Episode #59: Rob Hanly on 3 Reasons Why Your Marketing Strategy is Going to Fail.

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John McIntyre:Hey, it’s John McIntyre here, the Autoresponder Guy, and it’s time for episode 59 of the McMethod email marketing podcast where you’ll discover how to kick ass at marketing. Specifically email marketing, but really all things of connecting your prospect with your product and making a ton of cash. Today I’ll be talking to Mr. Rob Hanly who some of you might have heard of, about the three reasons your marketing strategy will fail. Now a long, long, long, long time ago which is really about 30 episodes ago, I did an interview with someone called the Reverend, okay? Now Rob Hanly is the Reverend.

This is his coming out podcast, he’s announcing himself to the world, getting his name out there, and like I said, today we’re going to talk about three reasons why your marketing quite simply sucks, or mistakes that you’re making that are really going to make it fail. So some really interesting stuff. Now Rob is a great guy. He’s a marketing consultant, he’s very successful, and I think where Rob really, really excels, one of his unique gifts is breaking things down into actionable steps that anyone can do.

I’ve had so many coffees with this guy. He’s here in Thailand with me right now, and we meet up for coffees and he’ll tell me about what he’s up to, I tell him what I’m up to, and I’ll be like, I’ve applied so much of what he’s said to the McIntyre Method and the McMethod. A lot of the emails that I’ve sent out if you’re on my list, some of that is going to be influenced by Rob because I’ll be like, All right, Rob. I’m going to do this. I’m doing this product launch this weekend, and here’s my idea. He’s like, Well John, that sounds great but you should do x, y, and z.

I’m like, oh, that’s a great idea. I’d go home, I’d do x, y, and z, send it out and I’d make more money than I would have made if I didn’t do it. So that’s Rob; great guy. Now to get the show notes for this episode of the email marketing podcast, go through themcmethod.com/59. That’s themcmethod.com slash five nine. Now, I’ve got a couple things. The McMaster’s insight of the week … McMaster’s if you don’t know, is my paid membership community. When you sign up you get access to the McIntyre Method, the stories, the sell, the pages that convert. Basically, a whole bunch of courses that’s really, to go back to this result, what is it going to give you?

It’s going to get you to develop a great email marketing strategy for your business, and you’re really going to learn how to do the landing pages, how to get stories down pat, really just build some great marketing into your business and make lots of money. That’s at themecmethod.com/mcmasters. Now I’ve got … basically there’s a forum inside there, and there’s some great stuff going through that forum that we’ve all been talking about with email marketing. So I want to do here is to share an insight of the week. Now this week’s insight is, what if you could improve your customer’s results with your product just by charging more? Now the point of your post-purchase fallout, this is critical if you’re making sales.

Now, so we’re talking about here, this was in a thread [inaudible 00:02:27] the product and some of the best ways to basically make more money with your product, and this idea here is, what if you could improve the results … I love this … this first sentence here. What if you could improve your customers results with your product just by charging more? Now, here’s an example. I just signed up for a coaching program for paid traffic with Justin Brook. Now this is … paid traffic is a new area for me. It’s what I’m getting into right now. I’ve got a sales final set up and after I’ve done this right now, I’m going to be going and setting up a new campaign on Facebook to test something else, okay?

Now Justin’s coaching is quite expensive. Now what that does is because I’ve paid him this cash, I’m incentivized to actually take action. If he’d just made it free, or if it was really cheap, or if it was like a $50 e-book, I’d be like, there’s no way. I’d be lazy. I’d procrastinate because it’s only $50, but when you’re spending a couple thousand dollars on something like this, it lights a fire under your ass to actually get something done. So that’s what I’m trying to do here, is by spending more money, I’m going to get better results with the product. I’m already seeing it happen right now. So think about then in your situation, what could do you do with your product? How could you just charge more and help your customer get better results, right?

You’re going to make more money, but forget about that for a second. Your customer, because they’re spending more money, they’re going to be more likely to do something with it. They’re going to get better results, and therefore going to talk more to other people. Tell more people about your product. Now this isn’t a panacea. It’s not a magic bullet, but it’s something worth thinking about, okay? Now reviews … one thing I like to talk about on the show is reviews. I love reviews, and it really helps spread the word about the show. I’ve had some great success stories from these podcasts. Terry Dunlap was an episode we did a few weeks ago, and Terry made $85,000 in just 5 months more or less just applying what he’s learned in this podcast. He sent me an email. It said pretty much that entire success story is this podcast.

There’s some other things he did, but that was the bulk of it. So if Terry can do it … and he’s not an email marketer; he’s not even a copyrighter. He does some government work … contracting work … and here he is kicking ass at email marketing. I just think it’s so good. I want to hear more of these success stories. So if you want to leave a review and help spread the word so we can get more of these, go to iTunes, search for the McMethod email marketing podcast and leave me a review, you’ll also put a big, huge, cheesy grin on my face and you’ll make my day.

I’ve got one listed question today. What would you do differently now that you wish you would have known when you started? That is very simple for me to answer right now, and that is paid traffic. I’ve tinkered with paid traffic over the last 2 or 3 years but I never committed to it. I never really got the mindset correctly, which is that most tests will fail and you just basically have to test your way to profitability. Now I wonder what would have happened if I would have been spending 10, 20, 30 dollars a day for the last year or for the last 2 years. I would be quite a lot further ahead than I am now, okay? So if I was to redo something or if I was to go back 2 years ago with what I know now, I would just get started with paid traffic and spend 5 bucks a day. Even if I could only spend 5 bucks a day I would still do it. So that’s it for now. Let’s get into this interview and talk to Rob Hanly and talk about the 3 reasons that your marketing strategy is going to fail.

It’s John McIntyre here the Autoresponder Guy. I’m here in a very, very soundproof room, not the usual spot. I’m here with a special friend who was on here about 30 episodes ago. He’s a bit of a … I was going to say preacher before but he doesn’t really go by that title. He goes by the title the Reverend. He’s a bit of a preacher, but the Reverend is really his thing, and today he’s coming to give us a bit of a sermon about consulting, and some of the reasons that’s … we’re not just consultants, but some of the reasons that your marketing strategy will fail. So this is going to be for consultants, for business owners, and anyone who is trying to use marketing in their business, which is everyone.

Rob Hanly:Hopefully.

John McIntyre:Hopefully, hopefully. That’s the way it should be, right?

Rob Hanly:Yeah, everyone should be.

John McIntyre:So I’ll turn it over to him and I think he’s here to talk about who he is this time maybe. Maybe the crack the nut and give you all a look at who the Reverend actually is, and then we’ll get into some of his marketing stuff. So over to you, Reverend.

Rob Hanly:So for those of you who don’t recognize my lovely Australian dulcet tones, my name is Rob Hanly and I’ve been a special consultant for a couple of years. I’ve worked with business in a variety of industries. I’ve worked with industry bodies, I’ve worked with health and fitness companies, financial services and a few others, and it’s been a really good experience because it allowed me to kind of see the commonalities of where people fail. Everyone likes to think their business is special and unique but the reality is, when it comes to failure particularly, there’s a lot of commonalities; a lot of things in common. So that’s the basic intro I guess, you know? Do I need to flesh that out? Do I need to explain some of the stuff I’ve done?

John and I have worked together. When he’s having his lunches he opens his products, we sit on Facebook chat.

John McIntyre:Facebook chat down at Ristr8to in Chiang Mai drinking that coffee.

Rob Hanly:Sipping that coffee, telling John to do things. John does things. That’s basically the way it works.

John McIntyre:Oh, we’ll talk about that. We need to do another episode. We’ll talk about the different strategies, you know, you’re the scalpel, I’m the hammer. We’ll talk about that later.

Rob Hanly:That’s it.

John McIntyre:But today let’s talk about these 3 reasons that you’re marketing strategy … not you, but the listener here … why the listener’s marketing strategy will fail because a lot of marketing does fail. A lot of marketing is terrible. Even when people go back and get good at copyrighting, and sales letters, and all that stuff, they still fail to actually get clients or get customers.

Rob Hanly:Get things happening.

John McIntyre:Get things happening. Just make money in general. So what’s number one?

Rob Hanly:The first thing that I’ve found to be the most common reason that a marketing strategy campaign will fail is that you actually don’t know what’s important. This sounds like no shit, but it’s the objective approach. So let’s say that you’ve got a business in health and fitness space, and this is a bit of a story about someone that I’ve recently been working with. I’m not going to tell you who they are but … it’s for their privacy. Most of my clients are discreet. I like to keep it that way. We were having a chat and I said to him, “What’s the single most important thing that you can do to drive your business forward?” If you could just do one single task every day, day in and day out, what would you be doing to make more money?

John McIntyre:Okay.

Rob Hanly:His comment was, “I’d be speaking to people on the phone because I know that everyone I get on the phone, I can get the majority of them to become a customer.”

John McIntyre:Right.

Rob Hanly:So then I asked him, “All right, so what are you doing to get people on the phone?” Nothing. Nothing in particular, just hoping that they’ll email and ask. Hoping that they’ll click a button and contact him. The fact is, we as humans are really lazy. Our goal is to conserve energy. So if you don’t tell me to do something, I’m not going to do it at my own volition. We have chatted. We have basically spoken. I said to him, “Here’s the steps you’ve got to take. Your goal from now on is everything you do is about driving people to end up on the phone to you or on the phone with you, or getting one step closer to being on the phone with you.

Again, it sounds so obvious, but when was the last time most people sat down and thought, what is the long term objective here? What is they key task I need to do every day in my business to make money so I can keep running the business, and how do I get people to take that action? It’s the simplest thing you can solve.

John McIntyre:I like it. This reminds me of when Perry Marshall was on the podcast about a month ago, and I got him on to talk about this 80/20 sales marketing book which you’ve read, which I’ve read, and that really blew my mind because that’s sort of like an in to this sort of topic, what’s important. If you sit down in your business and your marketing and whatever you’re trying to do, there are a few key actions that are driving all the growth, all the progress, and when you show up to work each day and you open up your laptop, you fire up the computer, and you just do whatever is on that list without actually pausing to figure out what’s actually contributing to the goal. If you don’t do that you end up kind of moving around in a bunch of busy work.

Rob Hanly:Yep.

John McIntyre:I’ll give you an example. I’ve been using MNO to manage my to do list. and I’ve got a project in there called the McMethod 2.0 or something like that … the version to do list. It’s just got along list of stuff. Change this on the website, change this, do this, do that, and it’s all good stuff and it will all create a result. However, based on the goals I have for the business, there are only … I realized that just reading this Perry Marshall book … there’s only a couple things that are actually important. We talked about this recently, that what’s important right now for me anyway, is booting out a sales file and then firing up that sales file on paid traffic. Obviously that’s what I’m doing. I’m just ignoring that whole to do list which is I don’t know how many pages long, I’m just not even looking at it and just doing this paid traffic stuff because I know that that’s going to drive things forward.

So I love this idea here is that people might be failing right now and not getting the results they want, but chances are, usually the solution is just one small thing. Like with the health and fitness buddy, that he doesn’t need to do a whole bunch of stuff. He doesn’t need to work harder, or do more, or spend more, he just needs to identify what’s the thing that needs to happen and do it.

Rob Hanly:Now for most people the quick hack … for most people obviously it’s sales. You can drop most of your attention everywhere else, and if you just focused on sales, get the money coming in the door both from existing clients and from new clients, that’s going to probably be the most important thing that you can focus on because then you can have revenue to hire other people. Then you can maximize the growth that you’ve already got the opportunity to take, to have. So three things to think about, the most important task, if you don’t know what that is, is it client acquisition, client maximization, or client retention?

John McIntyre:Let’s talk about that first. What is client maximization? That’s a big word.

Rob Hanly:It is a big word.

John McIntyre:I don’t like big words. I mean, I’m not really like a … I’m a short word kind of guy.

Rob Hanly:Short word? 5 cent word? So basically client maximization is, how can you maximize the lifetime value of the customer?

John McIntyre:Customer.

Rob Hanly:How do you maximize the lifetime value of the customer? How can you have him spend more money with you? The answer to that is always obviously provide more value and more opportunities for them to purchase. So instead of flogging a $37 e-book and nothing else, setting up a back end, setting up other products to help them with other problems. If like, a recent guest you had on the show is working a security space. So he’s got a front end product, he’s done very well with it, but what other back end tools could he add? Could he help them by giving the network setups? Could he help them with other issues with security? There’s a whole range of similar problems that he could help them solve. Because he’s obviously very good at solving that first problem. He’s got his lead product. It sells really well. What comes next?

John McIntyre:And that’s about maximizing. How much it costs to spend or do over a 12 month period, without getting technical? And the cool thing here to pay attention to is, I think some people hear this and are like, “I just don’t want to be selling all the time. It’s kind of sleazy, and I’m just trying to get as much money as I can out of them.” But the only way to really do this properly is to just help people solve more of their problems, so really you make more money but you are actually adding more value to the market place. So you’ve got to think about it that you are actually doing people a favor because they can just get all their stuff off you now. You’re just saving them time, energy and effort, and they’re giving you money in exchange for it.

I think the easiest way to think about this is if you own a car. Car mechanic. So yeah, he does your basic service, but he’ll also help you with your tires, if you’ve got any issues with the engine, he’ll also help you make it run smoother. He’ll also go and change your oil. He’ll do all that bits and pieces that need to come along for your car to run smoothly. And if you’re in a business of security, just to go back to that example, what other problems exist with people and their home technology security? Is it their phones, is it that they need VPNs, is it that they need apps to lock all their data down, to encrypt their data, they need guides on how to use Truecrypt. What is it that is more useful for them to do?

Rob Hanly:I think the easiest way to think about this is if you own a car. Car mechanic. So yeah, he does your basic service, but he’ll also help you with your tires, if you’ve got any issues with the engine, he’ll also help you make it run smoother. He’ll also go and change your oil. He’ll do all that bits and pieces that need to come along for your car to run smoothly. And if you’re in a business of security, just to go back to that example, what other problems exist with people and their home technology security? Is it their phones, is it that they need VPNs, is it that they need apps to lock all their data down, to encrypt their data, they need guides on how to use Truecrypt. What is it that is more useful for them to do?

John McIntyre:Fantastic. So you had client acquisition, client maximization, what was the other one?

Rob Hanly:Client retention.

John McIntyre:Client retention? That’s just keeping people on for longer, right?

Rob Hanly:Yeah, it’s keeping people on and a lot of people only think about retention as being an element of subscription services, so whether you’re a gym or you’ve got a membership site, all that stuff. But retention is also making sure they purchase from you multiple times. So if you have multiple products, that’s where retention comes in. That’s how you make sure that, if you’re saying in the business of health and fitness, and they come to you and they buy a weight loss program, well, how do you get them to buy another weight loss program? How do you help them with the next step? Maybe their first goal is to lose that 10 kilos that they’ve been carrying around that bit of a spare tire. But now maybe what they want to do, is they want to get the muscle definition. They want to cut a little more body fat and build a bit of muscle.

All right, cool. So let’s offer that to them next. Now they’ve had two purchases in the space of 12 months, double the lifetime value. What can you do, other than acquiring them, and maximizing the value on the initial sale, how can you retain them? Which also comes back to maximization. It’s a beautiful chicken egg that you can’t lose with.

John McIntyre:I like it. It’s all tied in.

Rob Hanly:Yeah, and you can’t lose. That’s the best part.

John McIntyre:That’s the best bit. Cool, man .All right, we’ve done that. Number one reason why marketing strategies don’t work, is you don’t know what’s important.

Rob Hanly:You don’t know what’s important and that’s your hack: acquisition, maximization, retention.

John McIntyre:Sweet. Number two.

Rob Hanly:Talk about yourself.

John McIntyre:So the other day, I was just hanging out at my place and I was thinking about how awesome I am.

Rob Hanly:This, ladies and gentlemen is what you don’t want to do. 

John McIntyre: I’m sure you’ve all received a message from somebody. He says, “Buy this, buy that, buy this, buy that” and all you want to say is, “Shut the fuck up, like I don’t care.” This is like an e-mail. Because we were talking about e-mail marketing. It’s like, “Hey, I’m really glad you joined my e-mail list. I really hope you have a great time. I’ve got some cool stuff to share with you. I think we’ve got the best business in the market. We got the best products and services that are going to help you, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

Rob Hanly:Delete. That’s all that comes off the back of that. So a really good way to figure out if you’re talking about yourself to much is count the number of “I’s” and the number of “You’s”. That’s it. I will make a little addendum here. If your doing call to action, that should always be mine, me, etc., but just in general copy, talk about “you”, talk about the other person, because when you are trying to influence somebody, you are the least important person in the conversation. You’re borderline irrelevant.  They are only concerned about solving their problems.

John McIntyre:This isn’t just copy, because I’ve talked about e-mail copy in McMasters. But this is with, you get on the phone with a client, when I get on the phone with a client now, I don’t know how I kind of ended up here, it’s just how I tend to do things now, I don’t go in there talking about me, talking about who I am, what I do and all that. Usually they already know about me from the podcast.

Rob Hanly:They’re indoctrinated.

John McIntyre:Right. So what I do is, all I’m trying to find out is, “Who are they? What’s their business? What are the problems that they have? And then, once I have a proper understanding of who they are and what they do, the only time I start talking about myself, is in the context of how we can help them.  And that’s it.  I leave it at that.

Rob Hanly:That’s really important though. You’ve just said, “how we can help them, how we can work together.” It’s never about “here’s what I will do for you, because I.” No, no. It’s like, “Together, these are our objectives and you and I will work together for this.” We. you. I is the least important letter.

John McIntyre:I think people understand that, but what people think when they write an e-mail, or they get on a client call, or they do any of these things, if they talk about themself, they are going to impress the other person. So I think it’s a little bit about social dynamics.

Rob Hanly:Yes.

John McIntyre:Understanding how rapport is built, how connections happen. But if you go in there and you talk about yourself, that’s the very immature way to try and build rapport and try and build a connection.

Rob Hanly:Yes.  When you do that, you are seeking validation.  What we need to understand is, a rich man doesn’t have to tell you he’s rich.  That’s it.  So whenever it comes that you are on the phone with someone and you’re saying, “Hey, yes, so you know I wrote this awesome, awesome AutoResponder, and it did hundreds of thousand of dollars in revenue, and I spent 18 hours working on it, and it was fabulous, because I’m amazing.”  They’re going to sit there going, “I really don’t care.”   It’s irrelevant.  

That stuff they should either (a) already know about you, and it’s not bad to say, “Hey, I’ve done some really cool stuff,” but after that, that’s it.  You don’t need to prove yourself.

John McIntyre: But you could say that exact same story. Now get this. So you’re chatting with them and they tell you all about their business and what they need. And you go, “Oh, that’s just like this other client I had two weeks ago. We did an AutoResponder for them, we kind of set them up with this, and they ended up being quite happy with it, but the results we got were really, really cool.” And then you talk about results. But then, it’s the exact same story, but the context is, “I’m only telling you because it’s relevant to your specific situation.”

Rob Hanly:Nailed it. 100%. Too many people spend time thinking, “Hey, if I spend a whole lot of time saying what an amazing person I am, it will win them over.” As you just said. You only give them those facts when it helps cement their trust, cement the authority back up a point. It’s the equivalent of, look if you’re a guy, you’ve gone out before, you head into a bar, you’re trying to tell a girl that she should go home with you. In a nut shell. That’s your marketing objective. Bring her home. But let’s be really blunt. If you go up and say, “Hey, so I’m a banker and I make $250,000 a year, and I drive a Ferrari and I’ve got this really nice suit that cost me $10,000 from Tom Ford, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, she’s going to look at you and ignore you and come to someone like John because he’s going to talk about her, and he’s going to tell her about her world.  Ant that’s a really good take away.  If you can demonstrate authority over somebody else’s world.  If you can show them that’s it’s all about them, you’re light  years ahead of the pack.  

John McIntyre:And that’s the other thing. We talk about, we’re going deep here, we’re going concept, concept, concept, but the other one is qualifying. Who’s qualifying to who? So, if I go into a phone call and I’m talking to this client, and I’m like, “Well, I’ve done this and I’ve done that,” I’m qualifying myself. I’m trying to make myself good enough for them. Whereas, if I just don’t do any of that, if all I did was eliminate that qualification to them, they’ll start doing to me, because someone ends up doing it. So they’ll start telling you why they’re a good fit. Why they’re a good business. Why they’re worthy to work with me. And even if it’s not the case, even if they’re a much bigger client than I’ve ever worked with before, I still want to create that frame, that approach, that context.

Rob Hanly:You are using the words I love, aren’t you?  Frame.  Love that word.  All those words.  It’s very important.  And someone always has to qualify to the other person.  The easiest way to have someone qualify is, shut up.  Say less.  Accept that you are the prize.  You’re the person who wins.

John McIntyre:(Long pause.  Laughs.)  That’s right, that’s right.  We can’t play the silent game on the podcast.

Rob Hanly:No, but that is a good trick to learn.

John McIntyre:The silent close, now.  That’s a whole other topic.  Right.  Number three.

Rob Hanly:Ah, this is something different.  Something that John and I are very different about.  I’ve even taken my sunglasses off just to make this point.  You’re not being strategic.  You are running around like a headless chicken.

John McIntyre:You talking about me?

Rob Hanly:I’m talking about anyone who’s marketing will fail.  If they are running around like headless chickens, if they are throwing spaghetti at the wall, well, you are probably (a) wasting a lot of effort, (b) getting sub par results, and (c) you’re not taking a second to step back and do the calculations to make sure what you are doing is worthwhile. 

  The equivalent would be, if you go and grab a handful of spaghetti that’s never been cooked, just to go off the same old metaphor, and throw a handful of  uncooked spaghetti at the wall, is it going to stick?  No.  Whereas, if you take spaghetti that’s been cooked for 5 minutes, is it more likely to stick?  A little more.  10 minutes, a lot more.  20 minutes, definitely.  So the concept of being strategic is about going, “Right, what’s my goal?  What’s my overall objective?  What are the resources that I’ve got?  And how am I going to make this work?  How am I going to bring this all together to achieve my objective, my outcome.”

A strategic way, minimizing waste and being as effective and impactful as possible.  And efficiency is also important.  That is my approach.  If you’re not being strategic, if you’re not thinking, “All right, so I want someone to buy something from me.”  Well, instead of just sending out a sales letter, I should send them some good content first, and good will.  Some good stuff they can use.  Send  them 3 or 4 e-mails.  Get them indoctrinated.  Understand the concept of reciprocity.  Once they start getting invested in me, and they say, “Hey, by the way, that’s really cool that you want to save for retirement.  Here’s something, I’ve put together for you.  It’s a really straightforward guide to useing your 401K, if you’re an American, to invest for your retirement,  I’ve provided you with this other information on it.”  They know that you’ve provided them this other information.  Never tell them how great you are or discuss that.  But then they will be more likely to purchase from you, because they’ve seen the quality of your work.  They’ve gotten results already.  They feel better off.  And there’s no selling issue.  It’s like, “OK, if you are interested, you’ve found this valuable, I’ve also got this really cool book.  Check it out.”

John McIntyre:This reminds you of like, you wake up in the morning, you open your laptop, you have a to do list, you have stuff to do.  Or you go to your business, you go to meetings.  There are all these different demands on people to go and do different stuff in their life and it’s very hard.  This is very relevant or timely right now, I’m going through a Tommy Robbins program you told me about, Tommy Laughed, and he talks about, he’s got a little system that he calls, and all of them do, right, there’s always a little acronym system thing.  But anyway, part of his thing, his system in this course, is, “know your outcome.”  So, you can wake up in the morning and you can open that laptop and you can just start firing away.  You know that your strategy [inaudible 00:20:59] just execute, execute, get lots of shit done. 

Rob Hanly:Move fast.

John McIntyre:Move fast and [inaudible 00:21:04].  But I think that’s a great strategy, but you’ve got to do it right.

Rob Hanly:{Crosstalk 00:21:09] You know where you’re trying to break.

John McIntyre:Exactly, exactly.  So you might just get up and just do a whole bunch of stuff, and I’ve done that for a long time, but what you need to do is, people have a rough idea of their outcome.  Say, “I want to make more money.”  But what would be more powerful, is to really think, “All right, so I want to make more money.  If I’m going to make more money, make more money is a 40,000 foot prospectus.  What’s 35,000.  I want to make more money with the website.”  Then you keep coming down.  You work your way backwards from that outcome.

Rob Hanly:What needs to be done.

John McIntyre:Exactly.  And so you end up going, “I don’t actually need to do this fucking logo.  I don’t actually need to do this website.  I just need to make some phone calls.”  Like our buddy, this health guy.  He doesn’t need to go and twiddle with his website or hire VAs, or write copy, or any of that stuff.

Rob Hanly:He needs to do two things.  Put a button saying, “Apply for more information or coaching” and start following up.  Just sending an e-mail out to customers who have already purchased from him, and say, “Hey guys.  I’m offering some coaching.”  Done.   That’s it.  That’s the kind of stuff, like, I’m a big proponent of the yellow legal pad.  Phone, yellow legal pad, that’s all you need.

John McIntyre:I can see that.  We got one right next to us.

Rob Hanly:Right next to us.

John McIntyre:Yellow legal pad and black paint,  You had to have that shipped out from the U.S., I heard.  To Dr. Rob, right?

Rob Hanly:Actually, to Dr. Rob.  Dr. Rob received a package from Andy Fosset, fromgoldmedalbodies.com.

John McIntyre:I love that guy.

Rob Hanly:He took good care of me, man.  I made a comment on Twitter that the easiest way to get my attention is with yellow legal pads and Andy pulled through.  I opened the door on Monday to a frantic Thai lady knocking on my door, and she had for me a specially shipped package from Hawaii of yellow legal pads.

John McIntyre:That’s the sort of thing you want to get knocked on the door for.

Rob Hanly:I don’t want to wait.

John McIntyre:It wasn’t like 6 a.m. In the morning, while you were still sleeping?

Rob Hanly:It wasn’t.

John McIntyre:That’s good.

Rob Hanly:But we’re a bit off topic.

John McIntyre:Just a little bit.  It’s always a bit of fun like that.  So let’s go back to being strategic.

Rob Hanly:That’s it.  You’ve got to be strategic.

John McIntyre:You’ve got to be strategic.

Rob Hanly:You’ve got to know your outcome.  You’ve got to work backwards.

John McIntyre:This ties in to this “you need to know what’s important.”  So you know what’s important.  You’re talking about yourself, that [crosstalk 00:22:56]

Rob Hanly:That’s friction, that’s friction.  That’s going to get in the way.

John McIntyre:Right.

Rob Hanly:You need to be strategic.  Once you identify what is important to you, do it. 

John McIntyre:So, point one and point three, or mistake one and mistake three, are very, very interrelated here.  And the best way to do this is, everyone should go out and read, go listen to the  podcast  of Terry Marshall on the 80/20 principal.  Because that was really made it click for me.  And then go buy his book, 80/20 Sales and Marketing.  I’ve been telling everyone to buy this.  But this is what will get you looking at your business, whether you are a consultant, or your selling products, to thinking there’s a small amount of action, a small amount of things  that you can do or focus on, that are going to get you most of the results, but the crazy thing is imagine, like our health buddy. 

Let’s give an example.  So, let’s say before he met you, he was doing maybe one phone call a week.  Because he’s going, “Well, that’s important but I’ve got plenty of other stuff to do.  I’ve got the website to manage, and all that.”    And then he sits down with you and you guys talk about what’s really important right now.  And he’s like, “phone calls.”  So, straight away, one thing he can do is eliminate basically most of the stuff he’s doing.  He can just make that one phone call a week and you just keep kicking along making the same income.  

However, now that he has all this extra time, he can reinvest or reallocate that time into making phone calls.  So not only has he eliminated most of his to do list, he can move half of that extra time into this phone call task.

Rob Hanly:That’s it.

John McIntyre:Then he’s going to grow his business rapidly.  He’s going to have more free time as well.  He’s just going to be having the time of his life.  And this is what happens when you figure out what’s important, because you can reallocate the time you gather from elsewhere, into what’s important, you get a higher return on investment.

Rob Hanly:That’s it.

John McIntyre:It’s so exciting, man.

Rob Hanly:The one thing to really keep in mind with this, is really specifics.  You need to be specific.  So you mentioned earlier, “Oh, I want to make more money.”  Well, “make more money” is not specific.  A dollar is more money than you’re currently making.  That’s very simple.  Just go ask someone for a dollar, bang!  You’ve achieved a specific goal.  But if your specific goal is, “I want to earn $10,000 more, I want this campaign to do $180,000,000,”  whatever it is.  One of the highest grossing campaign on line was Porter Stansberry’s End of America.  That was very hefty.  That was above mid nine figures.  I’m not at liberty to say what it was, because I don’t know what it was, exactly.  But I do know it was well and above that mark, from all things that I’ve been told or reports.  But they didn’t start by going, “Oh, gotta make some money off this.”  They probably sat down in a war room, white board, desk, bunch of them sat around, and was like, “What are we going to achieve with this?”  And then, they worked backwards.

So, if you want to be strategic, you’ve got to start with a very specific outcome.  You’ve got to start by saying, “I want to sell X copies.  I want to do  $X of revenue.”  Then you work backwards.  And you  never talk about yourself.   That’s it.

John McIntyre:All right.  We’ve got time for this one more bonus tip that we got written down right here in front of us.  If anyone is listening, we do have a cheat sheet.  That’s how were making this flow so nicely from one point to the next.  No tangents at all.  So anyway, let’s get onto this point.  Reason versus influence will make this a bonus, but we’ll keep it quick.  Because you just mentioned something about being specific.  That’s what reminded me about it.  And this is where what’s your outcome?  Are you trying to persuade someone to do something?

Rob Hanly:It means you are starting off on the back foot.  When I was younger, I really wanted to be  the most persuasive person on the planet and get people to do anything I wanted them to do.  And as I got older, I realized that it was much more effective strategy to find people who already wanted to do it, and just give them a nudge.  That was it.  Now, sometimes, I’ll deploy tricks and tactics and all sorts of stuff [crosstalk 00:26:04]  and they  need the nudge and it’s how you help them, but the real simple version of this is, if you find a guy who likes to cross dress it will be very easy to  sell him women’s underwear.  If you find a guy who hates cross dressing, and you try to persuade him to put on women’s underwear, then you might be able to get there, but you are wasting a lot of time and effort.  So this is the difference.  Persuasion automatically assumes that you are starting off on the back foot.  You have to cajole someone and play all these tricks and games.  But if you’re an influencer, if you say less than is necessary, if you know the person and it’s all about them,  and you know where their interests are, first of all you’ll only pick targets who can be influenced.  And second of all, it will be a lot easier to influence them to do the certain, specific outcome you want them to.

John McIntyre:OK.  So this will be like, in my case, if I’m trying to sell someone an AutoResponder, I could talk to just a business owner who maybe has a website, but has never heard of an AutoResponder before.  So I would have to go on that phone call, and, before I could even sell him anything, I’d have to convince him to believe in the benefits of the AutoResponder.  And I would lose most businessmen at that point.  Or, I could create a podcast on e-mail marketing and then I’d end up only jumping on the phone with people who already knew about e-mail marketing and e-mail AutoResponders, and then my only goal when I get on that phone call is just to find out what he wants and see if I can give it to him.

Rob Hanly:That’s it.

John McIntyre:That’s the influence, right there.

Rob Hanly:It’s essentially understand that 95% of people are not your customer, are not who [crosstalk 00:27:20]

John McIntyre:And that’s OK.

Rob Hanly:That’s great.

John McIntyre:People think that’s a bad thing, but that’s the best thing.  Because when you figure it out, we’re doing some Facebook ads right now so it’s kind of like, you’re not looking for everyone.  You’re not looking for every person in the United States over the age of 18, which is like 200,000,000 people.  You’re looking for only the people that care.

Rob Hanly:That’s it.  So think of it this way, right?  Most people complain, “Oh, I don’t have enough customers.”  If you were to take your target demographic, let’s make this really actual.  If you’re bitching about not having enough customers, and your target demographic is 5,000 people, and you haven’t sold to 5,000 people, you have nothing to complain about.  Because there is still people in your target demographic who have not purchased from you.  Only after you’ve maximized your client acquisition, your client maximization, your client retention, should you even consider making everybody your customer.  Stick with the basics.  Stick with people who care.  Share with them things that they’re interested in, and then make the sale.

John McIntyre:Unless you’re selling soap.  If you’re selling soap, you could sell to everyone.

Rob Hanly:Incorrect.

John McIntyre:Well, I mean like, just ordinary bath soap.

Rob Hanly:Who wants ordinary bath soap?  Ordinary, boring people.  That’s why you’ve got Dove.  That’s why you’ve got Lush.  You got bath [crosstalk 00:28:18]

John McIntyre:I like Dove.

Rob Hanly:I don’t.  They have too much sunscreen here in Thailand.  I’m pale enough as it is.

John McIntyre:All right, all right.  We’ll wrap it up here.  We’ve got a call to action right here and that is:

Rob Hanly:Contact me. If you’re a business owner, if you’re interested in finding out how you can do the things that we’ve discussed on this call, contact me. RobHanly.com.

John McIntyre:On RobHanly.com there’s a list they can sign up to and a form and all that wonderful stuff.

Rob Hanly:Yeah, you can reach out to me.  By the way, it’s H A N LY.  

John McIntyre:Rob Hanly.com  I have those links in the show notes at TheMcMethod.com.  Thanks for coming on the show, Rob.  We’ll see you again, I think in a couple weeks.

Rob Hanly:Yeah, we will.  We’ll speak soon.

John McIntyre:Sounds good, man.