Are you too busy to read fiction?

Want to understand people?  How they
think?  What makes them tick?
What makes them human?

Read a novel.

In college, my English professor Dr.
Knoll was the best professor I'd ever
had by a country mile.  As a matter of
fact, he was the best teacher I've ever
had, before or since.  67 years old, a mind
sharp as a razor, a gifted communicator
who could bring profound insight to almost
any subject.  Probably the most "well read"
person I've ever met.

Dr. Knoll had a very interesting bit
of advice for prospective medical
students.  "Read lots of NOVELS," he
would say. "Don't kid yourself that
being a doctor is about technical
stuff.  A good doctor understands
PEOPLE.  Novels, fiction and literature
teach you about people.  70% of patients
problems are mental not physical,
at least indirectly.

Medical schools turn out medical
researchers.  And medical research
has nothing to do with the real
cause of most people's `medical'
problems."

If this is good advice for a doctor,
then it's a rock solid recommendation
for marketers and salespeople.  Advice
I'd ignored for a long time, by the
way, until my wife plunked a novel
down in my lap last month and said,
"Perry, you HAVE to read this book."

She finally got through to me.  She's
been reminding me that I spend too
much time working and not enough time
enjoying the good things in life.
Kind of like that line from `The Shining'
by Stephen King: ALL WORK AND NO PLAY
MAKES JACK A DULL BOY.

Just in case you can't figure out what
to read, here are three fiction titles
I've read recently.  All three of these
were books I couldn't put down once I
was into them:

Foreign Bodies by Hwee Hwee Tan – Set
in Singapore, a story of a young man
framed for a crime he didn't commit,
and his friends efforts to reverse
the circumstances.  Insightfully Asian,
totally "Generation X", and stunningly
well written by a 23 year old woman.
An angular metaphysical theme probes
GenX's search for meaning in a cynical
world.

The Street Lawyer by John Grisham – A
yuppie lawyer in Washington DC has a
near scrape with death and gets exposed
to the hidden reality of homeless people,
which jolts him into quitting his job and
fighting for an invisible class of people
that gets pushed and shoved by the
oblivious middle and upper classes.
This book draws together two REAL worlds
that you may never otherwise experience:
big city, big time law firms (which
Grisham writes about with great skill) and
the hidden world of soup kitchens and
homeless shelters.

Dreamcatcher by Stephen King – The
undisputed ruler of the horror genre
and one of the finest novelists of our
time, Stephen King weaves a complex
tapestry of masterful character development,
colorful and cutting dialogue, multiple
subplots, gripping suspense and mind
bending abstraction.  This book is
about the invasion of an alien in
the mind of the book's hero, and
his deadly race to save humanity
from a lethal virus.

(This book was a birthday gift from
my wife, who wrote inside the cover,
"Because you need more pleasure in
your life.")

I've read all of these books inside
a span of thirty days.  Fiction reads
much faster than non-fiction.  But for
those of you who think it's a waste of
time, here's something to consider.

All of these books, particularly
Dreamcatcher and Foreign Bodies,
develop multiple three dimensional,
lifelike characters with great
skill.  The conversations are so
realistic, the description so
superb, that you are irresistibly
drawn into the story.  You experience
compelling empathy with the characters
in the story.

I dare say that very few copywriters
and advertising people –
even the superstars that earn $25,000
per sales letter – can actually
write as well as the top novelists.
But what's good about their copywriting
is the same stuff that's good about a
novel – it has so many emotional triggers,
so much empathy and so much humanity
that the reader gets absorbed in the story.

And yes, good advertising copy always tells
a story.

Novels will stimulate your imagination
like nothing else, and they WILL sharpen
your writing.  NOT a waste of time.  And
can I tell you something else I've
discovered?   Similar to my "pink
Cadillac theory of killer sales people,"
(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smartmarketing/message/19 )
I've found that most good sales people and
marketers are avid readers too.

***

4 years ago this month, I was desperately
struggling with a number of difficult factors –
wrong product, wrong message, wrong
understanding of `sales psychology' –
the commission checks were actually
declining, and I was going deeper in
debt.  I went to "Success 97" in Peoria,
Illinois, and purchased Dan Kennedy's
Magnetic Marketing Kit.  Within a year's
time, it literally turned my sales
career around.

This week I have a very special offer
to make to my subscribers: I got my
hands on a very small number of Dan
Kennedy Magnetic Marketing Kits –
complete with the outstanding Midas
Touch tapes and a six month Kennedy
Inner Circle membership with a series
of genuinely powerful bonuses.

If you've been thinking about increasing
your sales effectiveness with smart
marketing, it's time to stop procrastinating.
Click on www.usedtapes.com/mm to find
out all about it.  And please remember:
once these are gone, they're gone!

Sincerely,

Perry

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Smart Marketing Newsletter  (C)2001 Fulcrum

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I recently exchanged a series of emails with a newsletter member,
Nadeem.  He owns a Dan Kennedy Magnetic Marketing Kit, and is working
to apply the ideas in the kit to a business that serves industrial
equipment and software customers.

This conversation is important because it shows the flexibility that
is necessary in marketing to different kinds of people.

You can't market to this crowd the same way you market to, say,
a business opportunity crowd!

In reference to my own marketing to a similar market, I wrote:

"We measure our marketing results as Dan Kennedy suggests and we try
different things.  It works!  The only thing I should mention is that
you have to recognize the difference between the underlying
principles of good marketing (understanding your audience, talking to
them the way they talk to each other, knowing their aches and pains)
vs. the STYLE of marketing - I do not really use Dan Kennedy's style,
I use his ideas in a very conservative style which matches my
customers.  They are industrial equipment buyers and software /
hardware developers."

Nadeem replied:

"Can you share specific marketing tips/techniques that have worked for
you and as to how you deal with your customers since we are also
marketing (selling) equipments and software?"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Would you like to get a $50,000 advance for a manuscript that only took you two
weeks to write?  Would you like to receive royalty checks for the rest of your
life?  Writing book is a LOT easier than it seems.  We'll show you how and tell
you the secrets on getting an agent and a huge publishing contract.

http://www.writeabooknow.com/welcome/write113now and learn all about it!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I think this is a good time to address this question.  It's VERY
important.

To market successfully, you MUST understand what your prospects worry
about, what excites them, what drives them, what they love and what
they hate.

Dan Kennedy writes to an entrepreneurial audience, and one of the
things that his *chosen* (note: not arbitary) audience has in common
is that most of them are entrepreneurs who believe that it's possible
to achieve extraordinary results in their business.

Many own small or part time businesses, or have sales careers, and
want to grow those businesses dramatically.  Dan always keys in on their
imagination and aspirations.  He knows they're driven by optimism.  And he
pushes those "buttons" with skill in his sales letters.

But that may not be what drives your audience.  If it's an industrial
crowd, or a button-down corporate crowd, the motivations are much
different.  Yes, there may be some aspirations, but they are a minor
part of what you're selling.

With this bunch, you cannot assume wild-eyed optimism at all.  More than likely,
you're selling against RISK.  You'll usually be most
successful if you can persuade them that the risk is LOW.  And
talking about the things that are scary - like the ammonia leak in
their chemical plant going undetected for several hours - or losing ten thousand
barrels of oil production because a computer hard drive crashed - or putting
themselves at risk for a $10 million lawsuit - those are the things
that get their attention.  A 3 month delay in their expensive project - they
worry a lot about things like that.

If you're talking to a guy about $10 million lawsuits or ammonia
leaks, or 3 month project delays, you can't afford to sound like a
used car salesman.  You have to be serious, you have to slow down and
talk to him like he talks to himself and his co-workers, and you have
to talk about your risk alternatives that are PROVABLY better.  Then
he will get excited.  And yes, those kinds of people CAN get excited
and emotional.  Who wouldn't, with risk like that?

And people in those situations will spend enormous amounts of their
company's money if you have sufficiently proven that your solution is
less risky.

When you talk to them, you will not talk to them the way Dan Kennedy
talks to people about going to a marketing seminar.  You'll talk to
them with a neutral to slightly negative posture, emphasizing how
important it is for you to lower their exposure to disaster, delays
or expensive problems.

Bottom line is: Are you selling opportunity or risk management?
Maybe both, but you need to be sure.  If you're selling opportunity, be SURE to
talk about risks too - because they most certainly exist.  If your main message
is about risk, be sure to mention: "Oh, by the way, let me tell you about Roger
who minimized these risks - he conclusively proved the superiority of his
systems and got three new customers, who are worth over $1 million per year in
additional sales..."

Most importantly, the underlying PRINCIPLE of this is:

Enter the conversation that is going on inside your customer's head, not the
conversation you'd LIKE to go on in their head.  Talk like they do, think like
they do, and live in their shoes.

Please email me about your projects and puzzles: newsletter@.... 
Maybe I'll tackle YOUR challenge in the next issue.

Yours,

Perry

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

FREE Report, "How to Write A Book On Anything in 14 Days or Less!
GUARANTEED! Fiction or Non, get an agent in 36 hours, blueprint your
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best-selling plot for 75 cents, create a non-stop client magnet,
create demand for your book without ever leaving home, get an editor
FREE, and much more!

http://www.writeabooknow.com/welcome/write113now
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

More items from The Cluetrain Manifesto...

7.  Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.

8.  In both internetworked markets and among intranetworked
employees, people are speaking to each other in a powerful new way.

9. These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms
of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.

10. As a result, markets are getting smarter, more informed, more
organized. Participation in a networked market changes people
fundamentally.

11. People in networked markets have figured out that they get
far better information and support from one another than from
vendors. So much for corporate rhetoric about adding value to
commoditized products.

12. There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than
companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good
or bad, they tell everyone.

The conversations going on out there on the Internet –
newsgroups, chat rooms, discussion lists – are not just a random chaotic
conversation.  Because of the highly specific topics that these
groups discuss, the meandering discussions are very focused, and the
participants are usually serious about the subject.

The best example of organized Internet conversation to date is the
Linux Operating System.  Linux has grown to the point of rivaling
Microsoft Windows on many fronts, and is without doubt Enemy Number
One for Microsoft.

Linux is free and has grown from a pet project nine years ago to
being a major force in the marketplace purely by means of Internet
conversation – thousands of people adding pieces and software,
which are then sifted and perfected by thousands of others.

The result is extraordinarily reliable, flexible and powerful
software and tools which serious techies swear by - and which 34% of
all websites run on, no joke.

One of the things you need to understand about Linux is that it's
partly driven by hatred of Microsoft.  Hatred of ANYTHING or ANYONE
can define a market.  Never forget that!

Unlike Microsoft Corporation, Linux subverts hierarchy, because
it's a peer to peer community effort.  There is no "boss."  It is
an Inter-networked community, driven by knowledge exchange and people
participate because they WANT to.  Respect comes from their talent
and ability to articulate their views, not from their titles.

They get better support from each other than by calling tech support
and being put on hold: they just send an email out to a newsgroup
describing their problem and an answer may come back within an hour.
Or perhaps they just do a search on that question to find an answer
that's already archived on some website.

And it's true, there are no secrets – it's all "open
source" which means that if you modify a Linux program, you must submit the
modifications back to the community – because someone else might
want to do the same thing you just did.  No sense in re-inventing the
wheel.

So the chaos of conversation (which is admittedly a problem – the
conversation DOES meander quite a bit!) is compensated for by the
fact that everyone is looking to build on what already exists.

A few thousand people putting a little bit of effort into it can
snowball into a powerful result, even if 90% of the discussion is
banter and debate about how to do things this way or that way.

Linux itself is proof that the Cluetrain manifesto is right on the
money. As a matter of fact, IBM has committed $100 million to Linux
software development for 2001; it's a major part of their
business strategy.

So how does this apply to marketing???

First, most people reading my e-zine are small business owners and
entrepreneurs.  Many work from home.  There's huge power in all
of us talking to each other and sharing ideas and resources.  With the
Internet, it's possible.

There's power in this e-zine, because you can send me an email
with a question or comment, and it shows up in the next newsletter.  You can
steer the content.  And many times I write sales letters or come up
with ideas and bounce them off a newsgroup before I implement them.

Second, you must take advantage of the focused nature of topics and
groups on the Internet.  Unless you're a multi-billion dollar
corporation, the days of being "all things to all people" in
ANY marketplace are over.  It might even be over if you ARE a huge
company.

The more focused you are, the more fluidly you can join the
conversation, the more you can accomplish with a small amount of
effort.

Third, you MUST respect the intelligence of the community and the
conversation.  Increasingly, there's no alternative to developing
peer-to-peer respect in your community or industry, by participating
in those discussions.

If you burn people, you're going to get flamed, and the emails
may reside for years on some server – and people type in your name or
company name and the ugly stuff turns up instantly.

What do YOU think?  I want to hear from you.  Email me:
newsletter@... and let's keep the conversation rolling.

Perry S. Marshall

Would you like to get a $50,000 advance for a manuscript that only took you two
weeks to write?  Would you like to receive royalty checks for the rest of your
life?  Writing book is a LOT easier than it seems.  We'll show you how and tell
you the secrets on getting an agent and a huge publishing contract.

http://www.writeabooknow.com/welcome/write113now and learn all about
it!

Cluetrain manifesto, Part 2

***

A few weeks ago I started a series on the Cluetrain Manifesto
(www.cluetrain.com) which articulates some of the most dramatic
cultural and commercial changes that Internet culture represents.

After sending it out, I got this interesting feedback from author
Steve Manning:

"I've noticed this in my own marketing. It's very difficult to go
for the one-step sale anymore. About 90% of the sales I make come
after two or more contacts with the prospect. You really must build
this into your sales strategy. It's not that the prospect needs more
convincing about your product, they need more convincing about you,
the seller. The level of cynicism out there is really growing...
particularly on the internet.

"A sales coach I know states constantly that what we really sell
is trust. I would go one step further and state that what the
customer really wants to buy, is trust. That's the element that
appears when the sales letter goes from sales, to conversation.
You've still got to sell, don't misunderstand, but you've got to get
that element of trust before the sale occurs. Almost by definition,
trust evolves over time. Hence the need for multiple follow ups.

"And that's not just opinion. I have about 13 sequential email
follow ups and when I changed each to more blatantly garner trust
rather than sales, sales went up.

"A master of this sort of 'trust writing' is Jay Abraham. You
always feel like he has only your best interests at heart when you
read his sales material. His book (I've forgotten the title) clearly
states that we've got to be completely focused on the best interests
of the customer. Once we can get over our own cynicism about this
concept ("I'll pretend to be customer focused until they buy"), we
can start harvesting the real rewards.

"I know it's a cliche, but honestly, it works. The most selfish
thing you can do is be completely selfless. Try to establish a
relationship with customer prospects as well as customers. Develop
the trust your customer wants and can't find with most companies,
government officials, friends or other suppliers.

Just a thought,

Steve Manning"



Coincidentally, Steve's course on speed writing / speed
publishing has become a large part of my own writing endeavors,
upping my productivity and sharpening my focus.  I encourage you to
click on the link

http://www.writeabooknow.com/welcome/write113now

to find out what it can do for you.  Writing a book is a fantastic
way to separate yourself from "me too" competition.

I'm going to stop right now.  Steve said enough already; I don't need
to even add anything.

I'll keep rolling with more items from the Cluetrain Manifesto next
time.

Sincerely,

Perry S. Marshall

Hey Folks,

This one's a beauty.

Before you read further, take a good look
at the picture of a very unusual classified ad at

http://www.usedtapes.com/ezine/classified.htm,

then read on.

*************

1) Great headline.  This is GUARANTEED to get
attention.  Either this guy hired a copywriter,
or my guess, he IS sharp enough to pull this
off himself.

2) He gives indication of his 'incident free'
behavior during his most recent 'assignment'

3) He spent a decent amount of money placing
this ad - he didn't skimp on budget, even though
he may be totally broke.  He's probably the only
job applicant (as opposed to employer) who placed
this large of an ad in that day's paper.

4) Vividly illustrates his ability to manage
manufacturing, multiple forms of transportation,
and a staff of over 100 people.

5) Note the remarkable employees to revenue ratio.

6) Takes responsibility, even when it costs
dearly.

7) He illustrates his risk management expertise.

8) He's a contributor to his local communities and
schoools.  Sounds like an appealing guy.

9) He's Multi-lingual.

10) A very impressive personal reference is alluded
to.

Actually, not only is this a great example of a
classified ad, it's a great example of a killer resume.

I bet this cat got a ton of responses!

Any job hunter with impressive qualifications
should consider using this method.

***********************************************

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GUARANTEED! Fiction or Non, get an agent in 36 hours, blueprint your
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FREE, and much more!

http://www.writeabooknow.com/welcome/write113now
***********************************************

Comments?  Email newsletter@...

Talk to you soon!

Sincerely,

Perry

In this issue of SmartMarketing:

The Cluetrain Manifesto
How to write a book in 14 days or less
Reader feedback

*********************

Let's talk about a very important new book / website which
recognizes some very important aspects of Internet culture, and how
the online world has changed fundamental perceptions of sales and
marketing.

How important is this?  Last week I spent three days at the largest
industrial trade show in North America, and much of my time was spent
with magazine editors.

I mentioned this book to several of them, and each of them was
familiar with it, generally liked it, and reacted with a bit of
surprise that me, a vendor, actually "gets it."

If you are in a particular industry, and editors can see that you
truly understand what editors like, what an editor's life is
like, and what their readers are looking for, they'll love you.

Everyone is trying to get editors to run stories on their neat new
products and give them lots of free PR, but they're not giving
editors anything that they actually want.

Editors don't want superlatives and hype and techno-latin.  They
want news.  They want stories.  They want things that will inspire
ideas in their readers.  And they have to pull together enough good
material to crank out a good publication before the deadline.  They
like people who want to help them do that.

Anyway, the Cluetrain Manifesto is fundamentally about the worldwide
conversations that the Internet has made possible – and the
impossibility of any company, government or organization being able
to control the flow of information today.

It's about the fact that people's BS Detectors have never
been more sensitive, and if people want the truth, they'll go
online and engage in a conversation about YOUR product or service.  If
you're lousy, they'll find out about it – and they'll tell
everyone else.  And there won't be a dang thing you can do about it.

Smart marketers in this decade will stop trying to pummel their
audiences with hype and monotone corporate marketing happy-talk and
instead engage in the online conversation about what people want, the
problems they want to solve, what they love, and what they hate.  It
starts with really, really listening to people, and then being honest
about your interest in solving their problems, and speaking with them
in a REAL human voice.

*************************

There are 95 `theses' in "The Cluetrain Manifesto."

Let's start with six:
1. Markets are conversations.

2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.

3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are
conducted in a human voice.

4. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives,
dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically
open, natural, uncontrived.

5. People recognize each other as such from the sound of this
voice.

6. The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings
that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.

I don't agree with all 95, but these first six are right on the
money.  Most marketing, PR and advertising doesn't sound anything
like a real conversation at all.

Press releases are full of quotes that nobody ever actually said, nor
anybody would have said.  Most advertisements sound like chest-
beating and puffery.  Sales letters often sound like a high speed
presentation at a state fair.  They sound that way because most
marketers think "that's how professional marketers are SUPPOSED to
sound."

Well, OK, if you just want to sound like everybody else, then go
ahead and sound that way.  But marketing is tremendously more
effective when it sounds like a unique, two-way human conversation
– the conversation that your customers are already having inside
their own heads.

Talking to them empathetically about their likes, dislikes, aches,
pains and desires.  This is much more effective than standing on top
of a building with your 5000 watt megaphone and bellowing your
bragadocious message for five blocks in every direction.  Those
messages have no empathy.  The method itself suggests that you think
everyone in earshot is stupid.  And they just don't work very
well.

The best place to observe what I'm talking about here is on email
newsgroups, where people are discussing products, services, politics,
religion, or whatever.  They ain't writing ads.  They're just
talking with each other.  There is agreement, and there is
disagreement, but one thing's for sure: People are believable.

Here's the point: The best way to be believable is to join that
conversation.  Make sure what you sell is a genuine answer to the
questions people are asking, and see to it that what you say is a
continuation of that conversation.

Do you want to buy the book?  No problem, but to be honest, it's
a bit repetitive.  You can get much of the good stuff just by reading
the 95 theses and first chapter, which you can download from the
Cluetrain website, at www.cluetrain.com.

Feel free to send me an email and tell me what you think:
newsletter@....

***************************

"How to write a book in 14 days or less"

Did you know that the faster you write, the more "human" your
message will naturally sound?

Do you know that the more you write – and especially if you write
articles or books – the more likely it is that clients will view
you as an expert?  Getting published puts you at a very significant
advantage over your competitors.  I talked about this in a previous
issue, called "Positioning Power."  The link below tells you
how publishing helped me:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smartmarketing/message/22

How can you get published?  What if you don't even consider
yourself a `writer' at all?  To answer this question, I would
like to introduce you to Steve Manning, whom I met 2 years ago at an
exclusive marketing seminar in Phoenix.

Not surprisingly, he and I were the first people to show up (7AM on a
Saturday morning) to get good seats.

Steve has a website about (literally, NO JOKE) "how to write a
book in 14 days or less."

I do a ton of writing these days, and I use Steve's concepts to
do it.  I'd like you to know about it too.  Click on
http://www.writeabooknow.com/welcome/write113now and get on the fast
track to getting publicity, notoriety and credibility in your field.

****************************

Here's some Reader Feedback:

Roy sent me an email:

"You have permission to place my email name on your "Contrarian
MLM" e-zine list.

Here's why:

Throughout my time as an Amway distributor and Quixtar IBO, some of
the ideas I came up with on how to run the business aspect of the
business and how to merchandise the business were anywhere from 3
months to TWO YEARS ahead of where the business eventually went.

I was "advised" not to do that (whatever "that" was) because it was
not easily duplicated.  It didn't sour me on the products or the
compensation, but some folks STILL do not understand the difference
between a business plan...and a marketing plan.  I'm not going to
muck with the marketing plan...but I believe it is high time to put a
business plan into effect.

Sign me up, boss.

Cordially,

Roy

Folks like Roy are on the rise.  One of the consequences of the
Internet is that anybody in a "commodity" business, that
anyone can get into, is in trouble.  You MUST differentiate
yourself.  And that means NOT following the herd.

This might sound like heresy, but I think most of the stuff they
teach you in MLM about `duplication' is really just about
control.

In marketing, duplicating everyone else is just sinful.  Yes, brand
new MLM people need to get their bearings before going on wild
crusades, but if you've tried it "their way" and it ain't working,
it's high time to make some changes.  Instead of duplicating physical
activity like an android, duplicate the concept of individualizing
your business plan.  Think for yourself and teach
other people to do the same.

Remember, if you keep doing what you've always done, you'll
keep getting what you've always got.  It's just as true in
MLM as it is everywhere else.

Also: The Cluetrain Manifesto applies just as much to MLM as anything
else.  Most of the folks that are trying to rigorously control their
groups are doing so out of fear and panic, because the Internet is
ravaging their businesses.  Yes, network marketing tapes and seminars
are far more "human" than most other marketing; however, the
excessive positivity still triggers people's BS detectors - and when
they get on the Internet, the conversation there is sometimes far
more believable.

Note: I'm not starting a separate e-zine for MLM, but I certainly
got enough positive feedback that I'm going to include some items
about it from time to time.  So stay tuned.


Comments, anyone?  I encourage any and all of you to write me with
your comments and adventures.  Email newsletter@....

Sincerely,

Perry S. Marshall

The SMART MARKETING e-zine
February 24, 2001
(C) 2001 Fulcrum

Last time I told you about my 'epiphany in communist China' -
the startling realization that propaganda is propaganda;
people have BS detectors in communist countries, and they
have BS detectors when they read your advertising.

You've got to make sure your ads and press releases aren't
just hopelessly optimistic happytalk.  They have to be believable,
and they have to be true.

While in China (btw, I was in a remote southern province,
not a big industrialized city like Beijing or Shanghai),
one of the most remarkable things was how much western culture
is absorbed by the Chinese.  Just as we import shoes and
electronics from China, they import music, entertainment
and culture from us.  It's truly remarkable.

That's what this e-zine is about, starting below.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

First, a few announcements:

1) www.usedtapes.com has been totally rebuilt and
automated.  Classified ads are FREE, and
I hope you'll post and ad to buy or sell whatever
you like.  Since I literally "started over" with
the site, the listings are a bit sparse right now.
I'd appreciate the favor, and you'll be surprised -
people WILL contact you, even for obscure items.

Looking for something unusual or rare?  Got something
to sell?  The ads are free.  See www.usedtapes.com

2) A couple of issues ago, I offered information on
Paul Hartunian's publicity course.  I got quite a
few requests, including one Quixtar rep who uses
publicity techniques to educate the public on water
quality and sell water treatment systems -- which
is a fantastic, and very unusual tactic for MLM guys.

What a tremendous edge this gives him over all the
other masses of folks who restrict their activities
to doing only what they're taught by their upline!

Yes, you heard me right.  You SHOULD innovate, especially
in MLM, because let's face it: In network marketing
the odds are heavily stacked against you - no matter
how you slice it.  You NEED to color outside the lines
and create 'unfair advantages' for yourself and for the
people in your organization.

If you guys want to go into this subject in greater
detail, email me: newsletter@... and if there's
enough response, I'll dedicate an e-zine to the subject
of "contrarian MLM."

Well Anyway, I had a problem with an email server and LOST
all the requests for the publicity info!

Can you re-send your request?

If you want info on some seriously good publicity
tactics that ANYONE in ANY ORGANIZATION can use
to re-invent what they do into NEWS that newspapers,
magazines and radio stations will talk about, then email
me: newsletter@....

3)  Check out the whole asia trip and my China diary
at http://www.usedtapes.com/china

4)  Do you like this newsletter?  Forward it to a
friend.

5)  Are there other topics you'd like to discuss?  Email
me, newsletter@...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

EAST MEETS WEST: What the East and the West buy from
each other

The fascinating blend of Chinese culture and western influence -- and
what each culture accepts from the other

One of the most fascinating aspects of traveling abroad as an
American is to see first hand the influence of American culture in
those places.

My first overseas trip was Germany 3 years ago, where I turned on the
TV and saw Danny DeVito overdubbed with a tepid, completely
mismatched voice.  In Brazil, half the content on TV and movies was
American programming in English with Portuguese subtitles.

These were moderately surprising to me, mostly because I just hadn't
thought about it before.  But it certainly is no stretch to expect a
great deal of cross-cultural influence between North America and
Europe and South America.

But Asia is completely on the other side of the world.  And whereas
huge portions of North and South American culture come from Europe,
and much of Europe speaks fluent English and the same alphabet, the
east is a different animal.  China is home to the oldest culture on
earth, so I was not prepared for the pervasive westernization of
Chinese culture, even in a rural farm community.  Western influence
is visible everywhere in China.

What the West imports from the East:
Electronics
Shoes, fabrics, clothing
Martial Arts
Chinese food
Hard working university students
Eastern religion
Karaoke

What the East imports from the West:
Software, Music and Hollywood (mostly pirated)
Pop stars (ie Celene Dion and Lionel Ritchie)
Democratic ideology
CNN
Western fashions / styles
Education
Cigarettes

What's so interesting is what passes between the two cultures with
little resistance.  I think the key to understanding why is in how
things are packaged.

In China, people buy bottled water because tap water makes you sick.

In the states, tap water won't make you sick.  So why do people pay
money for bottled water anyway?

It's the packaging.  if it's packaged the same way as all the other
$1 soft drinks, it must be worth $1.  It becomes just another soft
drink choice.

I think American culture sells in China because it's attractively
packaged.

Even in a family and community oriented culture, individualism has
strong appeal.  50 years ago chinese citizens wore government issue
Mao uniforms; Saturday night in Shigo, at a gathering of locals in a
tiny rural farm community, two people there sported Nike jackets.

The rythms of western pop, the rebellion of rock & roll, and the
romance of the silver screen all appeal to fundamental human desires,
especially when packaged in cellophane and presented as a fantasy
which may actually exist in that faraway land, the United States.

Now I'm going to criticize some aspects of both cultures - how each
is vulnerable to the others' ills.  I promise to be equally candid
with both sides.  (If anyone is offended by this, you're too
sensitive!)

First, it's difficult for Asians watching American movies that
Hollywood is, in reality, a battlefield of unmitigated greed and the
carcases of failed relationships.  While movies portray stories of
happily-ever-after, the same actors and actresses are notorious for
their inability to find satisfying love, as the tabloids illustrate
every day.  Hollywood will do nothing to preserve the loyal bonds of
the Asian family, nor will it bring them happiness.

Similarly, during the last 20 years, America has been remarkably open
to the ingress of eastern religion.  Americans cynically doubt the
historicity and sincerity of its own religious belief systems, and
eagerly point out evils which have been perpetrated "in the name of
God."  Conversely, many westerners, without question, rational
analysis, or criticism, accept eastern mysticism.

Here's an example:  A few years ago, Dr. Deepak Chopra, the well
known author and speaker, was featured by PBS public television
during their fund raising drive, and anyone who donated $150 or more
received complimentary Deepak Chopra tapes from PBS.

Categorically, Mr. Chopra is an Eastern Mysticism Televangelist who
emphasizes health, wealth, and personal fulfillment.

Had a WESTERN televangelist - i.e. Jim & Tammy Bakker, Robert
Schuller or Jimmy Swaggart been featured, they would have been
laughed off the show, and PBS would have received truckloads of hate
mail and irate phone calls.  Chopra was well received.

Why?

Is the east healthier, wealthier or more personally fulfilled than
the West?  Did Mr. Chopra demonstrate that his teachings are more
logical, more provable, or more validated by modern medicine?

I doubt it.  In fact, to be frank, some of the teachings of Hinduism
are directly attributable to the hundreds of millions
of "untouchables," who are sentenced to a lifetime of poverty and
disease under India's caste system.

The PBS audience accepted Mr. Chopra just as readily as the Chinese
make pirated copies of American films.

So how does Mr. Chopra package his health, wealth, and personal
fulfillment with eastern religion?  How does he make it acceptable to
Americans?

First, remember that all Americans have been exposed to western
religion and televangelists.  Even if they have never investigated it
in any depth, they at least know what it is.

Eastern religion is new.  It's half a world away.  It's just as
exotic as a rural farm country in Yunnan province, China is to me.
By its very nature, it defies normal western analysis, at least on
the surface.   And for the person who has tried everything in pursuit
of health, wealth and personal fulfillment, it offers a refreshing
alternative.  Mysticism DOES sell in an analytical world.

Finally, Chopra does not package himself as a "Televangelist," even
though that is essentially what he is.  He packages himself as a
doctor, a motivational and inspirational speaker, as an advocate of
inner peace and alternative medicine.

Similarly, while Americans have been slowly banishing cigarette
smoking from public life, smoking is in full force in China,
population 1.2 billion.  Nearly every Chinese man I met was a
smoker , and a s a matter of fact, smoking is just as "in" in China
as it is "out" in America.  It is rare to sit down for a conversation
or meal and not be offered a cigarette.

How are cigarettes packaged?  I will defer to Dr. Knoll, the best
professor I ever had in college, for the answer to this question.  He
stood in front of a room of 100 university freshmen and held up a
Marlboro ad in a magazine.

"What is this ad selling?" he asked the class.

"Cigarettes," one student replied.

"No.  That's not what they're selling."

"What is this ad selling?" he repeated.

Silence.

"This ad is not selling cigarettes," Dr. Knoll explained.  "This ad
is selling the wild west."

And of course it was true.  It was selling adventure, manhood,
independence and blazing sunsets.  And what you got was an over
priced, addictive cancer stick.

Packaging is everything.

While I was in Hong Kong, I was invited to lunch by three ladies from
Kowloon City - Kwan, Bobo and Yanica - and subsequently invited to
visit their church.

The service was in Cantonese, including the hymns - which were
familiar American hymns but with Chinese words.  In this case,
packaging is working against the culture, not with it - the church
was established with not only a new belief system, but a new music
and culture as well.

In my humble opinion, Christianity is counter-cultural enough without
the added burden of changing neutral elements within the culture at
the same time.

If I were starting a church in a foreign culture, I would find as
many elements within that culture that I could harmonize with.  If I
did not directly borrow existing melodies, I would at least draw from
familiar chord structures and cadences.  Changing the core of
someone's belief system is remarkably difficult, and any help you can
get from the existing structure is welcome.

Whatever it is that you sell, you need to identify the elements which
harmonize with the culture of your audience, the elements which work
against it, and those which are neutral - and which can be brought to
your advantage with sufficient care.


Read the whole Asia story at http://www.usedtapes.com/asia

Best,

Perry

I just returned from a week in China. I had never been to a communist
country before. One typically associates the word "communist" with
gloomy, despairing scenes in the former Soviet Union or East Germany -
  people standing in long lines holding ration cards, and workers
labouring under cruel, despotic tyranny.

China is, in fact, a beautiful place, and I certainly did not leave
with that dreary impression. Everyone was very polite and hospitable.
The scenery was exotic, and the food was delightful. It was an
unforgettable experience, and I highly recommend China as a place to
visit.

But make no mistake: China is not a democracy. There are "official
views" on certain things, which shall be held by everyone.

Tiananmen Square? Students and soldiers departed quietly after a
peaceful confrontation.

Chairman Mao? A hero of his countrymen.

The Cultural Revolution? The whole unfortunate mess was the idea of
Chairman Mao's wife.  And fortunately, she was punished for this.

Religious views? Best not to discuss such things.

The five protesters in Beijing who ignited themselves with gasoline
during 2001 Chinese New Year? They were brainwashed by a cult who
encourages mass suicide.

Then I picked up the English newspaper, The China Daily. Some random
headlines included: "Mutual Contact Thrives" - the President of China
meets a North Korean official and is delighted to see
the "substantial economic development, national reunification and
progressive foreign affairs." No mention is made of the starving
North Koreans. "Bodies of 58 suffocated stowaways return home" - an
unfortunate story of what might happen if Chinese citizens try to
escape to England.

As the Chinese say, "In The China Daily, you can at least be certain
that the date on the paper is correct."

Anyway, this was my epiphany. I suddenly realized: THIS PROPAGANDA
NEWSPAPER READS EXACTLY LIKE A TYPICAL PILE OF PRESS RELEASES FROM
AMERICAN CORPORATIONS.  And people take both just about as seriously.

In America, if you wonder why the press is so cynical, it's simply
because they know that none of their information sources are
trustworthy.

On the long flight, I'd been reading two things that added
perspective to this epiphany. The first was a 70-page article in
Wired Magazine called, "The Truth, The Whole Truth, and Nothing But
The Truth." It is an insider's report on the Microsoft vs. DOJ trial,
including Microsoft's threats to stop selling Windows to PC vendors
who dared to install Netscape instead of Internet Explorer, and
Microsoft's arrogance and doublespeak in court.

I was also reading a new book called "The Cluetrain Manifesto," which
describes how the Internet is decentralizing business and making
corporate propaganda ever less effective, as people on newsgroups and
email openly discuss the naked truth about problem solving, products,
and politics. The name of the game in a communist government is
information control, yet it is no different in a corporation.

Think about it: At a large company, is it OK to talk about religion?
Is it OK to voice radical political views?  Is it OK to send emails
that say what you REALLY think about the company's new product line
or CEO?

Of course not.  There may be unpleasant consequences for such
things.  So if you ever wanted to know what it's like to live in a
communist country, you may already be working for one - except only 8
hours a day.  Extend it to 24 hours a day and you've got the picture.

"The Cluetrain Manifesto" is a fascinating book, because it clarifies
what all of us intuitively know to be true: Email and the Internet
are, above all, about real human beings having real conversations
with each other.  No company or government can truly prevent this
from happening (although email is monitored in China, and you do have
to watch what you send and receive).  Information is truly "out of
the bag" permanently.

Because people can talk to each other freely on the Internet --
because they can go check out conversations about products and
services -- they have more sources of information than just
the "party line."  And they have little trust for what the company
itself has to say.

An absolutely perfect example of this is the camera I bought before
going to China.  I needed a very small camera, easy to use, that took
good pictures.  I didn't even bother visiting camera manufacturer
websites.  I looked at a few product review sites and looked at
comments from customers who actually owned them.  Wound up with a
Canon Sure Shot Classic 120, and it was perfect for me.

And guess what... even though we've never met, you probably trust me
more than you trust Canon, and if I'd told you the thing was a piece
of junk in my newsletter today, you probably wouldn't listen to
anything else Canon tried to tell you about it.

I'm a real human being telling you a real story about a real
experience.  Much more believable than anyone's brochure or corporate
website.

The implications for marketers are huge.  Please think about this:
Five or six years ago, companies could actually control information.
Now they can't.  If people out there are mad or dissatisfied with a
company, the rest of the world is going to find out about it.  The
problems will be discussed in the conversation that's going on out
there, and curious consumers can effortlessly eavesdrop on the
conversation.  There is very little companies can do to prevent it.

An unfortunate example of this is Amway/Quixtar, the MLM giant.
During the last 10-15 years, the company has allowed some problems to
grow which until not so long ago were very well-kept secrets.  Now
these problems are blasted out over dozens of Anti-Amway websites,
and what they have is one of the worst publicity problems I've ever
seen on the Internet.

Unfortunately for them, the "conversations" posted on these websites
are much more persuasive than what John Q. Distributor might tell you
when he talks to you about the business, so if a prospective
associate finds some of these stories on the web, it pretty much
kills any chance of signing him up -- even if the guy who's trying to
recruit him up is the greatest, most supportive, honest and caring
sponsor in the world.

You know who this hurts the most?  It hurts John Q. Distributor, the
new guy going out to build his new business.  This is very
unfortunate.

This may offend some readers, but I'm going to be frank: Rather than
fixing the problems, Quixtar / Amway is trying to stop the
conversations -- heck, they're even harassing ME.

That's right, they keep sending me cease and desist letters about
www.usedtapes.com because I have lots of people selling "Quixtar
Tapes."  They don't like the fact that people can "go around the
system" and buy tapes from someone who quit the business six months
ago.  They're even shutting down Ebay auctions.

I can tell you that this is not going to work.  As a matter of fact,
if I ever DID decide to wage a publicity war with them, they could
only lose.  Don't you think all those anti-Amway websites would love
to get ahold of this?  How about 2000 newspapers that I could fax a
press release to in a matter of hours?  Do you think they would think
that was an interesting story?  Some of them most certainly would.

Believe me, I'd rather not wage such a publicity battle - it would
harm MY www.usedtapes.com customers who are distributors who are
buying Quixtar tapes.  It would get me in a pi--ing match with a $5
billion company.  But it also would make me and my site famous -- it
would literally be a fast track to national media exposure for my
website.

It would cost them a lot of money and grief.  It would hurt a lot of
John Q. Distributors who are out there trying to build a business.

In any case, you can see that it's all about the power of real
conversation.  And the empowerment of ordinary people through the
Internet.  The little guy has a voice now.  Don't screw him, or it
will come back to haunt you.

I gave you two examples of this - one positive (my camera), one
negative (Quixtar's publicity problem).

You need to be very mindful of this as a marketer.  You can't afford
to shaft people if you're trying to run a long-term business.

In the next installment I'll go into more detail about the Cluetrain
Manifesto.

Meanwhile, check out my BRAND NEW www.usedtapes.com site - totally
rebuilt and automated now, with unlimited FREE classified ads for
buying and selling.  You looking for something?  Tell the world.  You
got something to sell?  Sell it for free.  (No spammers, please.)

Sincerely,

Perry S. Marshall

Comments?  email me: newsletter@...

P.S. You can read all about my fascinating trip to Asia, complete
with pictures I took with my new camera -- Taiwan, Hong Kong, and
Southern China -- at my website, www.usedtapes.com/asia

Positioning Power!

Recently I was one of nine speakers at a
1 day technical conference, where several dozen
engineers and managers paid several hundred
dollars each to understand the direction
of the most talked about new technology
in my industry.  The conference was hosted
by the number one engineering society in the
industry.

The speakers: Two were leading technology
specialists from a $5 billion company.
Another was a senior marketing manager
in a large division of a $70 billion
company.  Another was "senior technical
architect" for a very high profile
standards group.  Another was from the
world's largest manufacturer of electronic
testing tools.  Another was a university
researcher from Canada who recently sold
a high tech company for a good sum of
money.  Another owns a modestly sized
company, owns several important patents,
and runs the largest internet newsgroup
in my industry.  Another is an extremely
sharp senior technologist in a hot, high
tech company.

And finally, there was me.  Marketing manager
in a company with 19 employees; I'm
ten years younger than any of the other
speakers, and my company is a third
the size of the next largest company
represented there.  I was right there with the
rest of them, plus I was invited back
for the next conference they do in March.

Of course the reason someone would want
to speak at this event was not for a
speaking fee -- they paid my expenses
but that was it -- it was for the PR.
When you've got 19 employees and you're
sharing the stage with multi-billion
companies, talking to managers in major
firms, that's good PR.

And in the virtual world we live in,
what matters is perception and whether
you can deliver the goods, not how
big your home office is.

So how did I get there?  Why did they
invite me?

There are several reasons, but the
biggest one was:

Magazine articles.

I've written a bunch of 1, 2 and 3
page magazine articles about this
hot new technology.  Editors of
trade magazines are always looking
for good material.  If you can write
a decent page or two on a hot topic,
you'll be in print next month.

Do that a half dozen times, and
you're an "expert."  Even if
most of the articles basically
say the same thing.

Heck, one editor of a quarterly
magazine made me a regular
contributor.  I've been in every
issue he's put out in 2000.

You need to remember that even if
you're NOT an "expert" -- if you simply
know the ABC's of a particular
subject, then there ain't no
"real" expert who can really say
anything in two pages that
you can't say anyway.

(Note that publishing articles in
magazines you see at the grocery
store or bookstore is a different
ballgame, much harder to get
published there -- I'm referring to industry
trade magazines.)

Apparently, I'm now enough of an
"expert" to go speak at conferences.

I guess I've hit the big time now!

So if you publish magazine articles,
people start thinking you're an
expert.  Reporters start calling you
and interviewing you.  You get invited
to speaking engagements.  Your
articles become a forum for educating
potential customers about what you
do, and getting those customers to
contact you.

At the end of your articles, you
should simply offer some sort of
"free report" or "guide" or "white
paper" that gives the reader more
in-depth information on the same
subject, all they have to do is
contact you and ask for it; you'll
give it away free.  It's a great
way to find out who's interested
in that topic -- and who's probably
thinking about buying something.

Most editors will let you do that --
it's their favor to you for giving
them free editorial content --
and you capture names of prospects
who you can now sell to.

You just achieved "expert" status
and got FREE sales leads at the
same time.

Folks, I'm telling you, this is
powerful stuff.  Most of the
magazines I publish articles in
charge $5000 to $10000 per page
for full page ads.

Articles are more interesting
than ads.  They're more believable
than ads.  People don't pick up
magazines for the ads, they read
articles.

So every month, I get full page
ads for free, and my full page
ads frequently get more leads
than what my competitors get
after spending $10,000.

And I get invited to speak at
conferences along side of VIP's
from multi-billion dollar
companies.

This is one of the most powerful
things I've ever learned in my
career.  You want to learn
more about this?  Email me
(marketing@...) and
I'll send you information
on Paul Hartunian's extremely
effective publicity resources.

Happy New Year!

Perry

P.S.  Read my belated family
"Merry Christmas" letter at
http://www.ebiz.futurezone.com/2001.htm

In a previous issue of this e-zine, I talked about the
continuum of pure face-to-face selling on one extreme,
and selling via email, media, and direct mail on the
other.

When you sell by media, everything is potentially
measurable.  For example, someone at the BMG Tape
and CD club can probably tell you exactly how many new
customers they get from every magazine they advertise
in, and a plethora of other statistics.

And in direct marketing, you define your best
performing advertisements as your "control" and
then you try to beat the control ad.

You change things one variable at a time and test,
test, test.  Different headline.  Different
offer.  Different testimonial.  Different magazine.
And so on.

Winning ads become the new control.  And you
systematically learn the effect of each change
that you test.

The point is this: Direct marketers who measure
what they do eventually become very smart about
what works and what doesn't.

But let's talk about face to face selling.

How do you REALLY know what works and what doesn't?

Can you go on twenty sales calls and then only change one
thing for twenty more, and measure the difference?

Probably not.  Situations are rarely the same
from one visit to the next.  So good
salespeople certainly try different
things and learn from their mistakes, but it's all
very intuitive.  Getting objective data on what
really works in selling is very, very difficult!

So you can go to seminars and training courses on
selling, and people may tell you that what they
teach you works.

But they can't prove it.  Because they don't have
any real "data" that a scientific person could
ever accept as conclusive.

I found one source of objective information on
this subject, though.  Neil Rackham of the Huthwaite
Institute, who wrote a book called "Spin Selling"
which is based on A/B split testing and analysis
of over 30,000 sales calls.

And this book is a good one.

"Spin Selling" is about big-ticket, long-cycle
corporate selling.  It's about what works when
you're selling a $100,000 or $1,000,000 system
or service to a big company where lots of people
are involved and where you can't possibly
close the sale in one call.

The thrust of the book is that in such situations,
traditional "closes" that you might learn from
Zig Ziglar or Tom Hopkins -- i.e., the endless
variations on "would you like the blue one,
or do you prefer the red one today" -- these
closes are useless and even detrimental
in complex sales.

Spin selling teaches that asking questions,
not giving features, benefits and closing
statements, is the key to success.

This book explains the art of formulating
questions that drill down into the deeper
implications of your customers problems,
and the ability of your product to solve
those problems.

It's about building your case based on the
customer's true needs.

"SPIN" is an acronym that stands for
Situation / Problem / Implication /
Need payoff.  It's a questioning process
that has proven to be very effective
in results-measured sales calls.

What it means is that your questioning
process should follow a series of steps
of getting around the problem --

-The Situation, or circumstances, and the
basic facts of the customer

-The Problem which the customer is trying
to solve

-The Implication of this problem - how
much this costs, how many people are
affected, and most importantly, the
non-obvious consequences of not solving
this problem.  Many seemingly "surface
level" problems have much deeper Implications
which the customer will only understand
if you ask him enough questions to uncover
them.

When they understand the deeper implications -
because you have uncovered those implications -
the customer will be able to communicate this to the
other members of his team.

-And finally, the Need payoff - if the
customer buys your solution, does he really
understand how your solution will pay for
itself in terms of cost savings, ease of use,
flexibility, etc?

This is really a good book.  And it's the
kind of book you can read several times and
get more out each time.

If anything, this will teach you that walking
into a client's office and giving a tidy
little presentation with features and benefits
is probably a waste of time unless it's a small,
simple decision that doesn't involve a lot
of money.

There's a great example on page 74 of two different
ways a sales call for a $120,000 piece of equipment
could be handled.

In the first example, the sales person uncovers
the fact that the customer's current machine
is hard to use.

The $120,000 solution is nice, but if all it does
is make it easier to use, forget it.  End of sales
call.

But in the second instance, the sales person
asks more and more questions.  He discovers that
the machine that's difficult to use is run
by 3 specially trained people.

Only having 3 people creates work bottlenecks --
only when someone quits.  Turns out that people
are quitting because the machine is hard to use.

Then it takes months to train new people.  That
costs $4000 in wages every time someone quits,
which is over $25,000 in training costs every
six months.

Meanwhile, they have to pay overtime for the
existing operators to keep the place running,
which costs even more money.

He also finds out that sometimes they send
work out to another company to accomodate
bottlenecks, and the quality suffers.

That creates late deliveries and they have
actually lost customers over this.  A very
expensive problem!

Suddenly, $120,000 for a new machine doesn't
sound so bad.  Why?  Because the sales person
uncovered issues and cause / effect that
the customer himself hadn't realized.

That's adding value to a sale!  And you'll
never get that far using the old features /
benefits routine, because that rarely
gets down to the IMPLICATIONS of the benefits!

This is a book any professional business-to-
business salesperson should have.

And going back to the subject of direct marketing
and advertising for a moment:  Once you've
been in front of people and discovered patterns
of these deeper implications of problems that
you can solve, you can incorporate those
very issues into your marketing message
and be far more effective at "hitting nerves"
in your advertising.

Find out more at
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0070511136/usedtapescom

Best,

Perry S. Marshall
The SmartMarketing Newsletter

Like a school bus full of children teetering
precariously on the edge of a cliff, the
American public is waiting with baited
breath as the saga of Florida's electoral
votes unfolds.

It's as though political time is stopped,
and the progress of counting votes
emerges in slow motion, frame by frame.

EVERYBODY is talking about this.  EVERYBODY
is thinking about it.

I normally couldn't care less about what's
going on in the news -- it's usually
just depressing anyway -- but every time I
get in the car now, I'm tuning in to
find out the latest.

Given that fact, I can't possibly miss an
opportunity to turn this into a
marketing advantage.

You shouldn't either.

What do I mean?  What I mean is, if you
synchronize with a very hot, very important
event or trend - even if it's not directly
related to what you sell - It will get
dramatically more attention in the marketplace!

You should follow my example.  So I'm going
to give you an example to follow.

I'm having a PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION UNCERTAINTY SALE.

Here are the terms of the sale:

I'm offering a 10% discount on everything.
The sale lasts only as long as the election is
undecided.

As soon as either Mr. Bush or Mr. Gore becomes
officially elected, the sale is OVER.

No exceptions.  Don't call me two hours after the
winner is declared, hoping I hadn't heard yet.

It won't work.

So what can you buy at 10% off?

Well, many of you requested my free tape, "The
One Hour 15 Minute Speech That Changed My Career
and Nearly Tripled My Income."

The tape describes Dan Kennedy's Magnetic Marketing
System, which really did make a huge difference in
my professional selling career.

And you can buy this (INCLUDING the
Brass Balls Tapes, which are way cool)for $337.50
instead of $375.00.  But only while our nation agonizes
in political limbo.

For that matter, I'll let you buy ANY one of
Dan's other information systems at 10% off -
the Copywriting course, Power Points, Ultimate
Information Entrepreneur, Midas Touch tapes,
you name it.  (Books not included.)

You can find out all about these products at
www.kimble-kennedy.com.  They're all excellent,
and they're all guaranteed to make you money,
or your money back.

(But you don't get the Election Uncertainty 10%
off deal if you order from them - only me.)

You also can read my personal story about the
Magnetic Marketing system at
www.usedtapes.com/magmarketing

You can fax me an order at (760)284-5920, email
marketing@..., or call (630)215-3671.
But remember:  You have to do it before we
get a president!

Happy Uncertainty, and happy shopping!

Perry

My Pink Cadillac Theory of Killer Sales People

OK, so what in the world is that?

Let me tell you.

My day to day sales life is in the world of business-to-business
industrial sales.  Deals that range from a thousand to a million
dollars in size.

And I work with all kinds of sales people.  All of them are full
time professionals.  Most, of course, are "average."  And a few
are tremendously talented.

Whenver I get a chance to spend some time with a really good
salesman, I ask him:

"What was the first sales opportunity that you ever really sank
your teeth into?"

Of course, successful Mary Kay saleswomen drive Pink Cadillacs,
that's where the term comes from.  And my Pink Cadillac theory
never fails.  I've always been right on this one.

The theory is this: Any time you find a really good sales
person, they always started out doing brutal, face to face, nose to
nose, kitchen table, door-to-door sales.

Live, real-time sales performance in front of real average
people, asking them to pull out their checkbook and do
business with you, right there on the spot.

I.e., Mary Kay, Fuller Brush, Cutco Knives, Amway, or
Girl Scout Cookies.

Whereas mediocre sales people usually start out in
customer service or accounting or maintenance or something.

So anyway, last week I was having lunch with two good sales guys.
I asked them both the question: What was your first serious
sales endeavor?

"Stock Broker" one replied.  "Most brutal profession on earth,
I might add."  This guy was in his early 30's.

The other guy, Charlie, was in his late 60's.  Been selling
industrial computers and stuff like that for 30 years.

He thought awhile.

"Kirby Vacuum Cleaners" he said.

"Oh Yeah, and I was in Amway, too," he added.

I raised my hand and gave them both a high five.
"Right on, brothers" I said.  "The Pink Cadillac Theory never fails."

"Tell me a Kirby Vacuum Cleaner Story, Charlie!" I said.

"You know," he said, "I was actually pretty successful at that.
But there was only one problem.  The people who could least
afford it, and who least needed it, always bought."

"For example, I went into this home one time, and this couple
was POOR.  They didn't have nuthin'.  They had wooden floors.
They had NO carpets at all.

"I did the demonstration.  I wanted to just give them the free
steak knives and leave.

"But they wouldn't let me leave without selling them a
vacuum cleaner!"

Yep, that's Charlie.  The ultimate peddler.  Now we have
a substitute phrase for 'selling ice to eskimos' - Charlie
'selling a Kirby to a woman with wooden floors.'

Now let me tell you something else:

The best advertising, marketing and copywriting guys have
the exact same background.  Nose to nose, toes to toes.
They learned how to think on their feet and they know
how to sell on a piece of paper now instead of in person.

That's what marketing really is.

Selling in print is really a more sophisticated kind of selling.

Lots of people can preach.  But a select few wrote the
Bible.

And I contend that you can't graduate to marketing until
you've learned how to sell first.  Ultimately, marketing
is not journalism, art or literature.  It's selling.

Today, I'd like to introduce you to one of the best marketing
and copywriting minds of today, Jeff Paul, a man who
started out selling (Insurance) and has since become
a mail order legend.

His book "How You Can Make $4,000.00 A Day,
Sitting At Your Kitchen Table, In Your Underwear!"
is a masterpiece on selling information.

The book itself can serve as a tutorial on how
to sell in print.  If you're serious about marketing,
you should own this book.  The ideas in this book
will open doors for you, and cause you to think
of selling and marketing in a different way.

You really ought to get yourself a copy.

Find out more at:  http://www.usedtapes.com/4kperday.htm

Have a great weekend!

Perry

The other day a friend gave the following Top 10 List to me.

I asked him where he got it, he said a friend of his
gave it to him.

So I have no idea where this originated.  It's the
first thing I've sent out to this list that wasn't
my own original.

Sorry if I slight someone by not giving credit.

But this is worthy of your bulletin board:

THE TEN SINS OF SALES PEOPLE

1.  They always try to be positive, when they should
be at lest neutral, or even negative.

2.  They spend far too much time talking and not enough
time listening.

3.  They spend their time trying to make people into
prospects instead of finding people who are prospects.

4.  They go into enthusiastic, fact-filled sales presentations
far too quickly, before the prospect has been qualified.

5.  They do demonstrations, proposals, quotations and
cost reductions for prospects without obtaining reciprocating
commitments from them.

6.  They give out information about their product or service
without finding out who wants it or why.

7.  They fail to determine the prospects budget, or they give
prices before value has been established.

8.  They fail to determine the decision process and who will
be involved.

9.  They spend a lot of time on what a prospect wants, but
almost always fail to find out why he wants it.

10. They answer unasked questions.


Good list of sins!.  Could do a whole newsletter, or
even a book on each one of those ten points.

Matter of fact, email me at newsletter@... and tell
me which ones you'd like me to elaborate on, and I'll devote
an issue or two to it.

One last thing:  Here's some info on an excellent e-zine
for computer and technical matters as they relate to
marketing, communication, common sense and business
practices.  A recommended resource.

=============================================================

"Bill Platt's Power Marketing Magazine" is a bi-weekly
publication designed to teach you the ins-and-outs of
marketing online and offline. Reader Testimonials are
just one of the many powerful marketing tools I teach:
------------------------------------------------------
"I never fail to learn something from Power Marketing
every time I read it!" ---- Shery
------------------------------------------------------
To Subscribe: mailto:PowerMarketing-subscribe@...

=============================================================

All for now!

Keep the cards and letters coming,

Perry

The Smart Marketing E-Zine
Copyright 2000 Perry S. Marshall

My MP3 Fetish

Yes, that's right.  MP3.  Might sound like an odd topic for a
marketing e-zine.  But in fact, the world of MP3 and the issues
& opportunities there highlight issues that are important in
many other areas and businesses.

First, a simple explanation for those that might not know the
terminology:

A single 5 minute song on a standard music CD occupies
about 55 megabytes of data space.  If you wanted
to download that five minute song over the Internet, it
would take FOUR HOURS over a standard 56K modem.

MP3 is a file format that solves that problem.  You can
use free software to convert that song to an MP3 file,
and most typically reduce the file size by 91%.  Now
you can download that song in only 15 minutes over a 56K
modem, and much faster with a high speed connection.

Basically the sound quality of an MP3 file is pretty close to
CD quality if it's done right.  Also, when you record it,
you can trade sound quality for smaller file size if you wish.

Anyway, this began to catch on about 2 years ago, and people
started sharing and distributing music this way.  With MP3,
you can listen to music via your PC, and get songs off of
the Internet.

The recent publicity about MP3 concerns www.mp3.com
giving access to copyrighted songs to people who "supposedly"
already have that music on CD (even though they probably
don't) and www.napster.com, a service which enables you to
locate and "suck" MP3 files out of other people's
computers,
and vise-versa.

The issue there is the free piracy of copyrighted music
without paying royalties or record companies.

Personally, I agree with the moral position of the record
companies; stealing is stealing, and one of the reasons
we have a great economy and technology in the US
today is that we respect intellectual property.

But that's not what I want to talk about today.

What I want to talk about is how MP3 re-defines the music
Market, and how this is similar to what's happening in a
Lot of other markets.  There's much to learn here.

There are two "technology factors" which are fundamentally
changing
everything in business today.  The first is computer processor
power.  It doubles every year.

The second is the Internet, and network bandwidth.  Network speed is
also doubling every year.

What that means is that the ability to distribute and use information
and data is doubling or quadrupling every year.  And it means that if
you make money by distributing or controlling information and data,
your business is changing every single day.

With MP3, music truly became "data" instead of a
"CD."  Record
companies can control CD distribution very easily.  They can't
possibly control data distribution over the Internet, even though
they appear to be trying.  (I think it's really interesting that
after using Rock & Roll to teach rebellion and defiance of authority
for 30 years, that they are suddenly standing up against rebellion
and asserting their authority!)

They will eventually fail, and they will HAVE to justify their value
in some fundamentally different way.

Now why do I like MP3?

A few years ago, I was the sound technicians for several bands, some
of whom tried very hard to "make it" in the music business.
Everyone
I know who's tried that has come back broke and disappointed.


Why is it so hard to make it in the music business?

I've talked to a number of industry insiders and broadcasters
about
this.  Here's the answer:

In any town, there's only room for 10-20 FM radio stations on the
dial.

It costs a lot of money to run a radio station.  They have a choice:
survive or get sold.  It's that simple.

If you want to make money in radio, you have to play songs everyone
likes to hear.  Which means you mostly have to play songs people
already know.

You can only introduce new music very slowly.  The Top 40 is simply
the short list of new songs that are popular.  And 40 songs isn't
very many songs.

Therefore "making it" in the music business (or Hollywood,
for that
matter) is literally like being the winning sperm out of 500,000
contenders, in the race to an occasionally fertile, fickle egg.

Like, don't take it personally if you didn't make it!
Believe me,
there are plenty of "amateur" musicians out there who are far
better
than whoever's playing on 101.9 FM right now.

So that's why you've heard the same tune by Pearl Jam for the
447th
time and your buddy from college who plays wicked guitar licks
can't
get anyone in music or on the radio to give him the time of day.

But today, with very inexpensive computers, powerful software, MP3
and the Internet, a basement / garage band can literally produce
studio-quality recordings and distribute them virtually free on the
Internet.

If you have a fast internet connection, you don't need record
companies anymore.  And you don't need radio stations.  You
don't
need them if you're a consumer, and you don't need them if
you're a
musician.

I'm a music fanatic, and I love to go to mp3.com and similar
websites
and listen to tons of new music by unsigned bands who produce their
own stuff and distribute it over the web.  It's entrepreneurial.
It's a level playing field.  It's the place where the
"little guy"
can actually get a fair shot.

I was in Seventh Grade when MTV went on the air in the fall of 1981.
At the time, most of what you saw on MTV was off the `beaten
path';
it did not quite resemble the usual Top 40 junk and it was quite
refreshing.  A lot of the `amateur' MP3 stuff is the same way.

Granted, only a small % of people are listening to music over the
Internet right now, but it's a growing number, and let me tell
ya,
the record companies better figure out how to remain useful, or their
days are numbered.

OK, so how do you make money distributing free music?

Darn good question.  I have a few answers.

First, the economics are totally different.

You produce the music, and that may be expensive. (But only 1/10th of
what it used to cost.  You don't even need a studio.)

But distributing the music is very cheap.  Perhaps fractions of a
penny for a download.

So the music becomes the attraction to what actually makes the
money.  You know, no matter how great technology gets, it won't
replace the live show with the real musicians there.  I think MP3
will give a boost to live music.  The music will be more accessible
because you won't have to pay $45 to see a national touring act
that
happens to be in a large city near you one night in two years.

You'll see local people more often, for less money.  And
you'll be
able to hear them before you bought their CD or spent money on their
concert.  Bands will sell hats, t-shirts, bracelets, jewelry, bumper
stickers and posters.  And they will still sell CD's.  And with
no
distribution in the middle, they make fatter margins.

Fundamentally, if they can attract the fans and build an audience,
there are always ways to make money.  If they own access to the
audience, instead of the record company, they have control of their
destiny.

Really, they'll make money the same way I make money writing this
e-
zine.  I want millions of people to sign up and get this free e-zine,
because that's my audience.  It's my customer base.

I make money when people who are more serious about marketing and
success buy my more advanced materials.  The e-zine is good, but it
is just the tip of the iceberg.  The real deal is when people decide
to take the next step and really apply some seriously good marketing
to their businesss.

Speaking of that, I invite you to see one of the best marketing tools
ever devised, the Magnetic Marketing Kit.  See
http://www.usedtapes.com/magmarketing for details.

Do you like the marketing music you get in this e-zine?  Pass it
along to a friend!  Comments?  Email me: ebiz@....

Sincerely,

Perry S. Marshall

P.S.: As I mentioned earlier, the issues that are affecting the music
industry via MP3 are affecting a lot of other folks in similar ways
–
including you, most likely.  More about that in future issues.

This is a big topic that deserves more than one issue.  I'm going to
come at this topic from several angles.  Here's the first.

If your new idea, new method or new technology is any good, then you
have imitators and competitors; you're not selling in a vacuum.

Maybe you're even the `imitator.'

To an idealist, it matters how original the idea is.  To the realist,
it makes no difference.

Betamax was better, but VHS video won the standards battle.

From a marketing point of view, it's usually better to be the
imitator.  If your competition spent tons of money developing a
product, and now they're dumping more money into teaching the market
place why people should want it, you can ride their coat tails.  You
learn from their mistakes and harvest the seeds they've already
planted.

It's rarely a good idea to be the first person to plant the seed,
unless you can do it very, very cheaply (see "Doing Missionary Work
On The Cheap" in a previous issue; back issues at
http://www.egroups.com/messages/smartmarketing).

Let me tell you something else I learned from a very good
book, "Selling The Invisible" by Harry Beckwith (see
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0446520942/qid=970675952/sr=1-
1/usedtapescom) for details).

If your customer is looking at multiple presentations from multiple
sales people, trying to decide who to buy from, it's always best to
be the LAST person.  NOT the first.

So envision this: Your customer gets approached by one of your
competitors, gives a delightful presentation on why they should
completely re-think their entire system process.

Your competitor must substantially change the customer's thinking –
change his paradigm – in order to get the sale.  He spends the time
and money to do so.  The customer is convinced he needs to make the
major change.

I promise you, before the customer makes a final buying decision,
he's going to check out his options.  Most people will check 2 or 3
other sources.

You need to make sure they can easily FIND you.

So make sure you show up on the search engines, the yellow pages, or
however people find you.  And offer them a free "report" or "white
paper" on something like "The Twelve Deadly Pitfalls You Should Know
Before Changing Your System Process – And How To Not Get Fired For
Making A Big Mistake."

So… all these other guys go in and give their presentations, but
somewhere in the midst of this, they get your free report.

***Positioning Key:*** YOU wrote the "book."  Just because you WROTE
something, raises your credibility above someone who apparently only
knows how to TALK.

And of course it's very, very valuable and important that you warn
them about some things that the other guy forgot to mention.  That
helps a lot!

If you do this correctly, not only can you be the last person to
present a solution (and therefore have the best chance of winning),
but you warned them about pitfalls the others forgot to mention, and
because you were invited in, you were the expert, whereas the other
guy may have been just a `pest.'

More to follow soon!

Perry

I am interrupting our normal discussion about marketing
to look at the lighter side of politics.  After all,
all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.  (Jack Nicholson
said so.)

So for this issue of the Smart Marketing Newsletter,
considering the severity of the recent conflict,
I present a solution for the Middle East Jews vs.
Palestinians conflict that has been raging for millennia.

Yes.  That's right. I have THE solution.  Be sure and tell
everyone you heard it here first.

Here it goes:

Let's send Bill Clinton over there to give a speech to
all those folks on the West Bank.  He's going to make
them an offer they can't refuse:

"Citizens of the West Bank, I have an offer you simply
cannot turn down.  We, the People of the United States Of
America will give you  guys the entire state of Nevada --
including Las Vegas -- which is immensely larger and
more spacious than this tiny little cramped country
you live in now.

"It doesn't matter which side wants to move over.  Maybe
the Jews would like to move to Nevada and let the
Palestinians remain in this miserable place.

"Or perhaps you Palestinians would like to get out of
here and take over Vegas, leaving the Jews to wash their
clothes in the polluted Jordan River.  If you'd like to do that,
we'll let you, so long as you don't go back to Palestine."

"Furthermore, Congress has agreed to pay all your moving
expenses.  We're going to put all of you on luxurious
cruise ships, and your belongings on big freight carriers,
and once you arrive on Los Angeles, you can form a large
Middle Eastern caravan, complete with Camels, for your
final voyage to the Promised Land."

Well... Do you think it'll work?  Who could refuse such
generosity?

;^)

Perry

Missionary Work, Part 1: Educating Customers on the Cheap

A couple weeks ago I talked about "Missionary Work", i.e. selling new
ideas / paradigms in a change resistant market.

Selling is twice as difficult when you're breaking new ground, and
you need every advantage you can get.  I mentioned several
ingredients essential to successfully doing this.

The first requirement is that you educate new customers at minimal
expense.

I'm going to tell you how I've done this.  But first, let me tell you
how NOT to do it.

Do not hunt down everyone who can fog a mirror and spend hours with
them, explaining the wondrous virtues of your cool idea.  Do not host
luncheons or buy dinners, rent meeting rooms, banquet halls or
football stadiums and then drag the blind, naked and lame to fill the
seats.

It's better to have 5 prospects who are rabidly, wildly interested,
than to have 500 who showed up just for the free cookies and orange
juice!

Please aware of your own idealism and any tendencies you have to
overspend or be overly optimistic about results.  Don't say, "I'm
going to go whole hog, because when all these people start buying,
I'm going to have tons of money." When you haven't already had
personal success in your endeavor, treat it as an experiment and be
tight with your money.

Maybe none of you are dumb enough to do that, but I've done this kind
of naive, stupid stuff.  I've thrown good money after bad, constantly
thinking, "I've talked to so many people about this, someone's bound
to buy soon!"

OK now, on to the main point.

What you want to do is create a series of steps – maybe 2, maybe 10 –
which people take to systematically educate themselves about what you
do.

Here's a brief list of educational mechanisms you can use, starting
with the cheapest:

-Email
-Website
-Recorded outgoing voicemail messages
-Sales Letters, Free Reports, "White Papers"
-Copies of magazine articles
-Audio Cassettes
-Video Cassettes
-Books
-Web Video Conferencing

All of these mechanisms cost less than $5 per customer, and the
Internet stuff is basically free.

(By the way, if you're in an MLM and you're being charged more than a
couple bucks for prospecting audiocassettes, or more than $5 or $10
for a video, you're paying too much – all the money's being made on
the tapes.  Make your own!)

Self-Liquidating Educational Materials

By far the best way to educate prospects is to charge them for the
materials you send them, by making them appealing enough that people
will pay a few bucks.

I'm dead serious!  Remember, if you charge people for a video, book
or seminar, they'll watch the video, read the book, and believe what
you say in the seminar.

You might think you can't charge people for this.  But I disagree!

Think about something for a minute:

Why should people spend their time on something that they wouldn't
spend money on?

One of the keys to educating customers about new ideas is breaking
the educational process into a series of small steps.

Let's say you want to charge $20 for a seminar, which actually
upsells the customer to something else.  This automatically requires
the seminar to have some valuable information in and of itself.  You
have to sell the value of the information in the seminar.  You can do
this through a website, a sales letter, or a cassette tape.

So your process could look something like this:

1) Customer sees paid advertisement (or press release) and
responds by calling 800 voice mail which tells him/her more
information than what was in the ad
2) Customer receives information packet which primarily sells
the value of the $20 seminar
3) The $20 seminar is long enough to articulate the full
benefits of, and sells, the $200, $2000 or $20,000 product.

You start with a wide funnel and `thin the herd' through a series of
deliberate steps, so that the people you spend the most time and
money pursuing are the people who are most likely to give YOU their
money.

***

For several weeks I've been offering a very powerful cassette tape,
FREE, to anyone who asks for it.

Yes, I even send it to international addresses.  Just sent tapes to
Ireland, Russia and Australia.

It's called "The Radical 1 Hour, 15 Minute Speech That Turned My
Sales Career Around And Nearly Tripled My Income."

And yes, more than any one single ingredient, this speech literally
got me on the right track.  As a matter of fact, this tape talks
about many of the ideas I just discussed in today's newsletter about
missionary work.  I've used these ideas extensively in my own
businesses with excellent success.

Want a copy of this tape?  Email newsletter@... with your
mailing address.

By the way: I had some computer problems and lost a few emails from
people requesting tapes.  If you think you should have gotten yours
by now and haven't, email me and I'll make sure one is on its way.

Which reminds me to remind you: Always back up your data!  You'll
never regret it when that inevitable computer glitch rears its ugly
head  :^)

Sincerely,

Perry S. Marshall

Autoresponders

Last week one of my customers spoke to me about what she wanted
me to write more about on this e-zine.  I'm always interested in
knowing what you folks would like to know!

Anyway, she has an MLM business, and she said she wants to know more
about autoresponders.  Of course the web is one of the key ways to
identify new clients, and autoresponders are a great tool.

An autoresponder is a mailbox that automatically sends a specific
reply to the sender whenever it receives an email message.  Most web
hosting services have autoresponders as part of their standard
package.

Let me give you some examples on how these autoresponders can be used:

1) For customer service:

I use autoresponders for my site www.usedtapes.com - anytime someone
submits an order to us from the website, they automatically get a
message that says their order will be handled within 48 hours.

Another company I work with has an autoresponder on their email box
info@..., informing the sender that it might take 24-48
hours to respond to the email, and if it's urgent, to call an 800
number for support.  People definitely appreciate getting that
message.

The sender gets a reply (almost instantly) from the autoresponder,
and their original email message is forwarded to an email box that is
frequently checked.

2) As a means of requesting information:

Let's say you run ads in newspapers or magazines.  You could put
your www address on the ad, but you wouldn't necessarily know if
people visited.  However, if you say "send an email to
info@...
and you'll instantly get a reply email with full details" they
get the information in a pre-written email message, and you capture
their email address.

3) As a means of notifying others:

Some autoresponders can be configured to forward the incoming email
to multiple addresses.  You may work in an organization where this is
useful to you.

4) An added twist: scheduled autoresponders

Some dedicated autoresponder services send multiple messages
automatically, on a schedule.  This is very useful, because people
need repeat exposure to new ideas before the information sinks in.
So you can send a message immediately, a follow-up message three days
later, a 2nd follow up message a week later, etc.

It's an electronic equivalent of the multiple sales-letter
sequence described on the tape "The 1 Hour 15 Minute Speech That
Turned My Sales Career Around & Nearly Tripled My Income" (which
you
can get free by emailing me your street address to
newsetter@...).

For an example of scheduled autoresponders, see
http://www.databack.com/mailback.htm.

One time I tested an autoresponder service (which I won't name
here) – their website invited me to enter my name and email
address, and it would send me scheduled messages about their
autoresponder service.

Technically, their service worked, but they didn't do it right.
They would send me messages with my name inserted in the text--badly
formatted--and every few days I would get more and more messages.  It
was downright annoying.

Please make sure that you've thought things through very
carefully, and executed the details perfectly, before you roll out
an autoresponder to your customers and prospects.  And don't
over-use
it.

Autoresponders are a valuable tool.  I use them a lot and they're
very beneficial to me, and I'm sure they will be for you.

Got other questions about autoresponders?  Email me at
newsletter@... with questions or comments.  Also, include
your mailing address to receive the free tape.

Sincerely,

Perry S. Marshall
The Smart Marketing Newsletter

I've worked both extremes:  I've done door to door, face-to-face contacting,
prospecting and selling.  And I've sold via mail and the web, no personal
contact at all.

They both work.  But the most interesting thing is when you can do both
together.

I've given presentations to husbands and wives sitting across the kitchen table,
with my wife by my side.  I've given presentations where a company's
entire engineering and upper management staff pummeled me with questions
for two or three hours.

Similarly, I've pounded the telephone for hours, days and weeks, sneaking
past gatekeepers and working with cold prospects to gain their attention and
favor.

At the other end of the spectrum, I've sold via media, in businesses where
all of the selling and order taking happened over the web and I never
had any personal contact with the customers whatsoever.

I've done entire negotiations with purchasing agents via email.  And I've sold
hundreds of thousands of dollars of products and services with sales letters,
where in most cases the only in-person "selling" was when they called
in their order and talked to an 'order taker'.

And here's what I can tell you about the two types of selling, and how to
combine them:

You can do one exclusively.  Or you can do the other exclusively.  You
can only deal with people face to face, or you can only deal people
via paper, email or web.

My experience has shown me that doing one at the exclusion of the
other almost always takes more effort than doing a combination of the
two.

Some of my business would NEVER get sold simply by direct mail
or a website, no matter how good or sophisticated the mail and the website
were.  There's simply too many unique things about the customer,
and too many ways that what's being offered must be 'tweaked.'

On the other hand, face-to-face prospecting is difficult at best and can
be an ENORMOUS time waster.  And some transactions are too small
to justify having a person there at all.

When you combine the two -- beginning the relationship with media
and developing it with face to face contact, that's when things really
cook.

Media automatically brings a degree of credibility, and is
amazingly good at screening out time wasters.

In today's American society, the balance leans in the direction of
media.  Door-to-door sales is nearly dead in consumer sales, and is
mostly relegated to low-grade commodity sales, like long distance
services, in business-to-business.

If you sell face to face, make sure that media brings you the
best prospects to the surface before you go see them.

If you sell via media, it's a good idea to have at least a phone
number so people can call and get a 'warm fuzzy feeling'
before they buy.

One other observation: People who are really good at selling in
print are almost always people who learned to sell face-to-face
first.  Selling via media is more sophisticated and requires you
to understand your customer so well that you anticipate their
thought process as they read what you write.

By the way: My pieces on "missionary work" are still in the works.
Keep an eye out for them.

Best,

Perry

P.S.  My offer continues: To receive a FREE copy of the cassette tape,
"The 1 Hour 15 Minute Speech That Turned Around My Sales
Career & Nearly Tripled My Income" email your street address
to me at newsletter@...

All of my sales life, I've been involved in some form of
"Missionary Work."  That is, selling ground-breaking ideas to
a change-resistant marketplace.

The term "Missionary Work" conjures up images of people who
travel at great expense to foreign lands to convert pagan tribal
people to a new religion.  (Perhaps it also has some sexual
connotations…)

And being that I have relatives who actually are religious
missionaries in foreign lands, I have a pretty good understanding of
how much work is involved, and how meager the results can be.

In the business world, "Missionary Work" is anything that is
idealistic, counter-cultural, counter-intuitive, or requires some
sort of "paradigm shift" or radical new approach, before
customers start giving you money and using your revolutionary new
product.

In business, doing Missionary Work is a GREAT way to go broke.  A
noble, honorable, exciting way to lose your shirt.

Examples of missionary work in business include: solar power,
electric cars, and operating systems other than Microsoft Windows.
Anyone selling anything Internet-related before 1995 was definitely
doing missionary work, as is anyone recruiting "MLM virgins"
into a network marketing opportunity.

The attraction of missionary work is "being there first" and
being positioned in front of massive tidal wave of cash that's
certain to come when the paradigm finally "shifts."

This downside is the risk that the paradigm will never
"shift", or that once it does, newcomers who do not have to
recoup a
missionary work investment will step in and steal your victory.

For almost 5 years I've been intimately involved in selling a
particular new technology that in 1995 was brand new.  It required a
complete re-education of customers before they would buy it.  Today
it's nearly mainstream, and all of the most progressive customers
in my industry use it.

I lost my shirt at the beginning.  I spent a LOT of time and money
early on, with nothing to show for it.

But today, sales are brisk, the money is good, and I'm working
with some of the most successful companies in this category.  I think
I can speak to this issue with some experience.

I'm going to do a series of articles on Missionary Work and how
to use Smart Marketing to minimize the pain and expense.  But let me
share my basic philosophy about this as we get started.

First, there are expensive ways to educate customers and there are
cheap ways.  You HAVE to find the cheap ways.

Second, there are usually other people who are competing with you who
are also working to re-educate customers.  You can use positioning
strategies to win their customers, at their expense, instead of
spending your own money.

Third, it's not as hard as you might think to make people think
you're the expert.  As a matter of fact, it's possible to
leverage your competitors' efforts to actually raise your
credibility
above theirs, so that customers would rather buy from you.

Fourth, if you are much, much smarter about LEAD GENERATION than most
people, you can identify the very most eligible prospects, who
require the least amount of work to cultivate, and "shake the low
hanging fruit off the tree."

Fifth, there is a way that you can inexpensively track the fruit that
isn't ready to fall from the tree until it actually is
"ripe", and make sure that it falls into your basket.

Finally, you can charge people to teach them new ways of doing
things, more easily than you can teach them for free.

Sound interesting?

Stay tuned.  I'll share some of my best strategies with you.

Meanwhile, I've got a cassette tape of a speech I heard in 1997
that turned my sales career around, and formed the basis of the
approach to "Missionary Work" that I've used ever since.

It's called "The Radical 1 Hour 15 Minute Speech That Turned
My Career Around & Nearly Tripled My Income."

You can combine this information with the material in this newsletter
to achieve dramatic `missionary' success.

Want a copy?  Email me: newsletter@... with your mailing
address and I'll send it to you.

Sincerely,

Perry Sink Marshall
The Smart Marketing Newsletter

A sales lesson from the religious part of the spectrum

Twenty years ago I read an extraordinary book called “Run Baby Run” by Nicky
Cruz.  It tells the story of boy who grew up in a deeply dysfunctional and
abusive family in Puerto Rico in the 1950's.

When Nicky was fourteen, he got a plane ticket to New York City.  He joined a
Latino gang in Harlem, and three years later was the president of that gang.  By
the time he was nineteen, he was completely immersed in drugs, prostitution, and
gang warfare.  He had committed 18 murders and there was no end in sight.

RUN BABY RUN is a gripping account of Nicky's life as gang president, and his
encounter with a naive but determined minister turned ghetto-missionary named
Dave Wilkerson.  It details Nicky's spiritual awakening, without which he would
have almost certainly become a statistic, whether rotting in a prison cell or
being stabbed or shot by another gang member.

About five years ago, I was driving in Chicago and saw a sign on a bus stop
bench, announcing that Nicky Cruz was going to be speaking at a high school in
the city.  I instantly decided that I had to see this guy and hear him speak. 
My wife and I went together.

It was weird to be a twenty-something suburban couple in a high school
auditorium full of teens and gang-bangers.  The place filled up, and the
presentation began with a crudely acted skit.

The skit depicts Joe Gangbanger, who is lookin' and feelin' real cool, rolling
along with with lots of money and girls, until he suddenly turns into the wrong
alley and gets shot by enemy gang members.

As he dies, black hooded figures appear and drag him to destruction, literally
shoving him through the entrance of Hell itself, while Joe Gangbanger kicks and
screams in terror every step of the way.

Of course I was aghast!  “You can't do that!!!” I thought.  “Can't you use a
little TACT???”

I continued to watch and listen as Nicky Cruz then came to the stage and spoke
to these inner-city teens.  He spoke in a very thick Puerto Rican accent, yet
with great empathy.

He described what it was like to be beaten by his father and locked in a farm
henhouse, being pecked by chickens all night long.  He described the hatred he
felt from his parents, the intense loneliness; his rage and his determination to
leave and never come back.

He explained why this had been his reason for an escape to gang life and a
lifestyle of illicit sex, drugs and murder.  And he pulled NO punches.  He
explained that this lifestyle was a one-way ticket to hell and that no matter
how cool you thought you were, you'd better change RIGHT NOW, or end up dead and
worse.

My mind went back to a place I'd been only a week before, Willow Creek Community
Church, far away from this inner-city high school, in the plush Northwestern
suburbs of Chicago.

Seats 4500, looks like a theatre.  They play cool jazz and do dramas about the
challenges of suburban life – subjects like infidelity, difficult teenagers, and
moral business quandaries.

They NEVER, EVER do skits about people being drug, kicking and screaming, to
hell.

And the messages are rarely “in your face” like Nicky Cruz.

But interestingly, the message is ultimately the same:  Stop.  Think.  Consider
the spiritual aspect of life and stop ignoring it.  And DO SOMETHING about it.

And it works.  In 1996, Willow Creek was featured on TV by Peter Jennings of ABC
as one of the most effective modern churches in the US, with average weekend
attendance approaching 20,000 people.

...My attention turns back to the high school auditorium: Nicky issues his
challenge and asks for a response.  To my surprise, hundreds of kids nearly
climb over their seats to come to the front and learn how they can reverse the
direction of their lives.

Astonishingly impressive.

Some people might think that Nicky is doing it the wrong way and Willow Creek is
doing it the right way.  Others think the opposite.

But I say they're BOTH doing it right.

Nicky's message wouldn't do much for the Willow crowd.  And the Willow style
message wouldn't so much as make a dent in a street-hardened gang banger.

Too subtle.  Too polite.

But Nicky knows his audience.  He knows what it takes to get inside the heads of
hardened inner-city gang members.

Willow knows their audience.  They know what it takes to get inside the heads of
sophisticated, educated, upper-middle class suburban professionals.

The lesson?

Know YOUR audience.  Figure out the conversation that's already going on inside
their head, and step right into it.

By the way, Nicky's book really rocks.  To get your hands on this book RUN BABY
RUN, visit

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0882706306/o/qid=966791930/sr=2-1/usedtap\
escom

Sincerely,

Perry

P.S.: Forward this to a friend so they can participate too!

To subscribe to the Smart Marketing newsletter, send an email to
smartmarketing-subscribe@egroups.com

As always, I'm eager to hear your questions, challenges and comments.

Here's an interesting question from Frankie.  My answer to him relates to
tapping unconventional resources for expertise.

Here goes:

>>> Hi , If you can give me some suggestions i would be most grateful. I'm
a public relation director for a gymnastic company that goes
into day cares, and teachers provide training for the children. They
know how to teach, that's not the problem . My challenge is to get them
to greet the directors and day care teachers and be friendly all the
time. I want them to smile and have fun. I want them to be extra
friendly . Maybe I'm too close to the situation to see what I can teach
them to change the situation.  Thank you so much.

Frankie

***

Hello Frankie,

Here's what I'd do if I were you.

You need someone other than yourself to give these folks a pep talk on 'How
To Win Friends and Influence People.'

I assume you want someone who'll do it for free.

So here's how to do that: Call up one of your friends who's heavily into MLM or
Network Marketing, i.e. hot-in-pursuit, "Mach 2 with his hair on fire."  Someone
who's been doing it awhile, and clearly has some persistence and experience.

Tell him that you know he's real good at motivational stuff and people skills,
and you need someone who can give an inspiring talk on people skills and
motivation.

Help him "feel your pain" - believe me, he'll understand.

He'll feel you're the greatest guy in the world for giving him a chance to show
off his skills.

Remember: in the MLM business, you have to get good at taking people who are
almost 'dead' for whatever reason, and 'resurrecting' them, such that they are
now going out and motivating everybody else.

Tough job, but good distributors are amazingly good at 'pep talks.'  And they
like giving 'em.

Tell him that he's not permitted to "promote" his opportunity per se, but he can
present himself as a specialist in this area who does personal consultation and
training, and that other services are available.

That's probably a better promo for his business than a direct one, anyway.  (Who
knows, he might get a corporate speaking gig out of the deal!)

Also tell him that you'll recommend him to others for similar situations.

Before your meeting, tell everyone that you've invited an Interpersonal
Relationships / Organization specialist to give them a talk.  Build him up and
let him go!

He gives a 15-20 minute presentation on the ABC's of positive relationships.

Since they don't know him, but they know you, he'll be the expert and they'll
listen to him.

Perry

PS Keep the cards and letters coming!  Fire away with your toughest challenges.

(c) 2000 Fulcrum / Smart Marketing Newsletter

From time to time, things happen that interrupt the frenetic pace of life and
cause us to look at things a bit differently.

Last week was that sort of week, so this week's newsletter is that sort of
newsletter.

Last Monday morning my mother called to let me know that my grandfather, Robert
Marshall, had finally lost his battle with cancer and heart problems at age 81. 
I traveled from busy Chicago to the serene Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia, to
be with my family members and to honor the memory and life of a great
individual.

Of course, once someone is gone, it's easy for us to romanticize their life and
dismiss the less noble aspects of their humanity, as our memory of them becomes
“the good ol' days.”

Though “Papa” as we affectionately called him was certainly far from perfect, I
can only hope to live my life as nobly as he lived his.  His memorial service
was a potent reminder to me about the difference between the things in life that
seem “urgent” vs. those that are truly important.

He fought in World War II, and for most of his life he was a minister.  Some
folks might have the idea that the ministry is somehow less challenging than
getting a “real” job, but I firmly disagree.

It's really one of the most demanding professions that there is.  Not for the
lazy or the faint of heart.  It's not for someone who wants to “punch out” at 5
O'clock, it's not for someone who wants to take weekends off, nor is it for
people who want to make loads of cash.  He didn't.

Aside from the usual sermons and meetings, Papa's life was deeply entwined with
the daily challenges and struggles of common, every day people in rural
Virginia.  It didn't stop with their emotional or spiritual concerns, either. 
As often as not, it was helping fix plumbing or a lawn mower in a community
where if it cost money, the problem may not have gotten fixed at all.

He was a man of conviction and a man of prayer.  And he was well loved, as
evidenced by the 500 folks who showed up to pay tribute to him and comfort his
family, looking forward to the day when they would see him again.

Heck, if you merely consider that he left behind three children, seven
grandchildren and seven great grandchildren, every one of whom is a decent,
industrious, God-fearing individual, that's legacy enough.

Just before burial, as is the custom for veterans, he received a 21 Gun Salute,
and his family was given a United States flag, in honor of his service to his
country.

Papa's time here has come and gone, and now it's my turn to make my life count
for something.  My grandmother (“Nana” as she's called) asked me my shoe size,
and I told her 'Size 11' she gave me two pairs of his favorite shoes.

I'll do my best to fill them.

Do I have regrets?  Well, a little.  Unfortunately he hadn't yet gotten a chance
to meet my youngest son Caden, and I should have kept in closer touch these last
few years.  I know that he and Nana spent many days together in solitude, while
their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren were getting on elsewhere
with their busy lives.

An extra phone call, letter or visit to them from time to time would have always
been welcome.

Of course I'm always nudging you to do something.  Here's what it is.

I'd like you to set aside an “urgent” project for a few minutes this week to
give some appreciation to a special person who has made a difference in your
life.  The letter or phone call that you make will certainly bring some extra
joy to their day.

I also invite you to consider whether what you're doing is what you want to be
remembered for.  Last I checked, we only get one life.  Let's make the most of
it while we have the chance.

Sincerely,

Perry

***

Last week I offered a free tape of “the” speech that literally changed the
trajectory of my sales career.  For those of you who asked for it, it's coming,
but be patient, it was delayed by last week's events.  If you didn't request it,
you still can: Email me your mailing address to newsletter@...

A few weeks ago, I asked everyone to come up with their toughest
challenge and send it to me.  One by one, I'm going after these.

Here's one from CJ Bonstrup:

Hi Perry,
Here it is:

I want to know how I go about choosing a new secondary market.
My core market is Private investigators and Process Servers
I also have a large segment of the bail bond agencies, but I
only have one product to sell them. There really is no effective
way for me to sell them my "how to market your business" courses
(for them it's advertise only - you can't target 'would be'
criminals).

I am looking into judgment collectors, repo agents, locksmiths,
security guard companies, etc. These are somewhat related to my
industry.

My question is:
Should I target these peripheral (but still very small) markets,
Or go after one completely different yet larger?

CJ Bronstrup -  The Marketing Wiz
Renowned Author, Speaker & Money-Making Webmaster
(If you can do it; It ain't bragging!)
Atlas Information Services  - http://www.atlasinfo.com

******************************

I've reprinted CJ's full name and info here, because I know
CJ, and
he's got some good marketing information of his own on his
website.

Y'all might want to take a look.

A little background: CJ is a consultant to Private Investigators,
who, as independent contractors who market their services, make up a
very interesting niche related to what I talk about in this e-zine.

I should add that CJ is an astute marketer in his own right.  But all
of us can benefit from people who live `outside the box' that
we live
in ourselves.  So let me take a run at this.

My answer to CJ is:

Pursue those peripheral markets.

Three reasons: 1) You probably understand those people very well; 2)
you know exactly how to target those people and speak their language,
and most importantly 3) I think that those markets will lead you into
still other markets.

Here's a serendipity I've discovered about response-oriented
direct
marketing: Your successes (in combination with your failures, of
course) will lead you into unanticipated directions if you simply
experiment, test, and listen to what people are telling you.

The world is increasingly made up of fragmented subcultures that rub
up against each other.  Every single person on this list belongs to
at least a half dozen of them.

In other words, you have a job or own a business in a particular
industry; you may have a second business venture in a different
industry; you belong to various churches, clubs, etc; you have
hobbies and interests.

You receive several magazines on various specialized topics.

The same is true of your spouse and other family members.

All of these industries, interests, and sub cultures rub shoulders
with related ones.  And I'd say it's better to "puddle
jump" than to
start over from scratch, with a completely new market.  Leverage the
knowledge and experience you already have.  The grass may be greener
in the new market, but the learning curve is also steeper.

I should mention that everyone should always ask themselves the same
question CJ is asking: "In order to expand, should I start from
where
I already am, or should I do something totally different?"

Keep the cards and letters coming!  Send your toughest marketing
questions to me: email newsletter@... and I'll be sure
to
tackle `em.

Perry

P.S. Three years ago -- May 1997, in Peoria, Illinois, to be exact --
my faltering sales career made a turnaround after I heard a 1 hour,
15 minute speech.

Please understand, I've been a tape and book junkie for ten
years.  I
listened to Zig Ziglar and Tom Hopkins and Tom Peters and Harvey
McKay and Les Brown and every other sales / motivational guy on the
planet.

I snatched up every piece of information I could, if I thought it
would help.

But this message was as close as anything's ever come to striking
a "magic formula."

I applied new ideas to the work that I was already doing, and it has
made a huge difference.

Would you like to hear this speech???

Email me back (newsletter@...) with your name and mailing
address and I'll send you the tape.

*****

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To unsubscribe, email smartmarketing-unsubscribe@egroups.com

Hey y'all,

I'm still working on some of those 'tough questions' you guys sent.  More to
follow soon.

But today here's a different kind of topic for this newsletter issue.

I used to design speakers for a living - if you have a 94 Ford Probe, a 95 Jeep
Cherokee, or a 96 Honda Civic or Chrysler Cirrus, for example, I designed
speakers for those vehicles.

Anyway, I'm going to let you in on a little 'insider secret.'

Bose is one of the top speaker brands in the world, as many of you probably
know.

But many audio manufacturers, especially "high end" ones, as well as
self-proclaimed "discriminating audio buffs" have little good to say about them.

Partially it's jealousness of their success.  And it's partly because Bose
does not always embody 'classical ideals' in their speaker designs.  And in some
ways, their products do fall short of meeting some technical criteria.

But they're popular and profitable.  They're brilliant marketers.

[Engineers and Idealists usually hate brilliant marketers.]

So anyway, I'm on a newsgroup that discusses audio topics.

I get this message, where a guy named Alan says:

"I went out with this girl on a blind date.  When I told her I built speakers,
she asked me if I could make some, just like those neat Bose speakers she saw in
the store.

"Aaaarrrrgghhh!"

Well, I guess that relationship was over...

This guy really, really doesn't like Bose.

So I sent this response.  You might appreciate it...

************************************

Subject:  Why people buy those lousy Bose speakers

Hey folks,

I've been in the speaker world for 18 years, three of them as a professional
driver designer.

During my life, I've mostly had a healthy disdain for Bose.

During my Jensen days, when people would find out that I designed speakers, the
most common response was, "What do you think of those new Bose [AM5] speakers?

Which translated, means: "as a professional speaker designer, can you comment on
their wonderful breakthrough technology and the thunderous bass that comes from
those tiny little cubes?"

At the time, I viewed the AM5's as the incarnation of a lie, designed to soak
innocent people for seven hundred bucks.  A fantastic racket on Bose's part,
considering what I estimated it cost to manufacture them.

I often told people what I thought, too.

A couple of times, though, I had to remove my foot from my mouth when I learned
that the person I was speaking to owned a pair.

The last time this happened was only a year ago -- with a new business partner
which I would prefer to have not insulted.  (I found out later that evening when
I joined him and his wife, in their home, for dinner - and saw the Bose speakers
mounted on his wall!)

Now for the last 5 years I've been out of the audio engineering business and in
the profession of sales and marketing (software company, specifically).

During my first two years in sales, I had the exquisite privilege of living on
baloney sandwiches and Ramen soup, if you know what I mean.

Things finally started to turn around for me when I got through my thick head,
something that in hindsight, I realize that Bose clearly understands, and has
understood for many years:

    DON'T SELL PEOPLE WHAT YOU THINK THEY "SHOULD" WANT.

    SELL THEM WHAT THEY WANT.

That, my friends, is what Bose does.

Do most people WANT flat frequency response?

No.

Do most people WANT "inter-transient silence"?

No.

Do most people WANT phase coherence, imaging that's precise to the twelfth
decimal place, or superior impulse response?

No.

(Not that most speakers at a Stereophile show can actually deliver those things
either, either, by the way...)

What do people want?

Small, unobtrusive design.  Exciting sound.  Glamorous, impressive technology
that will make their friends envious.

Oh yes, don't forget: They also want speakers that make their wives Amorous.

Huge, room-dominating Klipschorns or Thiel CS5.0's don't have that effect on
most wives.

You have to learn to enjoy having sex with the speakers instead, if that's what
you've just spent your money on.

Bose gives the people exactly what they want, including the Amorous wife part.

Everybody else gives 'em a woofer, a tweeter, and a simulated woodgrain box.  Do
an A/B with all those non-Bose $600 speakers on the showroom floor, and they all
sound fairly similar to each other, now that most speaker manufacturers finally
know how to get a reasonably flat frequency response.

How exciting.

What Bose delivers is not what I want.  It's not what any of you guys want,
either.  But it's what most people want.

Audio journalist Tom Nousaine once told me about visiting Bose in Framingham,
MA, meeting Amar Bose in person, and listening to an amazing concert hall
architectural simulation software/hardware system they had developed.

Very impressive, state of the art technology, according to Tom.  And if you
know Tom, he's got the best BS detector in the audio business.

My point is they have the technology; you can't say they don't.  They DO know
acoustics inside and out.

But they use their technology to "give the people what they want."  And they
make a ton of money doing so.

OK, so does that make them whores?

Perhaps.  But they're fantastically wealthy whores, with happy customers, who
get more respect out there in the world than all the other speaker guys get.

There's a lot to be said for that.

By the way, Alan -- if you really like the girl, you should make her a set
of speakers similar to those cute Bose speakers.

Perry

(C) 2000 Perry Sink / Fulcrum

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Hey Gang,

I'm continuing with some of the “send me your toughest marketing challenge”
questions that came back to me.

These are great questions.  Here's one:

Victoria writes:

"I own a small retail clothing store and am in the process of creating a radio
advertisement. I have already begun a poll of my current customers to see which
radio stations they prefer. I found that they have varied tastes and there are
at least six top stations with the others trailing close behind. Even when I
narrow down the possibilities I will still be left with the task of making the
ad. It's new territory for me. I've never done a radio ad before.

Thanks for the ezine. I enjoy it."

Victoria

Dear Victoria,

My first comment is that, as obvious as it may seem, I know that many business
do NOT poll their existing customers to find out what stations they listen to,
like they should.  They just go spend money.

You did ask the questions. And you asked the people who matter the most. That's
terrific. You might also go a step further to see if there's a time when most of
them are listening.

As far as content is concerned, obviously you want people to hear about you on
the radio and stop in and visit your store.  That's really the only thing that
counts.

If I were in your situation, I would think about it this way: If someone calls
you on the phone and asks you to explain what kind of clothing you sell or what
specials you're running (as I'm sure they sometimes do), you instinctively give
them a thirty- to sixty-second “soundbite” to persuade them to come in.

You should always have some kind of offer, or 'hook', to get them to come in
right away.

When they call, what do you tell them?  You probably tell them what's unique
about your store, and the unique needs that you cater to.  You're looking for a
'hot button' that will arouse their interest.  Maybe you tell them about the 2
for 1 special on blouses that only runs through Friday, hoping that they'll come
before they forget about it.

(By the way, 2 for the price of 1 is one of the simplest, easiest understood and
most effective offers you can make for anything!)

So if you have something really effective that you can tell people when they
call (which you should!) then that's the basis for your commercial.

Take the highlights out of that 1-2 minute phone call, and that's what the
content for your radio commercial should be.

If you do NOT have something that would make callers come into your store within
the next week, then you also do not have something that will be effective on
radio.  You need to invent something, and pronto!

Not sure what to offer?  Again, ask your existing customers for suggestions. 
Someone will always surprise you with a really great idea.

Hope this helps!

Perry

PS I strongly suggest that you read Jeff Paul's superb book on selling your
know-how with rifle-shot, precision target marketing!  You can learn a ton of
stuff from this book.  Visit http://www.usedtapes.com/4kperday.htm

PPS  I'm always eager to answer great questions like this one.  Got a challenge?
Email me: newsletter@...

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smartmarketing-subscribe@egroups.com, or to unsubscribe, email
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Hey Everybody!

I want to thank you folks for sending me a great collection of “tough
questions.”

They're all excellent.

And I'm going to answer every single one of them in turn.

I want you to know, I'm serious about helping you with your challenges, not just
selling you stuff.

Know whattamean?

OK, The first question is from Paul, who's promoting affiliate programs on the
net.  This is an EXCELLENT question.  And it deserves a good answer.

First, please take a minute to read his question:

        "Hi Perry, As far as a toughest challenge goes, and I know I speak for
more than just myself, it's "trying to recruit people on the Internet ".
First off there are so many programs out there nowadays, if there is one
there is a million.
      The main problem is that if you use the safelists or option lists, odds
are there is more than one person offering the same program you are so these
appear to be over overworked, at least with my experience. Not much luck.
       With ffa pages and free classifieds, the only people who find these are
the ones posting the free ads and they aren't interested in looking at other
offers, so these are basically useless too, for the most part.
        As far as paid advertisement, I have never really had any well know
marketers say which ones worked best for them and which ones are the best bet
for the money for what they provide as a quality service, and are not just a
fly by night take your money type of deal. Like the search engine
submissions, they do claim that the automated ones are filtered out by most
of the major search engines so these companies that use this software to
submit are pretty much a waste of money. Most of your Internet marketers
these days are average income people and aren't experts by no means as far as
promoting successfully on the Web. One just doesn't want to waste good money
foolishly on a pure guess. Do you have a list of services you have used, or
are using now, or know of others who have used them and gave it a thumbs up ?
I guess any marketing tips, tricks for advertising that you are familiar with
would help out many as they strive for success or to reach their goal, would
be appreciated.  Thanks you for your time and I hope you have a great day.
Bye for now.
                                                     Paul"


First, let me point out that, based on his question, I recognize that Paul has
actively pursued a number of avenues to promote himself on the Internet. 
(Congrats on being a player, Paul, and not being a spectator!)

And he's found that there's a lot more hot air than substance out there.

I'm actually going to take several issues to answer his question.

But the first thing I'm going to do is describe what has been my single most
successful Internet Marketing formula.

This is the formula I use to create my own customer list from scratch, rather
than buying one from other people--which, as Paul points out, is fraught with
problems.

It's “Affinity” lead generation.

Let me describe what it IS by first describing what it is NOT:

Let's say you put up a “world's greatest million dollar moneymaker affiliate
program website.”

Your site is for anyone who wants to make money on the Internet.  It's for every
person who's ever dreamed of owning a home based business.  And it's all they
could ever ask for, because all they need is a few hundred or a few thousand
affiliates and hyperlinks, and the money comes rolling in, right?

That's all fine, but what you're doing is trying to attract people based on the
fact that you simply offer these programs.  You're stepping right into the
middle of the fiercely competitive “business opportunity” market and offering
something fairly similar to what 1000 other people are offering.

It can be very difficult to distinguish yourself from everybody else.

That's the biggest marketing problem that most people have.

That is not “Affinity” lead generation.  It's “Try to sell to anybody and
everybody” Lead Generation.

Always remember this:

When EVERYBODY is potentially your customer, ironically, it's hard to find
ANYBODY who will be your customer.

That's because the marketing message becomes too vague.

And of course, by the very nature of affiliate programs, most of the visitors to
your site are probably people who already have affiliate programs they're
promoting, thus the problem you describe: trying to mostly sell to your
competitors, which doesn't work too well.

Here's what I do: I attract visitors to my site based on OTHER things, and other
very, very specific interests that they have.

Then I sell what I sell based on their specific known needs and wants, because I
know a great deal about them.

I can craft my marketing message to MATCH what they're already thinking about.

Here's an example:

Let's say you're promoting an affiliate program that sells herbs, vitamins, and
the opportunity to also represent those products.

You've got something for almost anybody, at least in theory.

But can you imagine trying to even show up on Yahoo or AltaVista or Excite when
someone types “herb”?

Or can you imagine how difficult it would be for your site to come up near the
top when someone types “business opportunity” or even “affiliate program”?

See, the odds are heavily stacked against you.  There's a thousand sites that
will show up ahead of yours.

BUT… Here's an example of affinity lead generation marketing, which gets around
that problem.

Let's say you have a lot of experience with Appaloosa horses.  You've loved
horses since you were a kid.  You read horse magazines.  You even owned an
Appaloosa, but then you sold it when you got a great job offer and had to move.

You know how Appaloosa horse owners think.  You're intimately familiar with this
microcosm of horse lovers.

You even know how the horses think.  (That has huge, huge possibilities all by
itself!)

So make an “Appaloosa Horse Lovers” web page, or team up with someone who
already has one.

Guess what!  When someone types in “Appaloosa Horses” into a search engine,
you've actually got a fighting chance of being found.

You know about Appaloosas, AND you're an expert on herbs.

COMBINE the two, and sell your herbs to horse lovers.  Tailor what you sell to
match their needs, their health concerns, and sell it to them using their lingo,
their likes, dislikes, hopes, fears, and prejudices.

You could have an e-zine devoted to the nutritional needs of horse owners.  If
you truly understand horse owners AND herbs, you won't have any problem doing
this.

Presto, you're building not only a list, but a “following” of people who've
given you permission to market to them.

That's infinitely better than a rented list of email addresses.

You're still selling the same herbs, and the same business opportunity.  But
you're “re-packaging" it with INFORMATION and you're making yourself “different”
than all the other “herb guys” out there.

Affinity marketing is a powerful marketing secret, I promise you.  When you can
do it properly, everything becomes much, much easier.

******************

This has already been a pretty long issue.  I am going to take time in the next
e-zine to talk more about Paul's questions.

For those of you who want to explore this subject further, I have some excellent
reading I'd like to recommend.

The BEST BOOK I've ever read that describes the process of “finding a
marketplace you can truly harmonize with--and selling them what they want”
through AFFINITY is by Jeff Paul.  It has the rather obnoxious title of “How To
Make $4000 A Day, Sitting At Your Kitchen Table In Your Underwear.”

The title refers to the fact that Jeff took his knowledge of a very specific
group of people, and sold “new” knowledge to those people – which he was able to
do because of his intimate understanding of their wants, needs, fears and
desires.

Jeff literally grossed $4000 per day or more, using the kind of affinity
marketing that I'm describing, working from his home.

Find out more about Jeff's book: Visit http://www.usedtapes.com/4kperday.htm

Sincerely,

Perry

P.S. Forward this message to your friends!  Give them a chance to subscribe,
too!

P.P.S.  Got a question?  Send it to newsletter@... or else reply to
this message.

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Hey Everybody!

Today's e-zine is not a micro-seminar like usual.

Instead, it's a very simple question I wish to ask you:

"What is your greatest sales or marketing challenge right now?"

Trying to help you out, without knowing what you really want to know, is like
throwing darts in a blizzard.

I want to hear from you!

Yes, that means YOU.  I want YOU to send me an email with your toughest
challenge.

Is it making too many phone calls?  Not making enough profit on each sale?  Are
you wondering what to do next on some project?  Dealing with tough competitors? 
Solving a tricky situation?  Trying to invent an advertising campaign that will
turn your business around?

Email me: newsletter@... with your toughest challenge.  Try to give me
some context re. what your business is about and what you want to accomplish.  I
promise I'll give you an answer... and make it an educational experience for
everyone.

Sincerely,

Perry

( Invite a friend to join us!  Pass this along.  Subscribe by sending an email
to smartmarketing-subscribe@egroups.com )



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Dan Kennedy, author of “Prospecting Sucks”, the landmark reference for Network
Marketers on using advertising to replace cold calling, relates an interesting
story:

“Recently, a well-known Hollywood star was discussing with me her desire to
start an MLM company.  It took considerable effort for me to talk her out of
it.”

No doubt his motivation was partly due to the fact that there are already so
many Network Marketing companies, and that the failure rate is pretty high for
startups.  But he further explained:

“It's taken Mary Kay Cosmetics 30+ years to get to the size of company they are.
It took the Victoria Principal Skincare product line only 18 months to get fully
half the size of Mary Kay, via Infomercials.

“The lesson?  Manual Labor selling is obsolete.  It's been replaced by Media.

“Victoria Principal's success, selling her products on TV, underscores this
fact.”

So does that mean all the folks out there who sell cosmetics or MLM
opportunities should quit and go do infomercials?

No.  Personally, I get in front of people and sell, face-to-face, every week. 
Media can never entirely replace that.

But what it does mean is that if you aren't using media in your business –
email, the internet, direct mail, radio, or newsletters (like I am), to
communicate with groups of people, and to make sure you're only spending
personal time with the RIGHT people – you're working a whole lot harder than you
should!

To find out more about Magnetic Marketing – the technology that eliminated cold
calling and manual-labor prospecting from my life – visit
http://www.usedtapes.com/magmarketing

If you're doing things the hard way in MLM, learn about Prospecting Sucks at
http://www.usedtapes.com/prospecting.html

Best of Success,

Perry Sink
The SmartMarketing Email Newsletter

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Comments?  Send them to newsletter@...

DotCom Bloodbath and the Return of Common Sense

Yesterday I got an email from a former “dotcom” employee: “IndustrialVortex has
failed in raising its second round of venture capital and has closed its doors. 
If you'd like to contact any of our former employees, email me at…”

This fella is a perfectly nice guy, and in writing about his company, I mean no
harm or insult to him personally.

After all, I bet he's not feeling real triumphant about this whole deal.  And I
certainly respect him more than some guy watching Monday Night Football who
thought of the idea but never bothered to do anything about it.

I'm reluctant to personally criticize these dotcom guys, because they're making
the same mistakes I've already made, just in a different way.

They're wasting money.

I wasted time.

Not only my time, but my family's time.  Time away from my wife, putting stress
into our relationship.  Time away from our small children, who grow up so fast,
if you blink, you'll miss a magic moment.

I used to fight with my wife about how much time I needed to spend away from
home, prospecting for new customers.  Or locked in some room making phone calls.

Great work ethic.  Pure, stubborn foolishness.  But more about this later.

Right now I'd like to point out some dotcom lessons that you can learn, at the
other guys' expense, even if you run a much, much smaller business.  Even if
you're not a “dot-com” at all.

Some background: This company's mission was to become the #1 spot for company
buyers to obtain equipment and all manner of industrial supplies etc.  A bold
ambition, no doubt.  They had a low cost fee structure which was attractive to
suppliers.  And they had hundreds of suppliers signed up.  Big companies, too.

They closed their doors just a few days ago.

First, let's talk about the “venture capital” issue.

Their first round of venture capital was 100 million dollars (!)

Based on his explanation, the problem might appear to be that they couldn't get
a 2nd $100 million.

I could do a lot of stuff with $100 million.  I bet you could, too!

The real problem: Not the lack of venture capital, but the lack of buyers.  I
don't know what they did with that $100 million, but whatever it was, it didn't
bring in customers.

For example, my company was signed up, and in the three months we were working
with them, I got only one request for bids, from a Big 3 automotive company. 
There was nothing on the request that we actually could sell them.  I suspect
that they simply sent the request to every supplier.

My first observation: You don't have to spend $100 million to find out if a
business is going to work or not.

Excuse me, let me rephrase that: You should NEVER spend your last $50 million
when the first $50 million didn't accomplish anything!

Imagine the stress, the disappointment and desperation of going down with a ship
that big!  Imagine trying to convince new investors, your employees and
yourself, that a few million more dollars is all that's needed to solve the
problem.

I'm not going to theorize about why the IndustrialVortex business model didn't
work (other than the obvious: it wasn't what people wanted).

Rather, I'd like to point out some things I've learned that you can put in the
bank.

**SMART MARKETING is figuring out what people want FIRST, then delivering it to
them!***

That's in stark contrast to the usual approach of coming up with a brilliant
idea, then convincing people to agree with you and give you their money.

If your approach is Market First, Product Second, you'll usually discover that
your first customers are easy and inexpensive to get, even though you may be
making lots of mistakes.

Here's an example:  Let's say you learned that there were some people who wanted
purple Siamese cats.  So you did some cat breeding voodoo and had a litter of
purple Siamese kittens.

You put a website on the net with Purple Siamese Cats For Sale, and you know
what?  You're the only site on the entire web that sells them.  People find you
almost by accident and the first litter is sold in a week!

As you begin to fill the demand, however—after you've sold 500 purple cats, it
becomes more expensive to get customers.  Pretty soon everyone searching for
Purple Cats on the web already has one, plus you get a couple of competitors. 
So now you have pressure to cut your prices and spend more for advertising.

If, in the process, you've gotten smart about running the details of that
business, you'll be OK.  You can deal with the competitors, and you can afford
to spend the ad money.

If you start with “Market First, Product Second” you don't need $100 million. 
Sometimes you can make profit with only a few hundred dollars of seed money.

The problem with many of the dotcoms is this: They sell “me too” products –
commodity items with low margins – and their business models have so much
baggage that they have to do $$$billions before they can even possibly turn a
profit.

They start out in a hole.  And life just gets worse from there.

Not the way you want to do things.

Here's another secret for small business people: If you are truly small – and if
you find that selling your product his a huge, uphill battle – if you keep
thinking to yourself, “this will be a lot easier when my business is bigger
someday” – that sounds like a characteristic of a crowded, “me-too” business
that will get harder, not easier, as it grows.

You should search for a different angle and try again.

Here's an example of testing BEFORE blowing a wad of dough.

Let's say that the Sharper Image catalog people guess that the Omaha Steaks
customers might be a good match.

Do they rent the whole list and send out 50,000 catalogs?

Absolutely not.  Smart direct marketers ALWAYS test their hunches first.

They start with 1000 names and monitor the results.

If they get a good response – and I guarantee you, they know their numbers –
they'll do 5,000.  They'll roll it out gradually, monitoring results along the
way.

If they don't get a good response, it stops right there, and they try something
else.

Constant use of this kind of testing and experimentation with multiple offers,
products and targets literally leads you to the next success.

This stuff all sounds like common sense.  But let me assure you, I know MBAs who
don't get it.  They wouldn't be caught dead launching a business from a card
table in the back room.  Not enough status in that!  “Real” businesses have
expensive furniture, prestigious addresses, lovely receptionists, lawyers and IT
departments, right?

We all know that common sense is uncommon.  But some people ARE making money on
the web.  And I have a prediction to make: the marketplace will eventually pound
common sense into the folks who think businesses need all those trappings.

The marketplace eventually pounded sense into me, with the help of some astute
marketers who finally “showed me the light.”

I spent years in sales, experiencing little success, pounding pavement, making
phone calls, and every other kind of drudgery you can imagine.

My biggest regret is that I didn't figure out much, much sooner that what I was
doing was not working.  I needed to change my approach.

Fortunately, someone came along and pounded some sense into my thick skull.  My
“revelation of common sense” came in the form of Dan Kennedy's Magnetic
Marketing Kit.  Dan taught me how to make customers find me, instead of me
finding the customers.

And, to make a long story short, my experience as a salesperson has changed
radically from what it was then.  Most of my customers (more than ninety
percent) call me first, instead of me calling them.

I sort through the opportunities and only spend my time with the ones most
likely to give me money.

I believe that whether you're a consultant, MLM distributor, industrial sales
person, retailer, butcher, baker or candlestick maker, you can experience a
similar breakthrough!

If a steady stream of qualified customers calling you, faxing you, or sending
you emails every day sounds appealing, I strongly recommend that you read the
rest of my story at http://www.usedtapes.com/magmarketing.

Sincerely,

Perry Sink
sales@...



(c)2000 Perry Sink / FULCRUM Time Leveraging Systems