today.

The fix to this is (switching metaphors) to play doctor. To ask more questions and get the “patient” to describe his own situation in detail.

Even if your diagnosis ultimately ends up the same, it’s much more likely to be accepted if you listen, and acknowledge the uniqueness of the person standing opposite you, and encourage their mental bubble to expand instead of doing something to make it pop.

This might be useful to you if you ever get on sales calls or anything like sales calls… with prospects for your coaching… or copywriting services… or simply your expensive-ass offer.

And if you want a new plan on how to sell or behave on sales calls, Sandler’s book is still my go-to recommendation. For more info, slip out the back, Jack:

https://bejakovic.com/sandler

Inspiration in case everybody else is doing better than you

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A couple days ago, I wrote an email about an idea from Dave Sandler’s book You Can’t Teach A Kid To Ride A Bike At A Seminar.

It seems many readers found that email unusually inspiring, and wrote in to say so.

So I will shamelessly go back to the same well, and tell you another anecdote from Sandler’s book to try to inspire you.

Here goes:

Sandler didn’t start out as a salesman. He had inherited his father’s profitable business. But then, through a combination of entitlement and stupidity, Sandler lost that business.

He turned to sales because he hoped to once again afford the kind of lifestyle he was used to.

Sandler started selling self-help materials. He struggled and sucked.

In the first year of his miserable new sales career, he went to an awards show for the star salesmen of his company.

Of course, awards were given out at the awards show. Of course, Sandler, who struggled and sucked, won no awards. Of course, he felt inferior, and even doubly bad about struggling and sucking as a salesman.

But through some combination of gnawing insecurity, personal drive, and a lack of better options, Sandler stuck to it. And he made a vow to improve.

Sandler started visiting the salesmen who had won the top awards at the the awards show. His plan was to interview them, learn from them, soak in their skills and mindset by osmosis. Except, that’s not what ended up happening.

In Sandler’s own words:

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One by one I was disappointed by what I discovered. They were all struggling. I went from Dallas to Denver, from Washington to Virginia, and interviewed every distributor who agreed to spend time with me. Most of them were starving. There was nothing consistent about their lives. A year of success was easily followed by a year of failure, but they faked their way through it, just as they had been taught to do. These were the stars of the distributor network, and most of them were miserable.

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That’s it. That’s the anecdote. The end.

Yeah, of course the book goes on to describe how Sandler developed his own sales system, and how he eventually started consistently making sales, and winning awards, and how he became the star salesman for his company, year after year, etc.

But you’ve probably heard enough rags-to-riches stories in your life.

That’s why the end of the Sandler anecdote, if you ask me, should really fall where he goes to talk to all these industry stars, who seem to be doing great, making tons of sales, getting awards and kudos, and the reality is they’re struggling and experiencing all kinds of volatility and scarcity.

I don’t know what your specific situation is.

But I imagine you have certain insecurities. We all have them.

Maybe you’re insecure about something objective and measurable — you’re not making enough money, you have no kind of audience.

Or maybe you’re insecure about something less measurable but still real — your experience and status.

It’s bad enough to deal with such insecurities and the underlying realities on their own.

But it’s doubly bad when you look around, and spot people who appear to be doing amazing and inevitably compare yourself to them. 7-figure this! 4-hour that! A newsletter with 250 million readers!

I’d like to suggest to you — as in Sandler’s time, so today.

There’s no reason to feel doubly bad comparing your situation to the 7-figure, 4-hour superstars. Because there’s an excellent chance they are struggling behind the scenes. If you could really talk to them, it would be obvious enough.

As for the realities you might be facing — whether income, or influence, or your experience and status — my stock answer is to start writing daily emails. And it will fix itself.

You’ve probably gotten used to hearing me say that, and maybe you’ve gotten deaf to it.

So let me share a message I got a couple days ago from Chavy Helfgott, who is a copywriter and brand strategist for consumer brands.

Chavy signed up to my Daily Email Habit service on day one, back in November. She was looking to bring her career back into focus after a couple years off due to personal reasons.

She started writing first daily, then weekday emails. 66 emails so far since November.

Chavy wrote me a couple days ago to report the result:

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Hi, just wanted to share a daily email win. After 66 emails, I just closed my first sale which I directly attribute to daily emails, and that client is already expressing interest in another package.

Additionally, writing the daily emails has helped me become more confident about pitching myself in other places. I responded to a question on a WhatsApp community of business owners, and it led to two calls with potential clients.

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I’m not making any promises that daily emails will sort out your life in 66 days.

But if you have the right combination of gnawing insecurity, personal drive, and a lack of better options, might as well get started daily emailing today? One thing I’m sure of, the results will surprise you.

And if you want my help along the way, here’s more info on Daily Email Habit:

​https://bejakovic.com/deh​

I believe you’re a 10

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Last night, I finished my second reading of Dave Sandler’s book, You Can’t Teach A Kid To Ride A Bike At A Seminar.

As you might know, Sandler was a sales trainer. His book is about his sales system, which Sandler developed after having something close to a nervous breakdown, day after day, trying to make sales using the old-fashioned approach of tried-and-tested sales techniques — “Would you prefer it in red or in blue?”

Curious thing:

The first real teaching Sandler does in his book is not about the initial step of his sales system, but something he calls I/R theory.

Sandler sets it up with a little exercise. You can try it yourself, right now.

Imagine you’re on a desert island, and you’ve been stripped of all your roles.

In other words, imagine yourself without any professional skill or accomplishment… without family relations and responsibilities… without local, national, and religious affiliation… without all your hobbies, talents, and memberships.

Imagine yourself completely isolated and stripped down to just your identity — your sense of being you.

On a scale from 1 to 10, how do you evaluate that identity?

Many people, says Sandler, rebel at this exercise, and claim that without their roles, they are nothing. Zero!

Many others give their identity a 3 or a 4, or maybe a 5 or a 6.

And yet, Sandler insists that everybody’s identity, yours and mine included, is always a 10, regardless of the roles we play and how well we play them that day.

Sandler gives some sort of argument to make his case. A baby supposedly has a “10” identity… and by induction, it must hold for adults as well. “How could it be otherwise?” Sandler asks, waving his arms a little.

Now, Bejako bear being a particularly skeptical species of bear, chances are good I would have simply rolled my eyes the first time I read this.

But it just so happened that at the same time I was first reading Sandler’s book, I was reading another book also, called The Will To Believe, by American philosopher and psychologist William James.

James gives a rational argument why believing stuff — even without any rational argument for believing it — can make a lot of sense in a lot of situations.

I won’t repeat James’s argument. It doesn’t matter tremendously. Just for me personally, it reminded me something I had realized before.

If you ask me, belief is not something that happens to you. It’s not done to you from the outside, by somebody putting facts and arguments into your head like they put leis around your neck when you arrive to Hawaii.

Rather, believing stuff is a personal, creative act, much like seeing is a personal, creative act.

Remembering this in the context of Sandler’s I/R theory was enough for me to honestly say, “Fine. Let me choose to believe I’m a 10.”

I choose to believe you’re a 10 too.

But why does it matter? Numbers are kind of arbitrary. Why 10? Why not 11, like the guitar amplifier in Spinal Tap?

You can label the numbers how you will. The important thing, says Sandler, is that you will find ways to make your role performance — in his case, sales success — fit your identity, your self-image.

So if have a self-image of, say, 6 out of 10, and if things in your life go bad, down to 2, you will find a way to get back to normal, back to 6.

On the other hand, if things go too well — a 9 or a 10 — you will find a way to get back to normal, too.

And if you’ve ever wondered why things never stay too good for you — why they never stay at a 9 or a 10 — maybe this is an explanation why.

Maybe try imagining yourself on a desert island, just you without any roles you play, and choose to believe you are in fact a 10.

If you do give it a go, let me know how it works out.

And as for making sales, and connecting with people, and writing day after day without quitting because things have gotten too uncomfortably good, you might like my Daily Email Habit service. For more info on that:

​https://bejakovic.com/deh

Reinforcement training

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I thought I was saved:

Age 20, I was lurking around the university library like all normal college freshmen do on a Saturday afternoon.

I flipped over a book that somebody had left on a table. It turned out to be an instructional manual for cognitive behavioral therapists.

As night started to fall, I read it. It blew my mind.

I recognized all the distorted patterns of thinking that the book described, which lead to anxiety and depression. I knew them all from my own head. Now I had labels to identify them, and techniques to challenge and redirect them in the future.

For a day or two after, I walked around on a cloud, feeling my life was transformed. I had finally found a way out of the gloom that had formed around me in my teenage years.

Except it didn’t last.

Within a couple days, the CBT stuff had largely slipped from my mind. So it was back to catastrophizing, and black-and-white thinking, and overgeneralization.

Apparently, I’m not unique in this. A few days ago, I was reading an article about the promise of AI for treating mental illness. The article mentioned CBT, and how effective and popular it still is — IF. From the article:

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When [Alison Darcy, a psychologist at Stanford] was in graduate school, she treated dozens of hospitalized patients using C.B.T.; many experienced striking improvements but relapsed after they left the hospital. C.B.T. is “best done in small quantities over and over and over again,” she told me.

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I’m telling you this because in my still-catastrophizing, black-and-white thinking, and overgeneralizing head, this connected to another thing I was reading a few days ago.

This other thing was a book by sales trainer David Sandler.

Sandler had came up with this amazing and low-stress sales system. He wrote it up in his book. He taught it to beaten down, despondent salesmen during live seminars.

The salesmen went out of the seminar walking on clouds, certain they had been saved from ever again being bullied by prospects or ashamed of selling.

Except it didn’t last.

That’s why Sandler’s book is called You Can’t Teach A Kid To Ride A Bike At A Seminar. From that book:

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Of course, people want instantaneous impact change. They want to see positive, enduring changes immediately. But our experience is that that kind of change is going to be sustainable over time only if you create a solid ongoing reinforcement program to back up the learning.

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Maybe this is true of all really effective but unnatural systems.

You hear such a system described. It makes sense. You get energized, follow through for a couple days.

Eventually though, you revert back to the mean.

The solution: small doses, over time, with regular reinforcement.

Yes, I know this is the exact opposite of what typical direct response offers promise (Gene Schwartz’s publishing company was called Instant Improvement).

But this reinforcement learning approach has its appeals as well:

It’s easy to get started with something when you know it only requires small doses, rather than a drastic change.

And with reinforcement training, it’s easier to get committed to starting today, rather than starting later AKA never. That’s because since change will take time, and reinforcement, rather than a one time big bang that you can get with the flick of a credit card, every minute that you delay ends up costing you down the line. Best start today.

It holds for CBT… for sales training… and for the effective but unnatural habit that is writing a daily email for your business.

For CBT reinforcement, you now have AI apps to talk to you and offer to correct your distorted thinking day in and day out.

For sales training, you have David Sandler’s President Club, which reinforces his sales system during weekly meetups for a modest $12,000 a year.

And as for daily emails, you have my Daily Email Habit service, which nudges you to write a daily email every day, and gives you a puzzle to mull over, and even some hints to make sure what you write is effective.

Daily Email Habit doesn’t use AI, and it doesn’t quite cost $12,000 a year, at least yet. If you’d like more information on it, today, when it’s best to get started:

​https://bejakovic.com/deh​

A rule you can take to the bank

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“If you talk less, you’ll sell more, and that is a rule you can take to the bank.”
— David Sandler

What, you’re still reading?

Even though I’ve paid off the subject line?

Insatiable. All right…

I can tell you I’m re-reading David Sandler’s mysteriously titled book, You Can’t Teach A Kid To Ride A Bike At A Seminar.

In case you don’t know Sandler, the man was a sales trainer, and his book is about his sales system.

Sandler was influential enough in the world of actual sales — the world of cold calling, going to prospect’s offices, sitting across the table.

But his ideas are much better known in the world of online marketing because negotiation coach Jim Camp, who influenced a million and one Internet marketers, apparently got most of his negotiation system, often verbatim, by being a Sandler franchisee.

Aaanyways…

Sandler says to talk less. To draw out your prospects to talk. To listen, and to get them to sell themselves.

It’s good advice. I tried it. It worked like magic, back when I used to get on calls with prospective copywriting clients.

It’s great advice for sales copy too.

Back when I was writing sales copy — thousands of words every week of advertorials, and VSLs, and sales emails — I made it a policy to “write as little as possible.”

That didn’t mean to have a VSL of 150 words or a half-page advertorial.

Instead it meant “getting the market to write your marketing for you,” as Travis Sago likes to say. To mirror and feed back things that people in the market already said themselves, in their own words, instead of coming up with my own arguments and language.

So that’s a tip for you. Talk and write less. You’ll sell more.

Here’s another tip. The above tip is great advice if all you’re looking to do is to sell, today.

But if you’re writing a daily email newsletter, particularly one for yourself and your business, then there’s a second purpose to your emails.

This second purpose is more wooly. Much less measurable than sales. It also happens in the vague future, rather than the clear present.

I’m talking about getting people to open your emails again tomorrow, and to give you an honest hearing. About gradually, getting people to see you as an authority, a leader, a trusted guide in all kinds of questions in their life.

Sales today are necessary and nice. But really, all the profits in email are in this long game, in the ongoing relationship, in the back end.

And that’s a rule you can take to the bank.

And now, on to my offer. If you don’t buy it today, I’ll promote it again tomorrow, and maybe I’ll convince you then.

Or maybe I’ll convince you today?

My offer is my Daily Email Habit service. It’s a new prompt/puzzle each day, delivered to your inbox, to help you write your own daily email.

The dual goals for Daily Email Habit are 1) making you sales today and 2) establishing your influence and authority, so you have an asset in your email list that only grows in value tomorrow, and the day after.

If you’d like to get started with those dual goals, and now:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Ponzi-like cold calling

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I’m rereading David Sandler’s book You Can’t Teach A Kid To Ride A Bike At A Seminar, But You Can Teach Him How To Fish.

Even though the title won’t tell you so, it’s a sales book.

Do you know Jim Camp’s Start With No? Camp’s book is in many ways a rewrite of Sandler’s book. But the original, as always, has stuff that the rewrite doesn’t have…

… such as the following story of Ponzi-like cold calling, which could be useful to many, even if they never make a cold call in their life:

In the early days of his sales career, Sandler cold called business owners to sell self-improvement courses and sales training. It was the only way he knew how to get leads.

Valuable point #1: Sandler got 9 out 10 cold-called prospects to agree to meet him. How?

Simple. He’d offer something for free, something that the guy on other end wanted, something nobody else was offering.

Specifically, Sandler would offer to come down to the prospect’s office and demonstrate his cold calling techniques to the prospect’s sales team, and motivate the lazy bums a little.

Like I said, 9 out of 10 business owners agreed to that.

Valuable point #2: Sandler didn’t offer to come do a demo as a means of making a sale. He did it as a means of making cold calls.

Sandler hated making cold calls. If he had to make cold calls at home, he’d put it off, do it half-heartedly, and not make enough of them to set his weekly quota of appointments.

That’s why he did the scheme above.

He’d show up to the prospect’s office, nervous but also amped up. And then, for an hour or so, he’d cold call — for himself.

He’d spend an hour in the prospect’s office, with the sales staff looking at him in wonder, making cold call after cold call, chatting on the phone, digging into the pain, and in many cases, setting new appointments for himself.

A couple days ago, I wrote that identity is just about the most powerful appeal you can make.

Well there’s a close second, and that’s reputation. In fact, for many of us, reputation might even trump identity. Cause you wanna look good in front of people, right? Even if you have to do things you would never do on your own.

And so it was with Sandler. He’d end an hour at a prospect’s office with another 2-3 set appointments, way more than he’d get at home had he spent the afternoon there.

Plus of course, he’d have a way better chance of closing the sale. Because nothing sells like demonstration.

Such story. Much lessons. So few people who will do anything with it.

And yet, it could be so powerful if somebody would only apply it, whether to cold calling… or to any other persuasion-related activity.

I’ll leave you to ponder that, and I’ll just say my email today is a “demonstration” of the daily email prompt I send out this morning for my Daily Email Habit service.

Maybe it’s easy enough to figure out what today’s prompt was.

Or maybe not.

In any case, today’s prompt is gone. Today’s prompt is lost to history, to be known only by the current subscribers to Daily Email Habit.

But a new prompt will appear tomorrow, to help those who want to write emails regularly, both for their own enjoyment, and to impress and influence others in their market. Because powerful things happen when you know that others are watching you.

If you’d like to read the email I write based on that prompt, and maybe try to guess what the prompt was, click here to sign up to my email newsletter.

6 things I’m reading now

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Comes a question from long-time reader Illya Shapovalov, on the trail of my email yesterday:

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Hey John,

Slightly off topic:

You always find some curious and interesting things to share in your emails. Can I ask you what publications do you read or are subscribed to? I really struggle finding just interesting things to read on the Internet, something that’s not sensationalistic or opinionated like most news outlets.

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The only non-work publication I’m subscribed to is the New Yorker. It’s a print magazine that arrives to my physical mailbox with the frequency of a baby panda birth in captivity.

As for interesting things to read on the Internet, I find most of those via Hacker News.

That’s a kind of bulletin- or news-board, curated by lots of smart people and moderated by a few, specifically to not be sensationalistic or opinionated. Much of what’s on Hacker News is tech news and articles that I frankly don’t care about, but there’s other interesting stuff always.

But why limit yourself to things on the Internet?

In my experience, books are the greatest repository of human insight and funny stories, better than courses, better than coaching programs or communities, and certainly better than blogs or websites.

Nobody asked about my book reading habits. But I’ll tell ya.

I read books in four categories, one book at a time in each category:

1. “Something from a previous century.” Currently, I’m finishing up the fourth and final volume of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, which I started back in December 2021, almost three years ago.

2. “Religion.” This can be about actual religion, or about the human mind, or the nature of reality. I just started A Life of One’s Own, by Marion Milner.

3. “Fiction.” I’m reading David Copperfield by Charles Dickens.

4. “Work.” (Copywriting, marketing, psychology, etc.) I’m reading I’m Okay, You’re Okay by Thomas Harris, since it’s one of the upstream sources of both David Sandler’s sales system and Jim Camp’s Start With No.

Bigger point:

You can combine the enjoyable and the useful.

I read these things because I find them interesting… but also because they can provide fodder for these emails and for other projects I’m working on.

Combine the two, enjoyable and useful, and you can have something you can stick with for the long term.

Smaller point:

There are lots of places to get possible ideas for daily emails.

I personally feel it’s more important to have a way to decide among those many ideas, a litmus test to help you decide if an idea is a good topic for your email today.

If you’d like to find out what my personal litmus test is, the test I recommend to coaching students who have paid me thousands of dollars for the advice, and to hundreds of people who have bought my courses, you can find that inside my Simple Money Emails program. For more info on that:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

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?

You, me, Affiliate World?

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Are you going to Affiliate World? If you are, let me know. I need the encouragement.

I’ve been reading about sales trainer David Sandler’s “traps for success.”

For example, when Sandler used to cold call on prospects at their offices, he would park his car in a downtown garage, knowing he only had enough money on him to pay for either lunch or parking.

He liked lunch, and so he spent his money during the day.

That would mean he’d have to make some sales calls, and close at least one, and get at least a few dollars of deposit, if he wanted to get his car out of the garage and drive home at the end of the day.

That’s why I’m asking if you’re going to Affiliate World.

I already know some people who are going. I’ve thought about it myself.

Last year, I went to two live marketing-related events. After each was done, I was juiced and I told myself I should do this more often. Plus this year Affiliate World’s happening in Budapest. I love Budapest — I lived there for 11 years.

At the same time, thinking about being herded onto a plane… and staying in some dungeon-like Airbnb… and paying hundreds of dollars for the privilege of feeling guilty if I don’t talk to a bunch of strangers… all that’s making me hesitate.

So I’ve set a trap for myself. I’ve told myself I will go to Affiliate World if at least five people I know will also be there.

That’s why I’m writing you. Will you be there?

Let me know. We can meet, talk marketing, or not talk marketing — after all, there are many other interesting things to talk about.

And maybe I can even show you around. Or not show you around — after all, maybe you truly enjoy talking to a bunch of strangers, and it sounds like Affiliate World will be a very stimulating place.