The challenge – the thing that separates the men from the boys in this game – is to deliver exhilaration and still tell the truth. This is not impossible; in fact doing so is the job of any honest business person. But to do so, you have to take the higher road. Let me explain.
There is a LOT of snake oil in the audio business. Like those exotic speaker cables, or $500 blocks of wood that make your equipment sound better just by sticking it on top of your gear (what do people think this is, some kind of idol or incantation?). Ten years ago the fad was “tuning dots,” tiny adhesive circles that you stuck on stuff, allegedly curing its sonic ills. One guy even sold vials of bull semen and said if you smeared it on your CD’s it would make them sound better. There’s a lot of this kind of stuff going on, and if the feds didn’t have bigger fish to fry, they’d put a lot of these fellas in jail.
A few years ago I wrote an article for Voice Coil Magazine, the trade journal for insiders in the speaker business, addressing this:
Here’s my quick-and-dirty list of things you can change in your system to make it sound different, and hopefully better, in relative order of how much those things will actually influence the sound:
1. Your listening room
2. Your crossover design and cabinetry
3. The speakers themselves
4. How much clean power you have available
5. Inductors (replacing ones that saturate with ones that don’t)
6. Signal sources, amps, preamps, D/As, etc.
7. Speaker stands
8. Capacitors
9. Cables
One of the things that became clear to me as I worked on audio systems was that items on the top of the list are difficult to change, require genuine insight into problems that most people haven’t studied, and are difficult to “sell” in the sense of swiping somebody’s American Express card and providing immediate gratification (with the notable exception of simply buying new speakers off the showroom floor).
However, the items on the bottom of the list are easy to swap and have the highest profit margins, even though they hardly make any difference at all. So those are the things that get the most attention in the press. Somebody will always be happy to lighten your wallet with something that makes more of an imaginary than real difference, simply because it’s profitable.
So when our engineers (many of whom own excellent home audio systems) would go to a show like CES, we would spend most of our time at the high-end portion, thoroughly appreciating the guys that were making real progress, doing real research, and certainly taking notice of the best-sounding rooms. And we also didn’t miss any opportunities to make light of voodoo and magic tricks!
The thing you must know is that all of the benefits claimed for the snake-oil stuff on the bottom of the list, are actually realized when you fix things on the top of the list. You fix the problems with your room and your speakers, and well… you can feel the heat from Dee Dee Bridgewater’s low-cut blouse.
In other words, there is real money to be made by actually solving problems instead of merely pretending to solve problems. And in most professions, you’ll keep your customers a lot longer if what you sell actually works.
Every business, every industry, every profession has a list like this. A list of legitimate solutions, a list of imaginary ones. Every industry has people who cater to both. Doesn’t matter if we’re talking about diet pills or internet marketing or fishing lures or CRM software or guitar strings or management consulting. And the savvy, ethical marketer actively sells against the con men.
Joe Polish, the leading marketing consultant in the carpet cleaning industry, enraged thousands of sleazebags in his business when he started teaching his members how to expose the con men and bait and switchers. He appeared on ABC’s 20/20 and deconstructed their lies. He even got death threats on his answering machine.
But he also raised the bar in his business, forcing a lot of those flim-flam men out of business. In the process he’s acquired a rabid cult following of entrepreneurs who follow his formula, sell premium services and command premium prices. He’s got small operators with only a couple of trucks who rake in $250,000 per year. They send him testimonial videos, gushing about how he replaced the insipid droning of their dreary lives with purpose and success. They brag to their fellow carpet-cleaner friends about how Joe helped send their kids to Stanford.
What’s not to like about that? (Aside from the fact that the kids’ carpet cleaner parents may have more common sense than the profs at Stanford.)
Joe could have taken the opposite approach – he could teach his customers bait-andswitch.
But what kind of following would he end up with? Thugs who would stab him in the back, knock him off and rip him off, not revere him.
My CD Guerilla Marketing for Hi-Tech Sales People has been heard and read by tens of thousands of people in the last three years, and it’s really the cornerstone of “Perry Marshall 101.” You wanna understand my approach to sales and marketing, you start right there.
I wrote the script for that at my local coffee bar, Buzz Café. I came home and realized it still needed an introduction. I scribbled down this:
It’s very important to recognize the difference between a principle and a technique. A technique is a “trick” that you use to get something done, something that works in a very specific situation. A principle, however, is something that’s universally true, something that transcends any particular company or circumstance. Today we’re going to talk about principles, not techniques. That means that not only does this information apply to my business, it applies to your business, and every other business.
Secondly, that means this information will be just as true 20 years from now as it is today.
Businesses are failing today because they are ignoring principles and trying to replace them with techniques. If you’re struggling to bring a product to market, if you’re working harder than you know you should, then pay attention.
As I wrote this, I was defining the exact kind of customer I intended to attract. Not some shallow guy looking for a get-rich-quick scheme, but the person who’s already been through all that nonsense and who is ready to listen to hard truths. I can now report that this is exactly the sort of customer I do attract. For example I’ve got customers who are into Stephen Covey (author of “7 Habits of Highly Effective People) who specifically mentioned this part of the CD as something that really forced them to pay attention.
Principles are the elements of history that repeat themselves, even as the names and faces and mundane details change. They’re the underlying mechanisms that govern human behavior, cause and effect, success and failure. If you recognize the principle behind the technique, you can easily figure out how to apply it to a different situation. Back in 1989 I remember my favorite college professor Dr. Knoll, reading a passage out of some English author – maybe it was a story from Dryden, I can’t remember. But he got done reading this section and said “Class, you know what this is?
This is Ollie North, except this version of the story was written 400 years ago.”
There is an interesting side benefit of focusing on principles instead of techniques, particularly when you’re selling information. It’s a clever way of telling people what to do without telling them how to do it (i.e., without giving too much information away).
They’ll pay money for the how.
