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There's a lot of ways to make money in America, and there's a lot of ways to make money in almost any business. But why put yourself in a position where you spend your entire business life having to last the next 30 minutes with somebody who all you do is complain about behind their back? Why do that?
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Hello and welcome to this month's master class. I'm Darcy Wares. I'm here with Dan Kennedy. And Dan, we get asked this question a lot about lead magnets and lead generation. And they've heard you talk about why lead generation is so important. So this month, I really wanted to start. I wanted to kind of go into a little bit about how we make sure we get the customers that we want the most. And so most business owners are after any and every customer they can get. Some will give lip service to defining and going after their avatar, but most struggle with trying to figure that part out and they complain about the customers that they get a lot. So can you start to help us see what's wrong with that picture?
Well, so I've always been amused about the complaining because who got them, right? It's not like you were required to take them, and whatever you did attracted that type of person. So if you tell me all your customers only buy by the cheapest price, you did something to get customers who only buy by the cheapest price.
Because in any product category, we can go find a place that is selling at a very high price. Right.
Yeah. So the first step to doing this right is taking the personal responsibility for what you get and not blaming the customer or the group of customers you got, but blaming you because you got them, 'cause that's the only thing you have any control over, right? You don't have any control over the fact that those 52 people are all cheap skates. You only have control over you and what it is that you did that brought you 52 cheap skates in the first place, right? So, it starts with selection and discrimination.
Okay?
And the willingness to define who you want and who you don't want and advertise and market and generate leads with that. Mmm. So telling certain people that they are not wanted is very hard for business owners, closed loop in large part because they have a bad front-end advertising and marketing system. So they don't have enough flow. So now they are afraid of not taking this one. Right? In professional service type businesses like mine, where you really are dealing with one client at a time, not 50 customers at a time, the fear for a lot of people is palpable. I mean, so they know, they will say in friendly conversation, "I took a client today. I know I shouldn't have taken." And then they will tell you everything that is going to happen with this client. They know they shouldn't have taken, right? But they were afraid not to.
Yeah.
So the first thing to understand about that is is that it's an erroneous fear. It doesn't even shut down volume. So if you look at the biggest advertiser currently, and probably at least for the past decade, in financial services, it's Fisher Investments. And I don't know, it's probably 20 years since we had him as a speaker at an info summit. Ken? Yep. Fisher. And Ken's a weird dude. And Ken was a weird dude there. And Ken has a reputation of being a weird dude. Uh, but he has built the largest advertiser in the category of money under management. And the current lead generation ads have changed very little over the last decade. So he's generating literally tens of thousands of leads every year for his sales force. In all the advertising, up until very recently, they said, "If your portfolio is $500,000 or more, call us." Now, that's the same as saying, "If your portfolio is less than $500,000, we're not for you. Leave us alone." The only thing they've changed very recently is they've upped the number to a million. So they have caught up with inflation, right? Is really what they've done. But they are still saying, "If you're not coming to the table with a million dollars of investable assets, we're the wrong place for you. Go to the go to the financial planner in the basement of your bank branch. Go to your brother-in-law, you know, leave us alone." And in the beginning, that took a lot of courage. It doesn't now because they've established a formulaic equation of X amount of dollars on advertising generates Y number of leads. Y number of leads generates Z number of appointments, and so we can exclude. And that happens again and again through their whole process. If you go play prospect, the first thing that happens when you go to get your free information is a verification question about your investable assets. The next thing that happens before you get an appointment is a verification question about investable assets.
So, the best of this that I've ever seen done, and sometimes people discredit its genius because of its comedy, but Halbert's lead generation ad, Gary Halbert, to get a woman, which I have, is the best lead generation ad ever written by far for all sorts of reasons. So this full-page newspaper had it, you know, ran in an LA tabloid when he was living in California because it was an advertorial. Look, the paper insisted on putting a banner across the top, but you guys could get a snap of this later, problem telling everybody that that it's an ad, which is funny in and of itself. The headline is, "Generous creative businessman wants to find a hot, sexy woman with a good sense of humor." From here on, from the midpoint of the ad on almost to the end are the seven things Gary does not want from a woman.
So half the.
Half the ad. So in the first half, he kind of establishes who he is, and he kind of establishes why he might be interesting to somebody. So here's my lead generation magnet in essence. But now here's who should not darken my door. Right? Now, the whole thing is written funny, but it's a very serious ad. And I have vision compromised today, but I'm just going to give you the seven things, not the copy. Number one, death or disease. Number two, drug dramas. Number three, desperate dilemmas. Are you sleeping in your car because your rent is six months overdue? Is your ex-husband a hatchet murderer who is trying to track you down and who swears, etc.? Right. Number four, marriage. I've been married twice, and both times it spoiled a great relationship. I'm not getting married. Eaten. Number five, I don't want a sexual swinger. Number six, I don't want a sexual prude. Uh, number seven, I don't want a woman who can't stay in prosperity. Some women are offended by this ad. I'm always interested in the different responses I get when I use it in show and tell. I read it in the Bias Touch marketing tapes, and I'll get an offended, you know, response, but the amount of the response he got was unprecedented. I mean, in the old paper days or today, personal ads today online, in the, you know, if you get like a trickle. I mean, so this thing was blind. Uh, it's just Gary at a post office box in Los Angeles, California. I saw the responses. The carton you go buy at Office Max that you fold up yourself to put your tax records in, and it's got a lid, right? This ad ran four weeks in a row, and it brought in like six of those, and it brought serious, long-winded responses. It brought a fair number of racy photographs with them. It brought former Playboy centerfold with centerfold attached, bank vice president woman without centerfold attached. It's unbelievable what this ad did.
Yeah.
And it worked. By the way, he had a relationship for many years with a respondent to this who was a perfect find for him. By the way, he could have sold the boxes for a lot of money. And you would say to yourself, well, so many people are going to be offended by that that you're not going to get any response, right? It's going to turn off the volume switch. But it, it doesn't do that. Fisher proves it doesn't do it. Halbert proves that it doesn't do it, right? So with highly affluent, sophisticated people, or with a mixed bag of the public, no, it drive it does exactly what it's designed to do. It repels a bunch of people. You who are a bad fit for you, who if you don't repel them, you are going to be tempted to take them, right? And then you are going to have customers, clients, or patients you spend your life complaining about. Dr. Charlie Jarvis, who's a dentist and a humorous speaker, he used to tell dentists that he had a sign on the backside of his operatory door in a dental practice to remind him that said, "You could stand anybody for 30 minutes if they can't talk." Okay. Now, I never chose to argue with Charlie, and it was funny. But why put yourself in a position where you spend your entire business life having to last the next 30 minutes with somebody who all you do is complain about behind their back? Why do that? Right? There's a lot of ways to make money in America, and there's a lot of ways to make money in almost any business. So, this type of ad, number one, it repels a bunch of people that you should, you don't really want, but if you let them get into your process, you're going to wind up with some of them, I in part because you are weak.
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