Glengarry Glen Ross

The ultimate high-ticket lead magnet

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“He’s doing very well. He’s doing VERY well. You know what he’s clearing himself? 14, 15 grand a week! Why? He’s got the leads. He’s got the good leads!”
— Glengarry Glen Ross

A couple days ago, I ran a poll in my Daily Email House community, with surprising results. The poll question asked:

“What’s the highest-ticket offer you have sold successfully to your email list?”

I think there was a bit of selection bias among those who responded, because the majority said they have successfully sold offers of $1k+ to their lists. 20% even said they have successfully sold offers of $5k or more via email alone.

In any case, the next day, I ran another poll. I asked House members why they aren’t selling more of their highest-ticket offer?

This time, the answer came back almost unanimous and much less surprising:

86% responded that they don’t have enough LEADS.

Like David Mamet says in Glengarry Glen Ross, it’s always about the leads, the good leads.

So you want leads? The good leads? The Glengarry leads?

Here’s a bit of advice on that from Dan Kennedy, the marketing guru I have quoted most in my newsletter because I have learned so much from the man, and because he is so quotable.

In Dan’s words, here is how you get leads, the good leads:

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My business comes to me because money follows and flows to authority.

For me, the journey toward this authority status began when I first published The Ultimate Sales Letter in 1981 — a book that has been on bookstore shelves without interruption ever since. It established me as an expert in the craftsmanship of letters that sell. It directly brought me clients, but much more importantly, it elevated my status above other copywriters. People wanted to hear from and get assistance from “the guy who wrote the book” about sales letters, and it is not accidental that the preemptive word “the” is in that title.

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Important point that Dan makes:

Yes, a book can get you clients directly. But it also leads others to you, even if they never buy or read your book. The book acts as a mental shortcut, and puts you in a position of “preeminent expert I want to work with.”

So go and write a book.

Or if you know yourself well enough to know that will never happen, or if you simply don’t want to wait as long as it might take…

… then you might like to know there are other, less painful and less time-consuming ways to build the kind of authority Dan Kennedy is talking about.

For example, my preferred method is to announce a live training, charge for it, and sell it. Then I either keep selling and promoting the recording, or I get it transcribed and turn it into a course or a even a book.

Yes, a live paid training that you sell on your site won’t appear on bookshelves at Barnes & Noble, and doesn’t have the same prestige as a book.

On the flip side, a live paid training is much easier and faster to put together than a book.

The deadline forces you to put out something, and in my experience, the result has always been 90% as good as I could have ever made it. The live, personal factor also makes live training attendees more forgiving than book readers would ever be.

Plus, the fact that you can sell a live paid training for $97 or $197 contributes to your authority as well, in a way that a $9.97 book cannot.

For all these reasons and more, I call live paid trainings Most Valuable Offers, more so than books or courses.

Next Wednesday, September 2, I will be running a Most Valuable Offer of my own, showing you how to sell and run Most Valuable Offers.

At the end of Wednesday’s training, I will give you an opportunity to get my direct support and help running your own Most Valuable Offer, if you want it.

Whether or not you take me up on that, I will give you the essence of what I have learned so far about running successful and client-pleasing Most Valuable Offers, based on my own experiences and my work with coaching clients.

Wednesday’s training happens at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST, and again, the date is September 2.

Yes, there will be a recording if you cannot make it live. But you’re sure to get more out of it if you can join me on the actual call.

Your investment, should you choose to join me, is $97 today and $2/month ongoing, because, as moons pass, I will be continuously updating the Most Valuable Offer SOP and sharing my Most Valuable Offer results and the results of clients I am helping on this.

If you’d like to sign up and learn how I run happy Most Valuable Offers to build my authority and attract the good leads, and how you can too:

https://checkout.bejakovic.com/most-valuable-offer/

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.

Why is Alec Baldwin telling me to Always Be Closing?

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You probably know the movie Glengarry Glen Ross, or at least you know the famous “Always Be Closing” scene.

​​But just in case, lemme quickly run through it:

Picture a small, regional office for a team of door-to-door salesmen.

Most of the guys in the office are losers — they are not selling anything, and are making no money.

One rainy evening, a new, different face is waiting there in the office. He has come from the rich and distant headquarters of the company.

The new face is played by a cocky and polished Alec Baldwin, with slicked back hair and a silk suit, looking handsome and deadly.

Baldwin has a Rolex on his wrist. And, as he tells the loser salesmen, he drives an $80,000 BMW, and he makes $900k a year.

Over the course of about five minutes, Baldwin delivers a menacing pep talk to the struggling salesmen.

“ABC,” he tells them. “Always. Be. Closing.”

The gist of Baldwin’s speech is, “Start selling, or you’re fired.” This sets up the necessary chain of reactions that leads to the climax of the movie.

Fine. You probably knew all this. Or if you didn’t, now you do.

But there’s one tiny bit that I omitted in my summary above, and that you may have missed if you ever watched this scene for real.

Because everything I told you, it’s a little bit, I don’t know, too pat?

Why does this slicked-back, cocky salesmen, who makes all this money and who lives in Manhattan, why does he drive down to the suburbs to talk to these losers, and why does he do it exactly tonight, on this stormy night, so that the rest of the movie can develop just as it should?

This is the kind of question that the people in the audience might never ask out loud. But somewhere in their brains, the question is there. And if it’s not answered — well, that’s a problem.

David Mamet, the guy who wrote Glengarry Glen Ross, knew this.

And so he took care of it.

As Baldwin is in the middle of his ABC speech, one of the loser salesman chuckles. And when Baldwin turns his deadly gaze on the guy, we get the following line:

“You’re such a hero. You’re so rich. How come you’re coming down here to waste your time with such a bunch of bums?”

Baldwin’s answer, when it comes, in between more insults to the other salesmen, is not much of an answer at all. The bosses asked him to come, he says, and he did it as a favor to them.

And that’s my point for you for today.

Effective screenwriting — and effective door-to-door sales, and effective copywriting, and pretty much any kind of effective communication — requires suspension of disbelief in your audience, if you have any hope of getting them to go where you want them to go.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that suspension of disbelief is often easier to achieve than you might ever believe.

Why?

Because while it’s instinctive for us to ask why… it’s also instinctive for us to be satisfied as soon as any kind of answer is provided, and to stop any further questions, at least on that one question.

Of course, it’s not always enough to say, “Because…” and then to give some kind of milquetoast reason.

Sometimes you need more powerful tricks to suspend disbelief in your audience.

And if you want those tricks, you can find them in my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

Why?

Because in Commandment I, I write about an A-List Copywriter who was a grandmaster of suppressing disbelief. And I tell you how he did it. If you’d like to find out:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

How dirty is your underwear right now?

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Seriously, how dirty is it? I’m asking because it’s a personal question and borderline insulting. And if my guess is right, it got your attention. Here’s why I need it.

I’ve been thinking about pattern interrupts and how to do them. Here are a few examples, in case you’re not familiar with this term, of what I mean by “pattern interrupt”:

1. Tony Robbins once threw water in a woman’s face. Repeatedly.

​​She was trying to talk through her marriage problems with Tony. But each time she started talking about her husband, she started to get negative. ​​So Tony threw water in her face, shocked her, and got her laughing.

​​”What is wrong with you?” she asked each time he did it. But she stopped being negative when talking about her husband.

2. “Coffee’s for closers only.”

​​You might know this famous scene from Glengarry Glen Ross. Alec Baldwin comes in to give his “Always be closing” speech to a bunch of real estate salesmen… but they aren’t taking him seriously.

​​So when one of them goes to get a cup of coffee, Baldwin stares and says, “Put that coffee down. Coffee’s for closers only. You think I’m fucking with you? I am not fucking with you.” The salesman puts the coffee down and starts to listen.

* Shooting the apple out of the pig’s mouth.

​​In the first Hunger Games movie, Katniss is supposed to show off her archery skills to a bunch of rich sponsors. But she misses the target. The sponsors laugh and start chatting among themselves.

​​Katniss next hits a bullseye… but the sponsors aren’t paying attention any more. ​​So she turns towards the sponsors, takes aim, and shoots an arrow through the apple stuck in a pig’s mouth in the middle of the banquet table. All the sponsors shut up and look at her.

I bet there are a bunch of different ways to create an effective pattern interrupt. The three situations above all do it. And though they might seem very different, I think they share a common element:

They cross private boundaries, whether physical or of personal sovereignty. They are intrusive, threatening, or borderline insulting.

So if you too need to get somebody’s attention, and change their set ways of thinking, try such a “personal sovereignty” pattern interrupt. Just make sure you have a good reason for doing so — otherwise you might get slapped in the face.

Anyways, since I still have your attention:

You might like y daily email newsletter. Or you might not. But if you’d like to test it out and decide for yourself, click here to subscribe.

The beautiful future of text sales letters

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“All train compartments smell vaguely of shit. It gets so you don’t mind it.”
— Ricky Roma, Glengarry Glen Ross

Right now, everybody’s so in love with copy.

In certain circles, this love even goes further, to a certain pride about ugly websites and ugly emails and ugly sales letters. “Who cares? If you’re interesting, if you write well, people will read your message even if it’s written on used toilet paper!”

There are even people who claim they’ve tested this. They claim that ugly, because it stands out, outperforms beautiful.

I can believe this. But here’s the thing:

If everybody’s making an ugly website in the hope of shocking people into handing over their attention… then ugly stops being different.

It gets so you don’t mind it, like Ricky Roma says in the quote above. And at that point, ugly loses its selling power.

I bring this up because I’m listening to an interview right now that Rich Schefren did with a marketer named Sean Vosler.

Rich spends the first five minutes of the interview enthusing about Sean and his work. Rich thinks this is the future of marketing.

He even gets so excited that he pulls up his text messages on screen, to prove how he just had an exchange with Jay Abraham, and how he invited Jay to join this interview. Rich thinks Sean’s stuff is so revolutionary that even Jay needs to see it.

So what exactly is Sean doing?

Well, he is selling a book about copywriting. That’s not unusual. What is unusual is that the book and its sales page are very professionally and beautifully designed (by Sean himself, who has a a background in design).

The point, as Rich puts it, is that “different is better than better.”

And in a world where many marketers are taking pride in making garish-looking sales pages… or sending boring and plain-looking emails (like the ones I send out in my email newsletter)… in that world, a beautiful design like Sean’s looks different. It gets attention. And that’s half the sale.

By the way, this is part of a bigger trend.

Last autumn, I wrote about a similar move to higher production values in VSLs. And now text sales letters seem to be headed in the same direction.

So if you are a marketer or business owner, this beautiful design stuff is something to keep in mind.

And if you are a copywriter, this is something you can bring up to your clients, and make yourself seem well-informed and cutting-edge.

But wait, you might say.

What exactly makes for beautiful design in a marketing context?

I can’t say. I’m not a designer. But if you want to see Sean’s sales page, the one Rich Schefren was so enthusiastic about, here’s the link so you can judge for yourself:

https://bejakovic.com/sean-vosler

Higher open rates = lower sales?

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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.”
David Mamet, Glengarry Glen Ross

I’ve been writing a lot of emails in the ecommerce space lately. This is for a client who’s constantly launching new products.

A few days ago, the client wrote me with a question:

“I’m curious with all the recent launches, which have looked most promising from an open rate and revenue standpoint?”

I could tell him right away which of the products were most successful in terms of revenue. But I wasn’t sure about open rates. So I decided to dig into the data.

It turns out the relationship between open rates and sales in our case has been negative. In other words, the more people opened up our emails, the less money we made. I even ran a little regression on it. On average, each extra percent of opens cost us $100 worth of sales.

How could that be?

Well, for one thing, we keep promoting different products, and at different price points. Higher-priced products might have less overall interest, but can result in more sales.

But there are other possible explanations, too.

For example, different subject lines will select for different segments of the market.

Maybe one subject line gets you a lot of opens. But like in that Glengarry Glen Ross scene above, maybe you’re just reaching a bunch of bored leads, who like to click on sensationalist ads, and who have no intention of buying anything.

Whatever the explanation is, the message is clear:

All those millions of blog posts by email marketing experts telling you how to increase your open rates could actually be hurting your sales.

A. B. C.

Always be checking your sales numbers. Sales numbers are for closers. Open rates? They’re for bums.

Speaking of open rates, I write a daily email newsletter with very high open rates. If you’d like to get on it so you can bring those numbers down, here’s where to subscribe.