Jon Spoelstra

What to do when people won’t buy money at a discount

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Last year, I read a book called Ice To The Eskimos by sports marketer Jon Spoelstra. I highly recommend it, because of stories like this one:

Back in the 1990s, Spoelstra gave a talk to a bunch of basketball team owners in Spain.

Says Spoelstra, at that time, pro sports teams outside the US lacked one big thing the Americans had: marketing. The owners of such non-US teams thought that if fans wanted to come, they would come. If the fans didn’t wanna come, they wouldn’t.

Spoelstra knew better. And to make his point, he ran a little stunt during that talk to the Spanish basketball team owners.

He took out a hundred peseta bill. “Who here will give me a 10 peseta coin for this 100 peseta bill?”

The team owners murmured and looked around the room. Maybe the translator had fumbled something? Or the American was crazy?

Spoelstra repeated his offer. “Who will give me a 10 peseta coin for this 100 peseta bill?”

More murmuring. Finally one of the team owners pulled out a coin and held it up. Spolestra jumped on the coin, and gave the team owner the bill in exchange.

“Do you have another 10 peseta coin?” Spoelstra asked.

The team owner shrugged and pulled one out. Spoelstra gave him another 100 peseta bill.

They repeated the deal a few more times.

“When will you stop giving me 10 peseta coins for 100 peseta bills?” Spoelstra asked the team owner.

The team owner smirked. “Only when you run out of 100 peseta bills.”

That was Spoelstra’s point about marketing. You hire a ticket salesperson… he makes you 100 pesetas… and only keeps 10 for himself. It’s a good deal, and one you should keep making as long as you can.

“Fine fine,” I hear you saying. “Thanks for the bland insight. Do you have anything more, or are we done here?”

I do have one more thing to share with you. One year later, the organization that had hired Spoelstra to give that presentation sent him a report about the attendance figures for each team.

The team owners who still refused to hire a ticket salesperson saw the same attendance numbers as before.

The team owners who took Spoelstra’s advice and hired a ticket salesperson all had attendance increases of 50% or more.

But here’s the bit that thrilled my novelty-seeking heart:

The team owner who actually traded with Spoelstra and got a 100 peseta bill for each 10 peseta coin, didn’t end up hiring one ticket salesperson… or two… but three ticket salespeople.

I don’t know his final attendance numbers, but Spoelstra says that over the coming year, that team owner had more attendance growth and revenue growth than anyone in the room. At the end of the year, the team owner ended up sending Spoelstra a framed 100 peseta bill with an engraving that said, “I didn’t stop. Thank you.”

Maybe that “I didn’t stop” was all due to the personality of that team owner.

After all, he was active while others were passive, daring while others were hesitant, even in a controlled and safe environment of Spoelstra’s presentation. Maybe he was just a risk-taker and a leader, where others weren’t.

Maybe.

But maybe it was also due to something else. Maybe it was due to the actual physical and emotional experience that team owner had of handing over a 10 peseta coin and getting 100 pesetas in return, over and over.

That kind of real and direct experience, and the resulting neurological imprinting, even if it’s done in a joke and play context, can have wide-ranging effects.

That’s something to keep in mind if you are trying to create change in your audience, or in yourself.

And on an entirely related note, I’d like to remind you of my Most Valuable Email training.

You are likely to get benefit from this training if you simply buy it and read it. But you are likely to get 16x the value if you put it into action, however hesitatingly and jokingly at first. And same goes for your own audience.

For more info on Most Valuable Email:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Amazon ad apocalypse

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Trouble in Bejako land:

My Amazon ad campaigns, which have been buoying up sales of my new 10 Commandments book, have cratered.

The background:

Since publishing my new 10 Commandments book back in May, I have reliably been selling 15-20 copies of the book per day.

A part of how I have been doing this is by running several Amazon ad campaigns in the background.

These campaigns have been working consistently for me. Until, of course, last week, when something shifted.

My campaign ad spend was no longer being spent, or even close to it. Ad cost per sale went way up. Most importantly, fewer books started being sold, just 5-10 per day, both via ads and organically.

I asked the universe why it’s doing this to me, and the universe came back with an answer.

“Amazon has changed its ad algorithm,” the universe told me.

It seems Amazon is now favoring “auto” ad campaigns (which I only had a small discovery budget for) and punishing “exact” campaigns (which was the bulk of my ad spend, because it got better results for cheaper).

I’m not sure what my point is, except maybe the old advice from sports marketer Jon Spoelstra:

“In almost any industry, the best role model is the high tech business. They can’t sit back and stop innovating. If they did, in three to six months they would be woefully behind.”

Amazon is innovating, and I fortunately am forced to innovate alongside them.

The fact is, email lists as a marketing tool provide a certain moat.

An email list is a free way to regularly communicate with dedicated, trusting readers and past customers, many of whom are ready and even eager to buy from you rather than others.

But an email list is only so much of a moat, and lulling yourself (like I often do) into thinking that an email list is a forever source of income, while sitting back and not innovating, will lead to woe.

In any case, I am adapting my Amazon ads strategy, and maybe I will get my book sales back up.

But also I want to get back to more active promotion of my new 10 Commandments book.

My initial idea for promoting this sucker was to get on podcasts. I put that on hold because 1) Amazon ads were working reliably until now and 2) finding podcasts to guest on is a pain.

But now it’s time to innovate. So can you do me a favor?

Do you listen to a podcast — about con men, or pickup, or magic, or sales, or hypnosis, or copywriting, or negotiation, or political propaganda, or comedy, or screenwriting — that you enjoy, and you think might enjoy having me as a guest to talk about the ideas inside my new 10 Commandments book?

If you do, hit reply and let me know. You’ll be doing me a favor.

And if you haven’t yet read my new 10 Commandments book, it deals with all those fields in a coherent and even interesting way. A few headlines from Amazon reviews:

#1. “This is going into my yearly reads collection”

#2. “A new favorite”

#3. “Sophisticated strategies behind the playful tone”

#4. “Instant Classic That’s Highly Entertaining”

#5. “This One’s Staying on My Desk!

#6. “More compelling than Cialdini with sprinkles of Houdini”

#7. “Superb lessons to be aware of”

Your own copy of my new 10 Commandment book is waiting patiently for you right now. If you’d like to claim it:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Spend all your time trying to sell out games

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Yesterday I watched a movie, Local Hero, which finished around 9:17pm my time, some 32 minutes after my daily email went out.

In those 32 minutes, I had 21 sales of the offer I introduced yesterday — “give me $10, and I’ll make you a ‘beta-tester’ for my new book.”

Since I only wanted 20 such beta-testers, I closed the shopping cart, and I updated the checkout link to point to a page that said “Thanks but this offer is now sold out.”

You might think it’s not much of an accomplishment to sell out 20 spots (actually 21) at $10 each.

And true, it’s not a lot of money.

But it’s very important anyhow. Not just for my own morale, but for public perception.

And on that note, I would like to share with you a quote from sports marketer Jon Spoelstra.

Spoelstra worked with some of the losingest and least popular sports franchises out there.

In spite of the lousy sports records of these teams, Spoelstra repeatedly managed to turn the teams into cash-cows. Here’s how:

“At the Nets, we spent all of our energies in trying to sell out games. This started with the games that people most likely would want to go to — the games with the marquee players on the opposing teams. You might think it was easy. It wasn’t. If we hadn’t committed all of our resources and manpower to selling out our best games, we wouldn’t have. A funny thing happened on our way to sellouts. Our attendance picked up in the other games where we weren’t even trying.”

I was planning to promote my beta-tester offer today to make sure this offer sold out, just like Spoelstra advises.

But since the offer sold out with just one email last night, that plan’s out.

So let me remind you of my most popular program, Most Valuable Email.

I can tell you that today’s email does not use the Most Valuable Email trick, which is what this program teaches you to perform in less than an hour.

And yet, the Most Valuable Email trick in a way underlies this entire newsletter, whether I use it in a particular email or not.

I can imagine that doesn’t make much sense without knowing what the Most Valuable Trick is. In case you’d like to find out, and better yet, to profit by using this trick yourself:

​https://bejakovic.com/mve/​

$100 for your failing idea

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Yesterday, I wrote about one idea from Jon Spoelstra’s book Ice To The Eskimos.

Well, brace yourself, because today, I got… another. Says Spoelstra:

“Pay bonuses for failure”

Spoelstra believed that the best companies any business could imitate were high-tech companies, because high-tech companies have to constantly innovate.

How do you innovate?

You gotta have ideas.

How do you have ideas?

You gotta get over the notion that’s been beaten into so many of us — via previous jobs, via decades of being at the mercy of professional teachers who accomplished nothing in life except a teaching diploma, and via that smarty-pants girl named Lydia, who always raised her hand in class, and was so smug about it — that there is always a right answer and a wrong answer, and while it’s good to have the right answer, it’s catastrophic to have the wrong answer.

In other words, people are afraid of failure.

​​Of sounding and looking dumb.

Deadly afraid of it.

Not good for coming up with new ideas.

So you gotta coax them out of their hardened protective shell.

Spoelstra’s method was to actually pay people extra for failing ideas. If somebody on his team tossed out an idea that went on to be a proven failure, the tosser-outer would get a monetary prize.

This is how the Nets (the NBA team Spolestra was working with) came up with innovations of all kinds — some small, others worth millions of dollars to the franchise, all of them previously unimaginable to anyone.

I read this. And I told myself, “I should try doing the same.”

Then I told myself, “No, that would be crazy. It would never work.”

Then I told myself, “Perfect. Sounds like a great experiment to try.”

So here’s my offer to you today:

Send me an idea. If it fails, I’ll send you $100.

A few added rules to give some structure to this offer:

1. Let’s limit the scope to ideas about how I could make more money, specifically via this newsletter, or the courses and trainings I’ve created for it, or the coaching I offer on and off.

2. I will pay you $100 if I actually put your idea in practice and find it does NOT work.

​​For that to happen, your idea has to be credible enough and tempting enough that I actually want to give it a try.

​​As a negative example, “Sell meth via email” sounds vaguely criminal, and I would not want to attempt it, even if it’s to prove you wrong.

As a second negative example, ​​”Start a YouTube channel” is so broad, open-ended, and intimidating-sounding that I would not choose to tackle it, even though there might be a perfectly failing idea hiding there.

3. What do you get if I try out your idea and it turns into a smashing success? You get the pleasure of seeing your intelligence manifested in the world. Plus, I will put you on the throne of the kingdom of Bejakovia for a day, and all the happy citizens will know your name, and the great deeds you have accomplished.

So there you go.

$100 for your failing idea.

Take a bit of time. Think about what you know about my newsletter, my assets, my skills. Think about what you know about internet marketing in general.

Come up with an idea how I could do better. Send it to me. And if it fails, it pays.

Four chapters more important than new customers

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Yesterday, I was flying from Girona, Spain to Zagreb, Croatia. It was not a pleasant flight. I tried to distract myself by opening up a valuable marketing book I’ve been reading:

Ice To The Eskimos, or, How To Market A Product Nobody Wants

I’ve been at this book for a couple of weeks already. I’m a very slow reader, which means I’ve just started chapter 5.

“Finally,” I said to myself as I started reading. “Now we’re getting into the sexy stuff, getting new customers!”

But that’s a classic mistake I was making.

Sure, the chapter 5 stuff sounded sexy.

But there were 4 chapters that the author thought were more important to write about before that.

The author of this book is Jon Spoelstra. Spoelstra was a sports marketer who was brought in to boost sales at the New Jersey Nets back in the 1990s.

Here was Spoelstra’s first and most important lesson:

Back in the early 90s, the New Jersey Nets were the worst team in the NBA. They had no stars. They even had no kind of home team advantage — New Jersey residents support the New York Knicks. To top it all off, there was a legitimate curse on the franchise.

The owners brought in Spoelstra to try to turn things around.

They told him to devise a strategy to lure people from Manhattan to buy Nets tickets. After all, Manhattan is so rich and so near, and so full of people hungry for entertainment.

Spoelstra refused.

He called it his Ulysses Method.

Spoelstra plugged up the owners’ ears with wax. He lashed himself to the mast of the Nets ship, so he would not be tempted to heed the siren song that leads to certain ruin, trying to woo customers from a sexy segment of the market where he just. could. not. win.

Instead, Spoelstra focused on unsexy New Jersey. Result:

The Nets went from zero sold-out games the year before Spoelstra was hired, to 35 sold-out games a few years later.

During the same time, the Nets also managed to increase revenue from local sponsorships from $400k per year to more than $7 million per year.

How Spoelstra achieved this is clever and worth knowing, and Spoelstra’s book is worth reading.

But none of it would have mattered much if not for the basic Ulysses Method.

I’m telling you this because I needed being told this myself.

When I first read Spoelstra’s chapter about the Ulysses Method, I impatiently sped through.

“Sure of course makes sense. But not really relevant to me. I am in no danger of chasing after markets where I can’t win.”

A few days passed. With a bit of space and time, I slowly realized Spoelstra’s warning applies very directly to me, and to stuff I’m trying to do now.

So I’m sharing the Ulysses Method with you now, because maybe you can use it as well.

All right, on to my offer to you for today:

If you feel you never learned the fundamentals of copywriting, and you’ve just been winging it based on what you’ve observed others doing, then my Copy Riddles program might be the fix you’re looking for.

Copy Riddles covers the A-Z of copywriting in 20 individual rounds.

Each round covers a specific copywriting topic or technique. The topics and techniques get progressively more sophisticated and rarefied as the 20 rounds go on.

But just like with Spoelstra and his Ulysses Method, the most important stuff is right there in rounds 1 and 2.

Internalize just those two rounds, or have them internalized for you, simply by following the Copy Riddles process, and you will be ahead of 95% of the people who call themselves professional copywriters, including many who make a good living at it.

For more info on Copy Riddles:

https://bejakovic.com/cr