Trust me for a moment or two while I tell you about the following interesting people:
On October 3, 1918, a man named Grover Bougher sent a letter to his brother George, a Private in the American Expeditionary Force.
Two days later, Grover was killed in a train wreck.
Grover’s letter was returned unopened the following April, with a note from the Command P.O. that George had also been killed, fighting the war in France.
Neither brother ever learned of the other’s death.
But life goes on. Eventually, Grover’s widow, Lulu Belle Lomax, met and married a man named Vernon Smith.
Smith loved children, including Lulu’s two daughters by Grover Bougher. And while Lulu had often said she would never have any more children, Vernon’s love for her two daughters changed her mind.
The result was Vernon Lomax Smith, born on January 1, 1927.
Fast forward to 2002:
Vernon Lomax Smith is awarded the Nobel Prize in economics. Well, actually he shares the prize with Daniel Kahneman. Like Kahneman, Smith did work in behavioral and experimental economics, so the Nobel committee thought it okay to split the prize among the two of them.
Fast forward even more, to 2022:
Vernon Smith, now aged 95, has taken part in an interesting experiment. Except, he is not the investigator. He is part of the experiment itself. The experiment runs as follows.
Smith and a lesser-known coauthor (one without a Nobel Prize) submit a paper for publication.
Will the paper be accepted for publication? How will Smith’s name influence those odds?
Result:
If Smith’s Nobel Prize-winning name is revealed to peer reviewers, they are more likely to accept the paper for publication.
If Smith’s name is hidden to peer reviewers, the reviewers are less likely to the accept for publication.
Common sense, right?
Except, what was not common sense, what was not obvious, and what was in fact shocking to the scientists who conducted this experiment, was the size of the effect of revealing Vernon Smith’s name to peer reviewers.
If Smith’s name was revealed to peer reviewers, they were 6x more likely to accept the paper than otherwise.
Same paper. Same quality of ideas inside. 6x difference in response.
6x!
Yesterday, I, John Bejakovic, wrote an email advising you to give your prospects mental shortcuts to make their decision-making easier.
One of the most valuable of such shortcuts is, as I have long trumpeted, to sell people, and not ideas.
Ideas are vague, hard to grasp, and hard to judge.
People, on the other hand, sell much better. How much better?
Well, thanks to Vernon Smith, we now have the answer:
6x better.
Like I said, this is something I have known for a long time. But I still need to remind myself of it often.
For example, I have lately been promoting my Most Valuable Email training.
I’ve given you all sorts of idea-y reasons why you might want to buy this training and learn the “Most Valuable Email trick” inside.
What I haven’t done yet is tell you maybe the most important reason.
While I have used this MVE trick heavily – more heavily than anyone I know of — I did not invent it.
In fact, I have seen some very smart and successful marketers, including Gary Bencivenga, Parris Lampropoulos, and Mark Ford reach for this trick it in non-email content.
It’s much rarer to see this trick being used in emails — outside my own — though I have spotted Daniel Throssell using this trick on occasion.
So many names.
So many people.
So many reasons to buy my Most Valuable Email training.
In case you are interested: