Professional vs. Corporate

In my new White Papers course, I talk about being professional without being corporate.

Howard Jacobsen, another sharp marketer, asked me to define this further.

I think it’s a great question, because there’s a subtle but important distinction.

Professional means exhibiting, communicating, and delivering excellent results, exercising great skill and knowing how to do your job. It means showing up dressed sharply in a perfectly fitting suit and tie, if that’s what’s expected; it means being organized, efficient and displaying an air of competence.

Corporate means institutional. Corporate means showing your customers the face of a building instead of the face of a person. On the surface, corporate seems impressive because it’s imposing and large. But it always engenders distrust. It’s always characterized by “I’m sorry, but that’s against our policy”… “Operations says that we cannot rectify that problem at this time”…

“ACME Corporation is the world’s largest international producer of ISO9000 certified, best of breed, robust and scalable e-commerce solutions.”

Corporations are made up of people, and usually those people are hiding behind the façade, masking their insecurities and making up excuses that their customers are somewhat conditioned to accept. When I use the word Corporate, I’m talking about bureaucracy and Byzantine complexity.

Stuff that repels customers.

But you can be professional without being corporate. You can be organized, competent, efficient and informed, you can dress sharply and make a great impression, but still be personal. You can extend your warm, fleshy palm and shake their hand instead of giving them a robotic arm. The key is to be personal and professional at the same time. Both of those things work for you.

Corporate will always work against you.

One of the big mistakes that growing companies make is shedding the personal in favor of the Big Corporate Image, thinking that people will be impressed by it.

Nobody’s impressed except the execs playing golf.

You know what impresses people? Having their disputes resolved by empathetic customer service people. Having access to the president when something’s going way wrong – and getting a listening, caring ear. Getting performance and guarantees instead of stalls and excuses.

That’s why I always put the Tom Hoobyar CD in the “read this first” envelope in my marketing system toolkit. ASEPCO (www.asepco.com) is an embodiment of Personal and Professional taking precedence over Corporate. They can talk about sex in their advertising without being considered unprofessional, because the experience of doing business with ASEPCO is intensely personal, and they back up everything they do with ballsy guarantees.

Adding a Front End and a Back End

You can think of these two mechanisms as being added to the front and back of what companies are already doing. Most companies are already saying “we make this product, and here’s what it does.” Sometimes they’re doing a lousy job of it, but they’re doing it.

But now we’re going to add a lead generation magnet at the front end – it dramatically increases response to all advertising – and we’re going to add an intriguing offers and guarantees at the back end – it helps you drive a stake in the ground when it’s time to close a sale.

When you add a complete front and back end to your marketing message as I’ve described – beginning with a good headline, you literally increase the magnetism of your business by a factor of five or ten.

The other day I explained lead generation magnets and white papers this way: Remember Steven Covey’s book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People? This book talks about the idea of the “Emotional Bank Account” – everyone you deal with has one, and you’ve got a balance. If they don’t know you, it’s zero. Every time you serve someone, help someone, you make a deposit. Every time you ask them to do something for you, you make a withdrawal. Once you’re zero or negative, you can’t get anything out anymore – the relationship seizes.

Most marketers attempt to make withdrawals from their customers’ emotional bank account before they’ve made any deposits. Most of the time they try to make a withdrawal based on a vague promise. It doesn’t work.

Lead Generation Magnets – white papers and such that give people information about solving problems – are deposits that you make before trying to withdraw.

If someone uses your information to improve their business before they give you any money – and it works – then now you’ve earned trust. You’ve earned the right to communicate with them.

Magic Success Ingredient: One Skill and Two Tactics

When you get right down to it, 80% of my work with clients and members can be reduced to one essential skill and the addition of two mechanisms to their business:

The skill: Writing good, attention-getting headlines so that people will want to read or listen to you.

The two mechanisms:

1) Creating & marketing lead generation magnets (i.e. white papers, reports, guides, etc.) and

2) Re-packaging and bundling your products and services into an intriguing, cohesive “widget” with guarantees and a powerful offer.

Re-Inventing an IT Business With a Killer Guarantee

Here’s an example. In January, Gold member Ciro Cetrangolo started an Information Technology company here in Chicago. According to traditional wisdom, right now is a very bad time to start an IT company.

And yes, the Ciscos and Nortels of the world are in the tank right now, but the fact is, most IT customers aren’t in the IT business (duh). They’re butchers, bakers and candlestick makers. Which means that all of this moaning about IT doesn’t apply nearly as much as people think it does.

Most of our conversation was focused on a risk-reversing guarantee. We put the ideas together, then he used a consulting certificate to fine tune it. Here’s his guarantee, from www.integrationworksinc.com:

Our Unique Support Guarantee:

Because our services are critical to the companies and people we service, we do more than make promises. We live up to them. The only way we can proper is by helping you succeed.

The first time done right promise:

With Integrationworks you’ll never pay for one project two times.

We believe in doing the job right the first time, every time. If we have to return to fix the same thing you don’t pay.

Business Critical Service:

Integrationworks guarantees your up-time! If your server goes down as a result of our oversight or error there is no charge for the time, materials, etc, to bring you back up and prevent the problem from ever occurring again.

Have you ever paid a consultant to install a system… then paid him to fix it… then paid him to fix it again? While our competitors profit two or three times for “emergency service”, we insure it doesn’t happen in the first place! If we specified, installed, and maintain your systems, and it ever goes down as a result of our errors, oversight, fault, etc, we’ll fix it for free. No matter what it takes, that includes parts, labor, and anything else necessary including the pizzas.

President Direct:

Integrationworks Gold level customers will always have direct emergency 24/7/365 access to the president of this company.

There’s nothing more frustrating than not being able to get a hold of your technology provider in an emergency. And even with all of the technical (call forwarding, answering services, etc, etc) systems we have in place to insure that never happens, there’s always a chance a call could slip trough, which is completely unacceptable to us.

That’s why our Gold level customers always have direct emergency access to my (the president’s) home phone number and mobile number for emergencies. The same phone I carry with me into the bathroom, the phone I set on the nightstand next to me when snuggling with my honey, the same phone I carry with me 24 hours a day, even on vacation.

So here’s what happened: He sent me this email:

Dear Perry:

As you know I bought the kit ($1000.00), I did the USP and the guarantee with your guidance and assistance, as I was still working on the letters, web site, white paper / report etc, etc, I sent out just my USP and Guarantee on real nice paper one on one side one on the back to people I had done quotes for before but not business with, basically people I had lost business to before.

About 15-30 of them total postage:$12.00. One of them called me and said he wanted a network review, I again used what I had learned from you and told him I could do that, and I charge $250.00 for a network evaluation and upgrade strategy planning. He accepted it, and I did it for him, telling him during the review of this that he can bid it out, etc, etc using my plan as an RFP. He said, basically referring to my guarantee, that “You’re the first guy / company that really understand customer service and standing behind your products and service, that’s something I’ve never seen in all my years dealing with you guys.”

He went on to tell me I didn’t have any competition and that I could book the dates for the install. (And I later got a check – that’s my own policy from previous experience). About $30,000 in business. Total Investment: $1012.00, not too bad.

Ciro

OK, so what’s the difference between Ciro and all of the unemployed IT consultants out there?

Let’s assume that they know just as much about installing computers and networks as he does. He’s got a significant advantage on a couple of major fronts:

1.) Ciro talks to people in plain English. This is very, very important. Open the Yellow Pages and look up Information Technology. What do you see? A bunch of techno-Latin about MCSE certification, a bunch of big-company logos, and a forewarning that the guy who shows up to fix your server is going to have a surly, holier-than-thou attitude and speak a foreign language.

2.) Ciro takes on the risk. This is real important. Last week I talked to a guy who works for a major robotics company. In his business, if he gets a contract, he is going to make the equipment work, come heck or high water, because he couldn’t possibly afford the black eye he’d get if everyone found out that his company screwed up the installation at a new General Motors plant. But this is a big corporation (back up a couple of pages if you missed my opinion about big corporations) and the big company won’t state any guarantees up front. They’re going to have to support this anyway – so why not guarantee it at the outset?

In Ciro’s case, the customer’s experience is not that much different than a car repair: You don’t want to pay for them to figure it out twice or three times. Ciro guarantees that they won’t. Also note that having a guarantee prevents you from taking on projects that you really shouldn’t take. It serves as a sanity check so that people you can’t help don’t give you their money.

3.) His “President Direct” guarantee assures people that if push ever comes to shove, they’ll get a real human being who’ll take action – not a voice mailbox. That’s enormously appealing.

4.) He’s got a lead generation system put together (barely had time to implement it, since his hands are full with new business) so that he can always turn on the spigot and get new customers at will.

Add these together and you’ve got a killer proposition that’s head and shoulders above everyone else. Ciro is recession-proof. You can be, too.

Building an Empire Vs. Building a Business to Support Your Lifestyle

Most sales managers are empire builders. Most corporate people are empire builders. But it’s a shocking experience when the empire comes crumbling down because it was built on a pile of false premises.

Look at Wall Street – posers get exposed every day. The economy tanks and everyone’s caught with their pants down. Why does it happen? It’s not because it has to be that way. It happens because people at Enron and Worldcom and Andersen Consulting are obsessed with appearances, not reality.

When the economy is bad, there’s a Darwinian effect – the posers get stripped naked. But the businesses that truly serve people, the ones that are based on the “is” world instead of the “should be” world or the “looks good” world – they do just fine.

The Curse of Perry Marshall

In This Issue…

􀀹 The Curse of Perry Marshall

􀀹 Executive Board Room Kindergarten

􀀹 $500,000 Business on a Card Table

􀀹 $30K Sales from a $12 of Advertising Expense

􀀹 The Difference Between Professional and Corporate

􀀹 Marketing When You’ve Got a ZERO Budget

Terence Dove is a new member in the UK who operates a transportation company. He sent me this email just the other day:

To: Perry Marshall

From: Terence Dove

Re: The Curse of Perry Marshall

Perry, your marketing system is great and everything but have you ever thought of how you can mess peoples heads up!!!!!!

Advertising is everywhere, most people ignore most of it and can get on with their day. I used to be one of those people before I got the system. Now I cant ignore any advertising at all. I am tormented, I look at every ad and think “that doesn’t work, they should do it this way, maybe if they wrote blah blah”. I cant even walk into a store without checking ALL the headlines on the magazine shelves and just last night, in the pub, I realised how deadly this curse really is.

I was getting pretty drunk with a few friends and needed to visit the gents (the bathroom). So, like i say advertising is everywhere, and in this place they have A4 size ads at head height above each individual urinal.

Thats great space because you have to read it, you cant look anywhere else. Anyway I read the ad, selling personalised license plates, thinking this ad is crap, its just a list of example license plates that don’t apply to me, maybe if they wrote etc etc.

So i finished, washed my hands and then the curse really kicked in…..I returned to the urinal and stood there, studying the ad with my hands on my hips thinking of how to improve it!!! There are guys walking in and out of the bathroom wondering ‘what the hell is that crazy man doing, he’s been standing in front of that pisser for ages, staring at the wall’. I only snapped out of it when one guy actually asked me if i was ok!!

So, for heavens sake, you must include a warning with your toolkit like “Warning: Using this system may cause you to embarrass yourself in public places”.

regards

Terence Dove

P.S. Hey, I just thought, even as I write this “I have just written a great article for Perry- damn, what a great headline- the curse of Perry Marshall”.. AAAARGH I’m doing it now, this curse is too much. I was very moved by this note, and wanted to console him. So I sent him this reply:

Dear Terence,

Thank you for your touching story of angst and advertising dysfunction. I feel your pain – really, I do. But you’ll eventually adjust to seeing stupid advertising everywhere and accept it as part of the ugly reality of life – besides, the money you’re making from your own efforts will console you and calm your troubled spirit.

Yours Truly,

Perry Marshall

Now that Terence recognizes good advertising when he sees it, he knows that most of the rest of the folks in ad-world are clueless.

Never forget this:

Ignorance is bliss, but you can’t un-learn a truth.

To the uninitiated – to people who haven’t spent time sitting in board rooms, listening to executives pontificate about what they think is going on inside their companies – the business world appears to be sophisticated, savvy, and populated by very, very smart people.

Lee Iacocca had a different point of view:

“If you make believe that ten guys in pin-striped suits are back in a kindergarten class playing with building blocks, you’ll get a rough picture of what life in a corporation is like. Grown men in a meeting will do anything — absolutely anything — to avoid being shown up. If someone doesn’t know the facts about a subject, he’ll ad-lib, just like a kid.”

Once you become informed and truly, genuinely competent in even just one aspect of running a business – management, marketing, advertising, finance, operations, quality control, whatever – you’ll start to see that most people in business are posers. They just bluff their way through everything.

That’s how ad agencies stay afloat, folks. They don’t really know what they’re doing – I repeat, they really don’t know what they’re doing. Because if ad agencies did know what they’re doing, they would advertise, too.

They just sound like they know what they’re doing. Their real job is to stroke the egos of insecure posers, not to bring in new customers. The ad agency business, and all their self-centered puffery, exists for the purpose of stroking executive egos. The ads you see in magazines and on TV are what VIP’s want to see, not what customers want to see.

One time I sat in on a board of directors meeting – something I wasn’t normally privy to – and listened to my boss spew out a sales forecast that bore no resemblance to reality whatsoever.

Reality is no match for a good fantasy. 

I mentioned to someone that what he was telling the board was grossly inaccurate. The reply:

“Nobody really cares about the details as long as he’s making his numbers.”

That’s par for the course, folks.

Within a corporation, one of the ruling forces is paranoia. Paranoia that somebody’s about to stab you in the back, paranoia that the employees are walking out the back door with your stash, paranoia that somebody knows more than you. And in the corporate world, all of those fears are valid.

But in the entrepreneurial world, a different form of paranoia is needed: Paranoia that you don’t know what you think you know, that the assumptions you’re making about your customers are wrong, paranoia that the things you’re investing in may not be the things that really pay off. One of the keys to success in direct marketing is being aware of what your assumptions are – and questioning everything that hasn’t been proved.

That kind of thinking doesn’t work too well in boardrooms, but it’s enormously profitable when results truly matter.

I know several people running businesses out of their spare bedrooms that make more money than most executives – in some cases, more money than entire companies. Yanik Silver, who wrote a couple of chapters for my marketing toolkit, made over $500,000 last year selling e-books. He spent the summer on the beach in Southern California, because his business is completely portable. He runs that business ‘on a card table’ with the help of his wife, Melissa.

The reason his income is comparable to Amazon.com’s, but with none of the warehouses, debts, shareholder meetings or political nonsense, is that he’s very focused on making his business support his lifestyle. Yanik is a hard-core direct marketing fundamentalist. He’s got a big pile of marketing books written between 1890 and 1930, a period when advertising was characterized by ruthless pragmatism.

He knows his customer base. He doesn’t try new ideas, he recycles old ones. He doesn’t lay new track, he runs the same train over the existing track as many times as he can.

Tribute to a Close Friend:Laurin Drent, 1946-2003

I’m sad to chronicle the passing of a special friend, Laurin Drent. Laurin deserves special mention in this newsletter because he’s the guy that introduced me to the challenging world of sales.

I’ve often talked about the fact that just about every savvy marketer and top-performing sales person I’ve ever known started out in some kind of person-to-person, door to door, get-in-front-of-Fred-and-Doris-and-sell-‘emsomething business. The kind of sales that Zig Ziglar talks about when he’s jumpin’ around on the stage, motivatin’ the troops.

When I was 21, my friend Bill Lahman invited me to hear about a “business opportunity”—my first exposure to Multi-Level Marketing. When I showed up Bill’s apartment, Laurin Drent was the guy who drew the circles.

I was in engineering school at the time, and it was a meeting that was destined to change the direction of my life.

I had already known Laurin for several years. My father died when I was 17, my mom had to go back to work, and we didn’t have a lot of extra money laying around. So Laurin, who was a shade tree mechanic par excellence, took it upon himself to help out my mom. He would come over and fix our car for free—he only charged mom for the parts—and I would sit in the garage and talk with him until late in the night as he taught me about cooling systems and oil changes and all that jazz. If I’m not mistaken, Laurin taught me how to change the oil in a car.

Mom and I would occasionally discuss the fact that there were plenty o’ folks at church who talked religion, but Laurin lived it.

So anyway, when Laurin started talking about marketing the product instead of just developing it, it was a pretty foreign idea to me. Frankly, it was light years out of my comfort zone. But I knew he had a good heart and I knew I could trust him, so I took the plunge.

My career as a network marketer was notably unsuccessful—and today I believe it’s a nearly obsolete business. But nonetheless, MLM is a very forgiving environment in which people with zero selling experience can get lots of hands-on assistance, develop considerable sales proficiency, acquire strong presentation skills, and learn to think on their feet and persuade.

That was precisely where I developed most of the essential sales skills that I use today. So I owe Laurin a debt of gratitude. I could call him any time and be assured of a listening ear. I remember a particularly distressing time, when my career was going down in flames, he helped talk me through a change that turned out to be very rewarding.

Another way in which Laurin set the pace was in the forgiveness department. Laurin went through a very difficult circumstance in which he was falsely accused and his reputation was trashed by others. I won’t belabor the details, but he made a resolute, daily decision to replace anger and retaliation with forgiveness and mercy. Only a man’s man can do that.

A year and a half ago we discovered that Laurin had cancer. He was given 3 to 6 months to live, with virtually zero chance of recovery using traditional medicine. He and Diana valiantly pursued alternatives, including trips to Mexico. I think it was at least somewhat effective; his doctors were constantly astonished that he was still carrying on a year later and more. But he finally succumbed to the illness on January 27.

My heart and prayers go out to Diana. It’s easy to eulogize the departed so one might be tempted to think Laurin was just an ordinary guy. But Diana and I know otherwise.

You never know what might happen when you help a widow in distress or strike up a friendship with a skinny 17 year old punk. Last I checked, we only get one shot at this life. Sure would be a shame to leave behind a bankful of dough and an empty funeral parlor, wouldn’t it?

Laurin’s example continues to inspire me to get outside myself and make a positive difference. I hope you’ll do the same.

Laurin—Rest in peace, my friend. Thanks for being a great buddy. I look forward to seeing you again sometime…

Perry S. Marshall

Laurin Drent: Turning lemons into lemonade, and treating friends like family

Back Page: A Rarely Discussed “Secret Weapon” Wielded by All True Masters of Every Discipline

True Experts, Original Sources and First Principles

Phil Alexander, who’s on my advisory board, has one of the largest collections of rare marketing and advertising books in the world. If there’s a “historian” of the Information Marketing business, he’s it. People routinely pay Phil hundreds of dollars to find exceedingly rare, out-of-print books.

Phil made a very shrewd comment to me the other day: The people who are interested in these hoary texts are almost without exception the very best and brightest and highest paid in any profession. The casual worker bee, by contrast, isn’t all that interested.

For example: Phil and I went to a seminar in Orlando last April, and Phil had this old book from the 1920’s. There were two people who, without prompting, walked by, saw the book, picked it up and studied it with great interest. The two people were John Carlton and Scott Haines. John and Scott are two of the most successful, and highest paid, advertising copywriters in the country.

Coincidence? Not on your life. These guys are rabid consumers of everything they can get their hands on. And they’ll both tell you that the very best books on the subject of advertising were written almost 100 years ago.

In October I got another confirmation of this truth: I went to a presentation on audio power amplifier design at Crown International in Indiana. The speaker was Gerald Stanley, one of the most talented amplifier designers alive today. Crown is one of the largest companies in the business, and Mr. Stanley has been the genius behind Crown’s amplifiers for the last 30 years. About ten different times during his talk, Mr. Stanley referred to a book on amplifier design from 1931. He didn’t talk about very many other books or papers.

So what’s the significance of this? The author of the 1931 amplifier book did some truly original, groundbreaking work. He was a true genius. Most of the people who came after him were just copycats. Most of the other designs that came after were inferior derivatives of that original work. The fact is, truly groundbreaking discoveries are very rare and unusual. Those who make those discoveries usually aren’t coming up with new techniques – they’re identifying previously unknown principles.

Similarly, take someone like Claude Hopkins, author of Scientific Advertising, written in 1918. My late grandfather was only four years old when that book was written! Hopkins is the inventor of coupons, and he is one of the titans of advertising. And he’s ignored by most people in the ad business today, who are too busy doing stupid things to study the old masters. But you can take that book and apply it to Internet advertising in 2002 and you’ll be standing on solid rock.

I include his book with my system because it’s an early source and it is written from “first principles.”

It truly lays down the essentials. A foundation built on this book is a foundation that will last.

People who are bona fide experts in a given field almost always approach things differently than everyone else. And they have an unusual ability to separate fact from fiction, to discern the difference between trends, fads and underlying truths. So like I always say, if you need a new idea, read an old book.

By the way, if you’re looking for a new idea from an old advertising book, contact Phil: phil@commandperform.com

The Big Picture: Anatomy of an Autopilot Marketing System for B2B Sales

Sales

Letter 1

Sales

Letter 2

Sales

Letter 3

Enticement is an advertisement, article or PR announcement in any media that reaches your target audience

Your Sales Funnel $

Ongoing adjustment for improved results

Another Rant – This One May Sound Familiar

I’ve got my own perpetual rant, implicit in my Unique Selling Proposition. There’s two versions of it. One is the rant about small business owners having no marketing system in place, and all the problems that result from their lack of “deal flow.”

The other rant is the salesperson’s version of the same thing. It’s when the marketing system is the blood, sweat, tears, cold calls and shoe leather of a commissioned sales person.

Well this month in InTech magazine, which is the largest trade journal in the Process Control / Automation industry, I’ve got a column on the back page. I’m reprinting it here for two reasons:

Drip Irrigation Sales Letter bridges the gap between the itch and the scratch.

Multiple, linked sales letters dramatically multiply response “Drip Irrigation” via newsletters and new offers keeps in touch with prospects who aren’t ready to buy yet. Personal followup closes the deal. Personal Follow Up Bait = Enticement for an Information Widget or White Paper

1. This is a live example of avoiding excess editorial commercialism and winning the audience at the same time by focusing on the pain, not the solution.

2. Notice the book offer at the end – my “Guerilla Marketing for Hi-Tech Sales People,” but under a different title. This offer is exactly the golden formula for getting 100 sales leads from a free column in a trade magazine. I betcha nothing else in this magazine produced that much response. You should structure your magazine articles exactly the same way. This space would have cost $10,000 if it had been an ad.