[WAMA] Perry Marshall "Ask Me Anything" Warrior Forum Thursday February 12 5pm EST

We're really excited to be holding our next Warrior Ask Me Anything event with Internet Marketing legend Perry Marshall. Perry is a best selling author of books such as 80/20 Sales & Marketing, The Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords and Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising.

Watch the Perry Marshall WAMA Replay Here

Transcript of the Warrior Ask Me Anything (WAMA) Event with Perry Marshall:


Welcome to Warrior TV. This is Warrior Ask Me Anything where we bring to you the world’s best internet marketers and online entrepreneurs for you to interact with.

Today I’m very excited to be joined with Perry Marshall. Perry Marshall is an internet marketing veteran and bestselling author of several books, most notable being 80/20 Sales and Marketing, Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords and Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertizing.

Welcome Perry.

[00:33]

Perry: Hey it’s great to be here you know, Warrior Forum is huge and it is very famous and it is really special to be here today. So we will knock your socks off with some great content and I know you have got some good questions here that have come in. So looking forward to it.

[00:50]

Alaister: Yeah we sent an email last week promoting your event and the response was overwhelming. We received I think record high registrations and questions. So I know the community is eager and really excited to hear from you Perry.

[01:04]

Perry: Well it’s great to be here so yeah let’s rock it and see what comes out of our conversation today.

[01:12]

Alaister: Excellent. So before we dive straight into the questions, why don’t you talk a little bit about how you actually got started with internet marketing, what led you to where you are today?

[01:21]

Perry: Well you know really it started with the pain and suffering of getting laid off from my engineering job and having to go into sales and like having scrap and baloney sandwiches and ramen soup for a couple of years while I started to figure out what I never knew that I didn’t know. I didn’t really understand a unique selling proposition and half of what I sold didn’t really have it. I didn’t really understand positioning and I didn’t have any. I didn’t understand marketing; I had none of that. I was pounding the phone. I was like doing just about everything wrong that you could possibly do wrong and I thought that elbow grease and good intentions and “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough and people like me” affirmations in the mirror and all that were going to help. And they really didn’t.

And you know sometimes you sort of accidentally stumble into things. Well I got fired from my job and I took this other job and you know this new company I worked for it was a little kind of a nothing of a company. I mean they actually had several software engineers working doing projects but I was in charge of the products line and the product line was really, it was pretty cool but they were hardly doing anything with it. But the thing they had was they had a good website and by the way this is 1998 okay. They had a good website and engineers who those were our customers were on the web looking for stuff back then. And the owner had managed to do a couple of things right and they were getting traffic. And they were getting traffic because they were delivering really clear useful information where everybody else was just kind of babbling.

And it didn’t take a lot of organization and shuffling things around to actually start to have leads coming to my desk every single day. And then talking to people being properly positioned and finding that when you set everything up right at the outset, it was actually fairly easy to sell stuff. And it was like the greatest form of therapy. I mean first of all I was tremendously relieved because had we stayed on the path I was on we would have probably gone bankrupt or something, my wife and I. But all of a sudden it was like, wow, we are actually paying our bills and we are actually chunking away a couple hundred bucks a month to pay off this massive credit card balance that we had managed to accumulate. You know and I don’t have it all solved but at least I’m not about to fall into the ocean and disappear.

And that is kind of how it got started. And about that time I had discovered direct marketing. I was reading Dan Kennedy newsletters which at the time were not talking about the internet at all. However I was smart enough to realize that all the stuff that Dan was talking about with print ads and direct mail applied perfectly to web pages and I got that and little by little we started doing stuff and four years later that company got sold to a public company for eighteen million dollars and I parachuted out with stock options, and it was really cool and it was completely, it was a complete 180 from how I had gone in and barely even paying my bills or buying diapers.

And so you know then I was like, so first of all, what if I got really good at this, you know, instead of just kind of good. And secondly I hung out my shingle and I said, okay if I can do this for my employer I can do this as a consultant and I could make money on my own terms instead of working for the man, so that’s what I did. And you know I’m still friends with the old boss Mike I had at the old company. In fact he hired me a year or two ago to do a little bit of consulting with them and it’s you know I would see friends come and go but enemies accumulate. So you know, he was the boss and he was the man and I did have the man’s boot under my neck but there is an actual period of time in your life when working for a company can be extremely educational. And there are some people that are listening in today are still working for the man, and I hope you are getting all of the education that you can get from wherever you are at.

[06:35]

Alaister: That is a fascinating story I mean in a couple of WAMA’s previously we spoke to Mike King and he sort of said a lot of his internet marketing experience and where he sort of what he has achieved today came a lot from his selling experience and it seems as if that is sort of what kick started your career as well. Would you recommend someone who is looking to get into internet marketing or further their skills in internet marketing to sort of perfect the art of selling?

[07:06]

Perry: Yeah you know and it kind of depends on who you are. And I have a tool called the marketing DNA test which I’m going to do something I don’t usually do, I am going to tell you how you can take it for free later. So please remind me okay.

Alaister: Sure okay.

Perry: But you know I think some people should be selling face to face and person to person and on the phone or whatever the case may be, and some people shouldn’t and the marketing DNA test is really good at determining that you know, like some people are hostage negotiators you know, and like you just throw them in a situation and they will somehow manage to negotiate and work out the deal or make the person happy but other people sell very differently. Some people sell by editing videos and doing things like that. Some people sell by writing and they want to sit in their cave and write perfect sales letters and then sell that way. You know there is a lot of different ways to sell. \

But having said that, I can tell you, you know I have got this thing I call it my pink Cadillac theory of killer sales people which that comes from Mary K cosmetics. I don’t know if they still do but they used to give their best sales people pink Cadillac’s as sales awards. There is no better form of selling or way to learn how to sell than to be thrown in front of real people and have to talk to them. I mean that is for sure. And most of the great marketers that I ever met they have something in their background where, maybe it was selling girl’s scout cookies or maybe it was selling Cutco knives or maybe it was vacuum cleaners or maybe they were a Mormon missionary for two years or whatever, but they had to get in front of people and they had to develop a relationship, develop rapport and actually get some kind of results. And that is a priceless background for any kind of marketer, no matter who you are or what you do.

And so I almost want to say you know, where can you eek some of that out of whatever you do because you know everybody does have to sell for a living, you know even a software engineer has to convince the other people on his team what we are going to do next. So you know, and I am not really a face to face salesperson particularly. It is not what I enjoy doing but definitely it helped me be a better writer and a better copywriter.

[10:05]

Alaister: What I love about your approach is you really spent a lot of time prequalifying your leads and making sure they are suitable for whatever you are offering them. And that’s I suppose what the marketing DNA test is all about being able to prequalify and sort of see is this suitable for you? And that is basically what your 80/20 Sales and Marketing book is all about. You talk about using the 80/20 rule and how it applies in life and business to find a certain lever point and optimize based on those.

Let’s talk a little bit about those lever points and how do you go about actually finding them, pinpointing them and what do you do when you actually find those lever points?

[10:45]

Perry: Yes so I want to tell my favorite story from the book which is from John Paul Mandocha. He is on my team and he has been a consultant and in many ways a mentor for me in a lot of ways. So John dropped out of high school in Denver Colorado, aged seventeen and hitch hiked to Las Vegas and became a professional gambler. And so if you can imagine a seventeen year old kid playing poker for a living in Vegas this is what he was doing.

Alaister: I’m sure his parents would have loved that.

Perry: Yeah well you know his mom was like going to mass at 6:30am every morning, lighting a candle for him just hoping that he wouldn’t get killed okay. So you know after a few weeks of this, he is like, “Dang this is harder than I thought, I have got to get myself a mentor.” So I don’t know how he did it, maybe he looked up gambling ring in the yellow pages I’m not sure but he found himself a mentor and the guy’s name was Rob. And the guy actually ran a den of gamblers. And so like, “Okay John for a percentage of your winnings I’ll teach you.” So they shake on it.

“Alright jump in the jeep John we are going for a ride.” So they are in the jeep and John goes, “Okay so how do I win more poker games?” And Rob goes, “Well you have to play people who are going to lose. And those people are called marks. You have got to play poker with marks.”

And he goes, “So how do I find marks?” And he goes, “Here I’ll show you.” And they pull into a parking lot, they get out of the jeep and they walk into a strip club and they sit down. There is women and music and rock and roll and people drinking, and Rob holds a sawed off shotgun out of his jacket and he holds it under the table, he opens up the chamber and then he racks it, under the table and then he puts the gun back in his jacket. And a few people are looking around like what was that? And the owner of the club comes over and he is like, “Hey gentlemen is everything okay over here?” He is like, “Everything is just fine. Teaching the lad a lesson.”

“Okay.”

And he says to John, he says, “John, did you see those people who turned their heads when I made that noise?” And John goes, “Yeah?” And he goes, “Don’t play poke with them. They’re not marks.”

Now, that is what John and I call racking the shotgun. You know making that noise in the crowded venue where everybody or not everybody just some of the people are like hey what was that? And everything you do in marketing is racking the shotgun okay. Now what 80/20 does is 80/20 turns marketing upside down from what most people think it is. So most people think marketing is, “I’m trying to get everybody, trying to get as many people as humanly possible. Everybody is going to love this.” 80/20 says 80% of the people are the wrong people, 80% of the products are the wrong products, 80% of the traffic is the wrong traffic, 80% of the web pages are the wrong web pages, 80% of the salespeople are the wrong salespeople and the first thing you have got to do is get rid of the wrong ones, okay.

We are not trained to sell to everybody. Sales is not a convincing people process, it is a disqualification process. So, what you start doing is you start asking questions everywhere you are going and anywhere you turn and you are trying to get rid of people as fast as possible because you are not going to spend time with hardly any of them, okay. And so this actually starts with what are all the things that would show me that I have got the wrong person in front of me and how do I get rid of them as fast as possible? And this is not how marketers think.

So, you bid on a key word and somebody, most people see the ad and they don’t click and some people click; racking the shotgun. Some people go to the landing page and they sign up for something. That is racking the shotgun. You send an email, 14% of the people open it, 86% don’t: that is racking the shotgun. 3% of the people click on the link in the email, 97% don’t. That is racking the shotgun. 1% of the people sign up for the webinar, 99% don’t. That is racking the shotgun. When you hosted this event right now today and people signed up for it, you were racking the shotgun. And you were finding out who is interested in Perry Marshall, who is interested in 80/20, who is interested in Facebook ads, Google ads and maybe email marketing, maybe even specifically the Perry way, we want to hear about that. That is a few people out of your list. Most people were not interested in it.

Well what most marketers would do is go, “Whoa what about the 86% that didn’t open my email? And what about the 97% that didn’t click? And what about the 99% that didn’t sign up on my webinar?”

Well ignore them. And work with the ones you have got because there is going to be more and more 80/20’s as you keep going. And I guess you know I probably should stop for a second and I should explain 80/20 just because I’m not sure everybody completely…actually most people sort of understand 80/20 but they only understand like this little bit of it okay.

So the part that most people understand is that 80% of your results come from 20% of what you do. 80% of the money is owned by 20% of the people. 80% of the sales guys, your sales gals, sell only 20% of the goods and the other 20% of the sales guys or sales gals get 80%. So most people know that, but there is a whole bunch of it that they don’t really get.

So the first thing is, if you have got ten sales people or 100 sales people what is going to happen is that 20% of them are going to sell 80% of what you sell and the other 80% are only going to sell 20% which means that the good ones are 16 times better than the bad ones which most people don’t realize. Really? Sixteen? Yeah, the good ones really are sixteen times better. And listen I’ve been the bad one, I know this okay. I know how bad it is okay. And what most people spend their time doing is they try to fix the bad ones instead of empowering the good ones.

But then here is the other thing people don’t understand about 80/20 and it is really deep okay. And it is that when you just take that top 20% that minority that is most productive you know, that I’ve got 100 salespeople and I’m looking at my top 20, when I just look at that top 20 and I ignore all the other ones, 80/20 is still true. 20% of the 20 still gets 80%, so four of them sell more stuff than the other 16 combined. This is true, it is a law of nature, there is almost nothing you can do to change it there is all kinds of politicians, and [19:45 davos] conferences, and united niches and all this, and they are like, “Oh the world is all unequal, we have got to fix it.” Like it has always been unequal, it is always going to be unequal; you cannot pass a law that is going to change it. If you want to talk about social engineering maybe we can get to that later, but I’m saying if you’re going to be a smart marketer you have to be a pragmatic realist and you have to understand that the vast majority of what you make and the results that you get is going to come from a tiny sliver of what you do and 80/20 is growing up, realizing that, and being okay with it and then pouring the energy into that tiny sliver that generates results which gives you explosive results and potential.

[20:35]

Alaister: Yeah it’s fascinating. I mean being able to prequalify really does change the mind frame and the approach that a lot of marketers and business people take when they are looking to optimize their business. So just before we dive into the next question, I just want to do a quick preview of next week’s Warrior Ask Me Anything. So here it is.

[20:53]

Next Week on Warrior TV: Jakub Linowski

Hey Warrior Forum members, I’ll be doing an Ask Me Anything session in a few days. I’m UI designer, I’m also a data expert, a CRO expert, and I run AB tests. Basically we essentially run AB testing consulting firm. We also share tons of UI advice for ease of use and higher converting pages. I’m looking forward to hearing from you. And I’ll see you in a couple of days. Thanks.

[21:24]

Alaister: Welcome back to this Warrior Ask Me Anything event with Perry Marshall. So just before the break we spoke about the 80/20 and being able to leverage that 20% that generates 80% of the results and a lot of marketers spend a lot of time trying to sell or market to basically everyone. They are trying to cast a wide net out and trying to reach as many people as possible and a lot of people are doing that right now. So I’ve got a question here from Andrew B. and he says he runs a five years old SEO and web design company Perry, and he wants to grow it to the next level. However he finds that he is spending a lot of time in the business and working on trying to promote the company and he is spending you know 60 to 80 hours a week working in the business. What sort of advice would you give to him?

[22:15]

Perry: Well so first of all, I’ll just make a comment that I think SEO is over rated and it is like ten times harder than it was five years ago and you know sometimes the problem is that you are in a shrinking industry instead of a growing one. And that can happen slowly and subtly, it can kind of sneak up on you, and of course you have only given me a little bit of information. So I can only take a few things and riff on them. But you know one of the best tools that I ever developed in my career is a tool that I collaborated with Richard Koch who is the author of the original 80/20 book that set my mind on fire. And he has written some other books that are just amazing. One is called The Star Principle. And the Star Principle is Richard’s formula for how he got wealthy and about thirty years ago, he started with some partners, a consulting firm called Ellie K. They worked in that business for several years. Richard sold his portion of that business and when it was all said and done he had 4 million dollars cash in the bank. And he turned that 4 million into 270 million in the years since.

So he is a fractional billionaire. And the star principle is his formula for picking winners as a either a consultant or an angel investor. And he wrote a book called the Star Principle which I think is the most underrated business book that I have ever read. Most people do not know about it. It has never sold particularly well which I think is probably a good thing because people that own it like really seriously have an edge. And so he wrote this book which I highly recommend and it has a formula for whether a business is going to grow or not. And Richard and I took that formula and we coded it into a webpage and we made a quiz. And you can take this little quiz in about 60 seconds. And it is at starprinciple.com. So you go to starprinciple.com you take the quiz and in a minute you will have an answer. And you answer these questions and it will give you a score from zero to 200 on how does your business…is your business a star? And any business that is a star by Richard’s criteria will get 100 points or better. And that is probably only 5% of the businesses are going to get those 100 points. Most businesses are going to get 15, 20, 30, 40 points. And above average might get 80 or 90. And what this is, this is a formula that says is this business going to grow? Does this business have the capacity to get way bigger than it is right now? And it is quite accurate.

And I would encourage this gentleman who asked the question to score his business. And I’m going to guess that he is going to get a score of I don’t know, maybe a 40 or a 50 or something. And this actually explains why he is putting more and more effort into a business that is producing less and less.

Now the interesting thing though is we sell a little report for $9 that dissects your score, if you want to go further with it. It explains how to make it bigger. But what you can do is you can run that score over and over and over and what you do is you start slicing your business into pieces and you go, well you know I’m not just an SEO company, I actually do SEO and I have this other social media piece, and I have this other direct marketing piece. And then you know, I kind of did this tangent with this other client. We got into some other stuff. And you could score every single one of those and you can identify the parts of your business that have the potential to grow explosively and the parts that don’t.

And so what this really is, is this is an extreme 80/20 on what businesses are going to succeed. And Richard applied this formula to his career as a private equity investor. And in the last twenty something years, he has only invested in about twenty companies, somewhere between sixteen and twenty and almost half of them had hit pay dirt. And that is very unusual because like most venture capitalists, most angel investors, they are happy to back 10%.

And so I would encourage you to go take this quiz. It is free. Again you can go a step further if you want to spend a few bucks. But I would encourage him to analyze that. I would also encourage him to analyze every single one of his clients business with the same score. So by the time he is done he is going to have ten scores for ten different things. And what he is going to see is there is a certain part of his business that has really explosive growth potential and when he looks back he is going to see that the energy he puts in really does pay off. He is going to see some of his clients have really explosive growth potential and he is going to see the other ones frankly are dogs. And you know, get rid of the dogs, say no, eliminate, it is disqualification.

[29:19]

Alaister: Yeah it is great advice. So we have got www.starprinciple.com we will add it in the forum. What was the book called that you mentioned that Richard Koch wrote?

[29:28]

Perry: It is called the Star Principle and you can buy it on Amazon. And like I said, it is the most underrated business book that I have ever read. In fact, Richard and I a few months ago, did a seminar called the Star Principle Seminar and it was $7500 a head and we had about 80 primary attendees who came to it plus their guests and it was an absolutely kickass event. And if you read the book you will get the basic core of much of what we covered in that seminar, is absolute bargain. And it will change the way that you see your entire business.

[30:16]

Alaister: Yeah I think what is fascinating about being able to run the star principle formula on your business is it allows you to really leverage the 80/20 principle and show you which components of your business is that 20% as opposed to that 80% where you can kind of focus your energy and time on, as opposed to focusing all your time on trying to build the entire business if that is what is going on right now. So I think that is really great advice Perry, thank you for that.

Perry: You bet.

[30:43]

Alaister: I’m just going to switch gears a little bit. I’ve got some questions here coming in, in regards to writing books. So obviously you have written a whole bunch of books, you have had a lot of success with the books you have written, you have hit best sell lists and things like that. I have got a question here from Sara M. She says she is trying to write a book right now. She wants to ask you, how do you actually approach writing it, and how do you overcome writer’s block?

[31:09]

Perry: I will start with writer’s block. The easiest way to overcome writer’s block is to take whatever you want to write about, convert it into a list of questions and then answer the questions just as though somebody sent you an email and asked you the question and you are sitting there answering it. Like every subsection of a chapter can be the answer to a question and you can take probably 30 to 60 questions and together those and the answers become your entire book. And then before you publish your book, you convert at least some of those questions into just headlines and away you go, okay. It is really plug and chug right. Now of course, you need to…your book should meet the qualifications of the five power disqualifiers I describe in the 80/20 book.

What are those? The five power disqualifiers are the five things that are always true every time any sale is made okay. And let me tell you what those are. And again John Paul Mendocha came up with this and I think it is brilliant. And so any time anybody buys something there are five things that are true. Number one they have a bleeding neck. What do I mean by that? If you went to the emergency room and you had a sliver in your finger they are going to give you a good housekeeping magazine and a clipboard and you are going to sit there for four hours until somebody can bother to see you. If you walk in the emergency room and blood is squirting out of your neck they are going to see you right away. There has to be a sense of urgency and the customer has to be in pain. And if the customer is not in pain, they are not buying okay.

Secondly they have to have the money. If the person doesn’t have the money they are not going to buy it, end of story. In the case of a book you should sell, you should write books for people who have money, at least if you are in any kind of business endeavor, and I’m not just talking about being able to afford a book. I’m talking about being able to go solve a problem with some money after they read the book.

Number three they have to have the ability to say yes. There are lots of people who you go see in a sales appointment or who visit your website or read your book. They have the ability to say no, but they don’t have the ability to say yes. And you are not writing your book for them. And you are not giving sales presentations to them.

Next is they have to buy into your unique selling proposition, which is to say your book, your product, your sales presentation, your phone call, your landing page, your trip wire offer whatever it is, your lead generation offer has to have a u.s.p.

And last it has to fit into their overall plans. Like where you’re taking them is where they want to go.

Now you need to write your book to meet these five qualifications and if you can convert the subjects into questions and those are the questions that a person meets all five of the criteria is asking, then now you are talking. And your book has to have a u.s.p. Your book has to address a question and an issue in a different way than everybody else’s book is doing.

[35:16]

Alaister: Yeah it’s great, following those five steps I can see you are able to create a book that has hungry, sort of raving fans that are hungry for that content. So now let’s just say that you have spent the time and gone through all this and written your book, what did you find as most effective when coming to market it? You achieved a big readership very quickly. How would someone go about trying to achieve that and replicate that as well?

[35:44]

Perry: Well okay so not only does your book need to meet the five power disqualifiers, it really needs the book needs to be a star. The book should get 100 points in the star principle formula okay. And so you have got to be really ruthless about this. Like since it takes anywhere from three to eighteen months to put out a book and get it printed, get it published and all this other stuff, you can’t afford to do something that is not, doesn’t really have teeth okay. So if you look at the books that I have done, I wrote my Google adwords book when Google was red hot. I was riding the coattails of a star. Google adwords was a star business. It still actually is but it is less of a star than it used to be okay. Facebook; another star business, another growing concept. I think with 80/20, now I was taking a gamble when I wrote that book because there wasn’t like a ton of people sitting there searching for 80/20 but I did have something working in my favor. First of all, I had done some things with 80/20 that nobody else before me had ever done. And secondly I think I want to say that maybe around 2010 to 2012 somewhere in there, somewhere about the time that people really started using smart phones and tablets seriously, the world went from bored to overloaded.

I don’t think anybody is bored anymore. I was bored ¾’s of my childhood frankly. School, yeah there is nothing to do, can we go to the swimming pool? Now everybody always has something to do, even though admittedly it is trivial, it is ridiculous, it doesn’t accomplish anything but everybody is overloaded.

I don’t know if 80/20 sales and marketing would have been a hit five or ten years ago but today especially entrepreneurs they are seriously badly painfully overloaded and what they needed was a book that was going to help them solve it. And that is why the book has been popular. But do you see the pattern there? That you know, picking your topics…and okay here is another thing and this is not obvious to people on the search lists. Every book that I’ve taken to the mass market I tested the content on a rabid, loyal small audience first.

So I was teaching and coaching Google adwords three years before I had a book in the bookstore. Same thing with Facebook. Same thing with 80/20. I got the message right because I practiced. It is kind of like you and I talking about salespeople earlier. If a Mormon guy goes on a mission and he is literally knocking on doors, he better figure out pretty fast how to actually get somebody to talk to him. And once he learns how to do that it frankly doesn’t matter if he is selling Jesus, Joseph Smith, Vacuum cleaners or insurance or aluminum siding or anything else. He knows how to start a conversation. And at that point it also doesn’t matter whether he is knocking on doors physically or if he is writing email subject lines. He has got to say something that is going to get somebody to open up, open the email right, open the email, it is a knock on the door.

So really where can you road test your ideas with real people? And people are terrified of this okay. People are terrified of finding out that their idea is going to go splat but you better find out now. You might as well find out now, not later.

[40:41]

Alaister: Yeah I read an article I think recently in regards to how you actually go about promoting your books and I think one of them talked about how you have a survey in front of your Google adwords book and it sort of prequalified people before actually telling them about the book and asking them to purchase it. And you mentioned how that was one of the reasons why you were able to achieve such a high rating within Amazon and all the reviews was because you prequalified them which when you think about it, it is very simple and obvious but it is genius. A lot of people try to push out their product or their book to a mass market, it is not suitable to everyone and people give bad reviews because it is not suitable to them. So I think that in itself is an amazing literal tip and a glimpse into your approach as to how to go about trying to get these results and trying to get your products in front of the right people.

[41:38]

Perry: Well yeah and I want to expand on that because when we came out with a Facebook book the truth was for about ten or fifteen percent of the people, Facebook was great. And for about I don’t know, 85 or 90 % it was not, it was like most emphatically not great, most emphatically was not going to work very well and we had to screen people. We had to push the wrong people away otherwise I knew we would get a bunch of one and two star reviews, we would get angry customers, nobody likes that you know it is not good for anybody and so what we did…and by the way when that book came out, Facebook didn’t have their act together. They were like a bunch of clowns frankly. I mean we would go what is Zach thinking you know? So we made this quiz and it was isFBforme.com which stands for is Facebook for me? And you can go there now and you can answer ten questions and it takes 60 seconds and it is just like the star principle quiz. But what this thing does is it gives you a score from 1 to 10. Is Facebook for you? If you got a 7, 8, 9 or 10 yes Facebook is for you. If you got a 2, 3, 4, or 5, no Facebook is not for you. And that quiz actually pushes most people away. Two thirds of businesses are going to get a 5 or a 6 or worse. Some of them will only get a 1 or a 2 or a 3 and we say to them, don’t do this go do something else, don’t do this.

Now the ones who get a seven and eight or a nine and a ten, when we say to them, “Okay this is for you, it is a thumbs up” they can believe us because they can see that we pushed all these other people away. Now I am just astonished how few people ever do anything like this. Most of them don’t even do anything remotely like this okay but this is how you should think. This is why the Facebook book has like 4.5 stars or whatever it is because we actually push people away. It literally says like in the first chapter of the book if you got a 3 out of 10 see if you can get your money back for this book. It actually says that. But you see how it gets you a much better customer?

[44:17]

Alaister: Yeah I think essentially what you have been able to achieve with that approach is you have achieved a much higher level of trust for the people who are suitable for the book. So they sort of say hey you are not just trying to sell me, you are actually selling me something that will enrich my life and be valuable to me in my business.

[44:35]

Perry: Yes. So this means being willing and eager to push prospects away before they buy and to also push customers away after they buy even. Like, you know what, this is not working, I don’t think this is for you; we need to stop working together. I don’t want to keep working with you anymore. I think you should find a different vendor. You know firing a customer if necessary.

And that brings me to another point. I think a lot of people who are listening to our conversation today, you have customers you don’t like, they bleed your energy, they drain you, you need to get rid of them. You are like, oh I know but look I really have got to pay my bills. Well you have got be sane and reasonable but frankly it is probably going to hurt but you should just get rid of them. You have to get rid of some things, you have to get rid of the good to make room for the great and you certainly have to get rid of the mediocre to make room for the good. And if it is a bad customer then it is a bad customer; get rid of them.

Most companies won’t do this and that is why they are mediocre.

[46:05]

Alaister: Yeah no that makes a lot of sense. We can actually see right now on the event a whole bunch of people have just come in. So if you have just come into this event and you missed the earlier half we have all the recordings as well as the recordings of the previous ones in the war room. So if you haven’t got access to the war room I encourage you to check out the war room and you will be able to access all of the recordings.

[46:31]

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[46:55]

Alaister: Welcome back. So you mentioned just before that little clip how you prequalify people before asking them to purchase your book. I know a lot of people are going to struggle with this. I know a lot of people are going to have a hard time pushing people away when instinctively they just want to get as many eyeballs to their product. How would you suggest for those people to overcome this sort of change in mind frame I suppose.

[47:23]

Perry: Well it’s almost always the case that a person who feels this way has also made another mistake and the other mistake that they have made is they have actually defined their product or their service too broadly. And so like I’ll give you an example of somebody just recently. They sold a product that almost any woman could buy okay. And this person was really struggling and it was their first year of business and they are selling this product, and they are getting some sales but not really a lot. And I’m like boy you know she is never going to make it. The reason is she is selling against some of the biggest companies in the world and she didn’t really have a really strong u.s.p. okay.

Well we sat and she came to a paid consultation. It was kind of sort of like my foreman intensives where people come to my office for two days and we tear their business apart and put it back together. I sat there and tore her business apart, put it back together, and by the time we were done we said, “You know who your product is for?” She said, “Who?” I said, “Women who do crossfit.”

Now that is about 1/10,000th the size of her original market, however her story, the reason she designed the product in the first place, the way that you use the product, who would really be interested, it was a perfect fit. And now she can dial down her marketing like a magnifying glass in the sun when you focus it down, and then you go from regular pure sunlight to like burning holes in sticks and leaves in minutes or seconds because that focus is so great, it just completely changed the whole sales story, everything. I said, “You need to go home, change all your marketing, narrow it down.”

Now this was so counter intuitive to her because she is like, “Yeah but every woman could use my product.” I’m like, “But you don’t even have a good argument for every single woman in the world why they should buy from you instead of all these massive consumer product companies. However you have something for crossfit people that nobody else is making, nobody else is selling and all those crossfit maniacs…” like dude I heard a great joke the other day. A vegan, an atheist and a crossfit person walk into a bar. How do I know? Because they all told me in thirty seconds.

Well you know there you go. You have got a bunch of evangelists now buying your product and what are they going to do? They are going to tell all their crossfit friends. And what are they going to do? They are going to guilt all the people that aren’t in crossfit why they should be in crossfit and like buy this product right.

And so this is how you do 80/20 thinking. This is 80/20 sales and marketing.

[51:18]

Alaister: By the way just to let you know, I do crossfit.

Perry: Alright. I’m going to get an atheist and a vegan and you guys can all walk into a bar.

[51:31]

Alaister: No it’s great. Yeah it’s fascinating just hearing you giving advice in regards to trying to focus down people’s attention. How do you go about actually trying to do that? When you have created a product you sort of think okay now it’s ready for prime time, I’m going to promote it out to everyone. What is your approach to find that sort of rabid small group of people that are passionate and hungry for your product, in this case the women’s crossfit group? How do you actually go about and bring it down to this small target market?

[52:05]

Perry: Okay the way I always find this works is I have to dig into the person’s story of how this came about in the first place. So here is what happens when people develop products, services, ideas, new companies and stuff. What they do is they are in a situation, they need to solve a problem, they bang around through the pinball machine and they struggle with all this stuff and finally they get an idea and the idea seems to work. Then they start developing it and polishing it and it turns into a product. And their focus moves from the original problem to the product. And then they start adding bells and whistles and features and all this kind of stuff. And pretty soon the product seems like it is for everybody but what usually happens is that they product has started to drift away from the bleeding neck.

So the way I got to this was I said, “Okay hang on, tell me how this came about in the first place? And she told me this whole story and it basically had to do with exercise and being out in the sun and sweating and all this other stuff and it related to what her product did. And I started to realize that well you know what, this is a really interesting product but it only works for people that are sweating. And not only that, it only works for people that are serious about sweating. And somebody in the room said something about crossfit and all of a sudden it all clicked into place. And then we started going from there. And it made perfect sense but it only made perfect sense in hindsight.

So I think a lot of times you have to do what great copywriters do which is really really really dig into the original story and there is usually an element of knowing yourself. I have only in my life been successful at selling to the same person that I already was. I’ve never been successful like marching into the insurance industry and selling to insurance agents. I’ve never been an insurance agent. I’ve always been successful selling to the same people that I already was. I was successful selling to electrical engineers. I was successful selling to young green start up marketers. I was successful selling to consultants. I was successful selling to entrepreneurs, successful selling to business owners, it was all basically I had already walked a mile in those exact same shoes and I came up with a solution that nobody else had come up with to solve a really ugly problem and a bleeding neck. And I can say I am you, and you are me or I was you and you were me and here is my story, here is how I was in pain, here is how I was bleeding and here is how I solved it. And what I described, it made perfect sense.

Now to give you another free resource, I am going to make sure I remember to give you all the stuff I promised to give you today. So here is one resource that will really help people, especially if they are starting out, or especially haven’t quite found the groove, there is a blog post I wrote called Memo from a pink kool aid drinker. And if you go to perrymarshall.com and you search pink kool aid, I think you can actually just search Google for pink kool aid with a “k” and it will come up. Go to that blog post and that blog tells a story, and then it has got this self evaluation questionnaire. Go there and do the questionnaire.

Here is what I want you to do. I want you to print it out, take a yellow pad of paper, go to Starbucks or wherever your favorite hangout place, your favorite thinking spot, library whatever. Leave your computer at home, leave the distractions at home, leave your smart phone at home if you can, and go through the thing. It is going to show you these are the shoes I have walked in, these are the industries I’m familiar with, these are the subjects I know about. You should be selling to people you understand about subjects you know about. Any time somebody says, “Hey let me show you how to make a killing by marching into this industry, grabbing a big bag of cash and leaving.” That never works; they are always ripping you off okay.

Now here is another resource that I want to give people. In the 80/20 book which you can buy for $7 if you are in the US and $14 if you are outside and we will ship it to you. You can go to sell8020.com and you can get the book. But I want to give everybody a free bonus. In the book I have a link to take the marketing DNA test for free. And we normally sell it for $37 and if you go to marketingdnatest.com, $37 and it is worth every penny and it will tell you how you sell. But here is a free link. If you go to perrymarshall.com/8020supplement you will get a backdoor access to the marketing DNA test. And I want you to take that test. And if the way you are trying to sell right now does not match what that test tells you then you need to change how you are selling. It is not what you are selling it is how you are selling it because everybody has a different way of selling.

And so do you notice how much of what I am saying is like knowing yourself? And if you don’t get this right it doesn’t matter how many pay per click advertizing tricks you know or how many SEO tricks or how many social media shortcuts you take because you won’t be congruent with yourself and you have to be congruent with yourself. And you have to sell who you are even if what you sell is not you at all.

[59:25]

Alaister: We are just running out of time now Perry but just before we wrap up a question has come in and I really want to ask this question. We spent a lot of time talking about who to sell to, and how to prequalify that group of people and how to sort of reach that group of people but I want to talk a little bit about how to go about actually selling to that group of people once you have identified it. So Tom R. is asking, “How do you go about incorporating persuasion when you are running your copy whether it be email copy or landing page copy? How do you go about building that out and using persuasion techniques to actually get the people that you have prequalified to take action?”

[01:00:06]

Perry: Okay so I believe that selling is almost like an argument for why you should do business with me instead of everybody else. It is almost like you need to imagine that you are in a debate and the debate is whether they should give their money to you or they should give their money to somebody else okay. And here is the thing. Arguments don’t win arguments. What wins arguments is evidence.

So, you have done the star principle quiz and you have adjusted your market to where you are over 100 points on that and you have done the five power disqualifiers, they have a bleeding neck, they buy into your unique selling proposition and all of that okay. Now what you need to do is you need to prove with evidence that they would be foolish to not give you their money. Okay you need to make an argument for why they want to give you their money and back it up with proof and evidence and see if you have proof and evidence you can do understatement instead of yellow highlighter marker banging the drums and yelling from the top of a roof. You can whisper. You can whisper your evidence and if it is good evidence, they will see it and they will pay attention.

So, here is the question. How do you prove that they should give you their money? That is a question you need to answer. It is not about stringing clever words together. It is about proof.

[01:02:20]

Alaister: That is a really fascinating way to approach copywriting. How to prove that they should give you their money.

So unfortunately we have run out of time right now Perry. I really want to thank you for giving up your time and contributing to the community. This event has been hugely valuable and I think your unique take on things and your unique approach will be able to help a lot of the warrior community greatly, so I really appreciate your time. Thanks very much Perry.

[01:02:47]

Perry: Well thank you and I want to salute you for being in a star business, which is running the Warrior Forum you know, it is the number one thing in its own growing niche. And congratulations it was great to be here and I am honored to be on your program today. So I appreciate it, thank you.

[01:03:05]

Alaister: My pleasure. It has been a pleasure having you on Perry.

Perry: Take care.

Alaister: So next week we have got Jakub Linowski for our Warrior Ask Me Anything event on Warrior TV. Jakub is a copywriting and conversion specialist. He is the founder or GoodUI.org so we are really excited to speak to Jakub in regards to how to leverage user interfaces and good design to increase conversions.

So thanks very much for tuning in and we will see you next time. Bye.

[End Recording 1:04:10]

THE IMPORTANT STUFF:

2112 or Moving Pictures?

I am Electrical Engineer and would like to know how this skills has influence on your business.
Thank you,
Alex.

Wow.. Legend Perry has joined the Warrior Forum? Hmm.. this is good news. Hope to grab some latest adwords wisdom from you, Perry.

I look forward to this wama. Perry book help me a lot in building my business.

Regarding mindset. What do you think is the best mindset to be in to be successful in IM. Are there any rituals/practises you do to stay in a positive productive mindset?

Hey,great event!!!
I feel fortunate being able to take advice !

All the best

Perry, I just started pay per click for affiliate marketing. I started with a product on MarketHealth that I thought would sell well,. A program I bought suggests using Bing and 7Search first because doing PPC on Google Adwords is more complicated, and to wait til I have a profitable campaign before using Google. The CTR was not bad, no sales though. What have you found easier to succeed when you started PPC? Keywords I used were very specific to target those ready to buy.

Perry,

Thanks for hosting this here! I'm a member of your monthly mastermind call but rarely come to the calls live.

My biggest question is along the lines of managing time like Richard Koch . . .really focusing on priorities and not running around on the hamster wheel. I do a good job managing my time and priorities (last year I dropped from 40 hours a week in 2013 to working 15 hours a week in 2014 with an INCREASE in both gross and net revenue)

But I want to really supercharge this this year, what would you recommend to take it to the next level?

Thanks

Sean Mize

How can I use Adwords PPC advertising again after being banned years ago for a newbie mistake involving copyrights that went against their policy?

There's no need for me to explain everything but I have tried repeatedly to explain my case to the Adwords people over the years and to no avail, so I gave up. They still allow me access to my Adwords account to use their tools and I have not violated any of their other products, including Google Adsense. You would think they would reconsider after all these years being banned from Adwords PPC.

I know my question isn't a popular one. I am not a bad person. Knowing what I know now as an experienced Internet Marketer I wouldn't dare make the same mistake again and follow what other people do, now that I know better.

Looking forward to it. want to learn about time management, scheduling and productivity

Customer Psychology Question

Is there a simple strategy/tip to find out what the "conversation going on in the prospects' mind" is, in any market?

Would be useful to help copywriting clients.

Thank you Perry

Hello,
I have 2 questions - technical ones, so maybe it is ok to ask Perry, and that case i will be grateful and if no, maybe someone else could guide me
1- Can Perry talk about the Prosper202 product, cause there is really little videos on the net and this is really complicated to understand how it actually track conversion cause i do not see any synchronization with clickbank.
2- How we should write our destination url so we can know which keyword brought the conversion? cause right now i do not know witch keywords are better than others?
Thank you!

Two questions.

1. Do you think having your name positioned alongside controversial figures in the "make money online" info product niche has been a long term asset or liability to your career in marketing academia?

2. Your website says that 80/20 Sales And Marketing is required reading at some companies. What companies?

Hi Perry,

Just a quick shout out to say THANKS for taking the time to chat with us.

Paul

wow its great its helping to boost my business from begginers to top level and i think every one can learn from this.

regards

Hello Mr. Marshall

Thank you for this opportunity.

I have some very specific questions.

What tools do you use for tracking and optimization? I know you are big on 80/20 and Kaizen, and so am I. I am just wondering what you use in terms of software.

Also, do you test entire funnel paths, or do you treat various levels independently? Here's what I mean...

2 Ads X 2 Landing Pages X 2 Sales Pages X 2 Upsell Pages = 16 Paths

One can either test each path (perfect test) but that would be 16 tests. Or one could simply find the better ad, better landing page, better sales page, better upsell page, and use that path. Former would require a lot more traffic, but would be much more accurate. I am wondering how you do it over at your company.

I am also curious, like I said above, about the tracking software and tools you use.

Many thanks
Lakshay Behl

P.S. I am the man who sent you that long handwritten letter in 2013. I am happy to report I've successfully built up a consulting practice where I am implementing a lot of what I learn from Dan Kennedy, Eugene Schwartz, you, and other teachers of marketing for my clients.

Ok, here's my biggest question: I am getting to the point where I have too many subscribers to answer every email that comes in. I have considered making myself totally unavailable with an autoresponse (much like you do) but am afraid I'll lose business because of it. I've tried having an assistant personally write and let folks know I'm not answering email questions, but answer them live on a weekly call. But I'm getting folks who get quite angry that they don't get a personal response, I had one guy tell me "I am getting too big for my customers"

Your thoughts?

Sean

I'm running Gravity Forms plugin with Wordpress connected to Mailchimp autoresponders. When is the right time to move to amore expensive CRM type of system and which do you recommend, for example, Ontraport vs. Infusionsoft? Thanks

thanks for the share i have been following Perry since before i started my own company and hes advice has not changed in its profanity

What is a daily practice/exercise I can do to make 8020 thinking automatic for my brain?

Will a recording of this be available for those of us who can't make it live?

I'm sorry I missed this, what a great guest to have!

Thanks for your patience while we produced the video.

This was one of our most popular events of all time. Thanks all for attending and for your great questions! We look forward to bringing you more great content in our upcoming events.

Watch the Perry Marshall WAMA Replay Here

This was a great "get" for the WF.

In a come-and-go world of marketing experts, Perry Marshall is a constant - in copywriting terms, he's a "control".

There's true gold in the last few minutes of the call about persuasion, evidence and proving your case in your copy.

Fun call.

Could you share more thanks

I always wondered if there was any way to guarantee results with an online business. I want to know more.

The ad says "Thursday February 12 at 5pm EST."
Is February the correct month?

It can be very helpful for budding online marketers.