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• The Power Of Being A Professional Entrepreneur
• Power Of Simplicity
• Leave Money On The Table If You Must Walk Away
• The Power Of Buying Right
• The Power Of Installment Payments
• Brand Identity
• Power Of A Well Selected Market
• Manipulative Selling
• Pander To The Big Boys
• Burning Desire

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The “professional entrepreneur” masters the skills of entrepreneurship but is never limited to any one particular industry or business i.e. application of those skills.  The professional entrepreneur can start or run companies or both, and is adept at extracting maximum value out of a business and its customers via focused diversification.

Tags: dan kennedy, dan kennedy marketing, Dan Kennedys, Dan s Kennedy

The late Fred Herman, one of the “early” sales trainers, coined “KISS” for Keep It Simple, Salesman, and the advice is just as good now as it was in 1950. Too often, we complicate the sales process unnecessarily, for our customers and ourselves.

When putting together a sales “pitch”, I try to get a “straight line list” built; what points must be made and proved, in what order, to arrive at the close…..then I’m careful about wandering off in the weeds, away from that straight line.

Tags: dan kennedy, dan kennedy marketing, Dan Kennedys, Dan s Kennedy, direct marketing

Never get mad, never burn the bridge. End your unsuccessful negotiation with something like: “I’m sorry we can’t do business and that I will have to use all of my ad budget in other publications. If you have a last minute cancellation or remnant…..”  Leave the door open. If not before, as they see your ad appearing repetitively in other magazines, they’ll come back to you.

Tags: dan kennedy, dan kennedy marketing, Dan Kennedys, Dan s Kennedy

Buying space at the right price is just as important as presenting the right message. Maybe even more important.

The greatest product, offer and ad copy in the world will not overcome bad economics, and one way to achieve bad economics is over-paying for media (or, for that matter, for printing.)

Many years ago, I made the same dumb mistake many did and do; I “knocked off” what I could see of a business without realizing there were things I couldn’t see. At the time, the opportunity-type magazines were chock full of $10, $12 and $15 get-rich book ads, all modeled after the famous Joe Karbo ad*, and these ads were running month after month. I answered a number of them, and most of these advertisers were not doing much selling of additional products to these book buyers. I concluded that (a) they were making money from the book sales and (b) that I could create a better ad than theirs. I was right in some cases about (a); I was right in all cases about (b), but I still walked away a bit bloodied and bruised. Why? Because I paid the rates the magazines asked, less only frequency and agency discounts - and I had no idea that these other advertisers were buying the same space I was for 15% to 30% less than the “discounted” rate I was paying. (I also didn’t realize the extent to which they relied on their mailing list rental revenue for their real profits.)

I quickly learned the game, and can assure you: you MUST buy right.

And, unlike traditional/brand/image advertisers, we direct-response advertisers (should) know what we can pay per lead/order and, thus, what we can pay for space. If a particular publication will not sell you space for the amount you can afford to pay, then, no matter how badly you want to be in that publication, you must pass.

Tags: dan kennedy, dan kennedy marketing, Dan Kennedys, Dan s Kennedy, direct marketing

Think about the car business: does anybody really concern themselves with the selling price of the car anymore? No, most are only concerned with the monthly payment. That’s why that industry has gradually de-sensitized people to longer terms; from a norm of 24-36 months to a norm of 48-60 months.

America lives by payments, and is largely conditioned to think about the payment amount rather than the purchase amount. Just about anytime you are selling something with a price that is “significant” to your market, you ought to offer installments. Offering and emphasizing payments vs. price can improve response by as much as 50%.

In mainstream consumer marketing, we have discovered an advantage to monthly payments below $50.00. In business to business, the amount is less important. If selling a fairly high-priced item, you may want to “weight” the financing in your favor, to cover all costs with the first installment and only finance profit: Egs. a $1,000.00 purchase - $500.00 down, 5 monthly payments of $100.00 each.

Tags: dan kennedy, dan kennedy marketing, Dan Kennedys, Dan s Kennedy, direct marketing, small business

 Brand Identity

Most Businesses Have At
Least Brand Identity OR Goodwill;
Many Have Both

Brand identity means that the name, logo, a key product is instantly recognizable and is respected by a marketplace. And sometimes a buyer will foresee opportunity to exploit that brand identity in a new and different way - for example, the Heinz Corporation bought Weight Watchers NOT because they wanted to be in the weight loss center business but because they correctly perceived a lucrative opportunity to put the Weight Watchers name on frozen and pre-packaged foods sold via supermarkets.  Goodwill is less tangible and less exploitable outside of the business’ core customers.

Tags: dan kennedy, dan kennedy marketing, Dan Kennedys, Dan s Kennedy, small business marketing, small business marketing ideas

Power Of A Well Selected Market

“Don’t play blind archery.”

I’m going to tell you a secret that virtually no other high-priced copywriter will ever admit:

at least half the battle is won via selection, not “creative” ie. message, copy, offer, etc. Mediocre marketing aimed at a very well selected target will get superior results. Exceptional marketing aimed at a sloppily selected market may, at best, deliver mediocre results. Selection is where it’s at.

I challenge businesspeople to create a very, very detailed profile of their current typical customer and their ideally desired client. Your success at attracting or finding the ones you want depends on knowing what you’re looking for.

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Manipulative Selling

“Selling IS psychological manipulation.”
(Message: get over it!)

- THE CLOSERS

In the past 5 years or so, there’s been an incredible proliferation of new approaches to selling and sales training that try to sound warmer, fuzzier, and, well, less like selling….like “non-manipulative selling”, “non-confrontational selling”, “win-win selling”, “stress-free selling” and the like.* This is all horse puckey if you ask me. Selling is manipulation. If you are going to feel guilty about designing and using a presentation and answers to questions and objections engineered to make people do what you want; accept your proposition; buy your product; choose the higher priced options; and so on, no supply of psychobabble-ish buzzwords will turn you into an effective salesperson (in person or in print). The tools of selling include fear, guilt, ego, and greed. Mainstream advertising is largely about association: wear these shoes and you’ll be like Mike, drink this stuff and you’ll be like Shaq, drive this car or drink this beer and attractive members of the opposite sex will think you’re cool. Asking someone any simple yes/yes question: would Tuesday or Thursday be better? - even offering choices of credit cards or payment terms - is by nature manipulative. Just about everything you do in selling has a manipulative effect even if unintended.

I feel fortunate that this never bothered me in the least. I’ve been selling my entire adult life, from the very beginning operating under the “no holds barred” premise: that my job is to make the sale doing and using anything short of lying or fraud.

Tags: dan kennedy, dan kennedy marketing, Dan Kennedys, Dan s Kennedy, direct marketing, sales

Pander To The Big Boys

 

 This is very important if you happen to be selling a small company to a big company; know that they will view you with disdain and they will be very willing to assume that, given their superior intelligence and superior resources, they will be able to do much better with your business than you have. If you are selling, this is a conceit you will want to pander to. (If buying, beware of your own arrogance.)  This is the kind of arrogance that causes a big company to buy something like Snapple then wind up selling it back to its old owners for a fraction of what they paid for it; Time/Life to buy a thriving mail-order business and then manage it into extinction. It is perfectly okay to be underestimated by people giving you money.

Tags: dan kennedy, dan kennedy marketing, Dan Kennedys, Dan s Kennedy, direct marketing, small business marketing, small business marketing ideas

I’ve been around only a few people who have exhibited sustained, burning, overwhelmingly intense desire to accomplish a particular goal or learn a particular skill and it’s my observation that such people rarely waiver from an optimistic, enthusiastic, constructive attitude.  “Fire in the belly” seems to prevent distractions in the mind.

Tags: Carter+Henderson, dan kennedy, dan kennedy marketing, Dan Kennedys, Dan s Kennedy, direct mail, direct marketing, mailing list, small business, small business marketing, small business marketing ideas

Honor Your Commitments

“To be punctual in all of your appointments is a duty resting upon you no less obligatory that the duty of common honesty. An appointment is a contract and if you do not keep it you are dishonestly using other peoples time and, consequently, their money.”
- S.D. Bremer

This is a big “hang-up” of mine; I detest being late and I detest being inconvenienced by others who cannot get where they’re supposed to get on time. I sometimes go to extreme and extraordinary lengths to honor my commitments, as small as a lunch appointment - and “honor” is a chosen word. I think peoples’ behavior with regard to honoring their littlest commitments very accurately reveals whether or not they can be trusted with bigger and more important things.

Tags: dan kennedy, dan kennedy marketing, Dan Kennedys, Dan s Kennedy, direct mail, direct marketing, Gary Halbert, mailing list, small business, small business marketing, small business marketing ideas

This is one of my favorite “tricks”: selling Item-A for X$, then offering that customer a “bigger” Item-B, for Y$, but giving full credit for the prior purchase as a discount. This puts money in  the customer’s pocket that he loses if he doesn’t make the second purchase.

For example, we ran our SuccessTrak seminar business for three years based on a $25.00 deposit to guarantee attendance at the free seminar, then refunding double the deposit against the product purchase.

I nearly doubled my U.S. Gold client’s business with a $99 “Mini-Kit”, then full credit for the $99 when the full kit is purchased.

Tags: dan kennedy, dan kennedy marketing, Dan Kennedys, Dan s Kennedy, direct mail, direct marketing, small business, small business marketing, small business marketing ideas

SRDS: Standard Rate and Data Service gives you all the details of all the commercially available mailing lists in a given product category. So let’s say you’re thinking about selling something to parents of toddlers. SRDS’ll reveal who else sells to them, what they buy, what they’ll spend, how many buy, how many subrscribe to relevant publications, and a lot more. You can get a demographic and behavioral snapshot of this customer. If few other direct-response marketers are selling to them, you’d better think twice about bucking the trend. (Pioneers come home full of arrows.)

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Adapt To Your Circumstances And Make Them Work For You

“I am never frightened by revolutionary changes in my life, whether they are voluntary or forced upon me by circumstances for I do at least have control over my reaction to circumstances. And I exercise this privilege not by complaining but by searching for that seed of an equivalent benefit which each experience carries with it.”

- Napoleon Hill

Hill was a master at knitting many important ideas into a single affirmative statement like this one. I think that’s one of the main things that has so strongly attracted me to his works. Anyway, if we dissect this beauty we first get “I am never frightened”. Since fear is one of the paralyzing factors that inhibit most peoples’ performance, a statement of fearlessness is pretty significant. Saying he is not frightened by “revolutionary changes” acknowledges that there are frequently such changes. The flaw in most peoples’ approach to goal-setting is a lack of flexibility toward means of achievement, which causes over-reaction, negative reactions and, often, fearful reaction to unexpected changes. “Control over my reaction” - well, this is the only thing over which we do have total control. “Privilege” - Hill viewed his unique human ability to exercise control over his reactions to changing circumstances as a great privilege. I doubt that most people ever think of it this way. But it is. It is exclusively through this ability that we can control the outcomes of our lives. “Seed of equivalent benefit” represents a key part of Hill’s entire philosophy; that EVERY (apparent) adversity conceals opportunity.

Tags: dan kennedy, dan kennedy marketing, Dan Kennedys, Dan s Kennedy, napoleon hill, small business, small business marketing, small business marketing ideas, think+and+grow+rich

Compete on value rather than price

Henderson documented that the most successful businesses merchandise value not price. This means that they attract - and of equal importance - retain their customers because of a combination of reasons, that combined represent “value” as opposed to getting and keeping customers purely based on price. The independent retailers who survive must master this in the face of Wal-Mart and others like it.

I’ve also noticed that the more “complex” the relationship and the value delivered, the less likely a pure price marketer is to steal the business. For example, the industrial chemicals company that also removes and rehabs all the customer’s valves twice a year, provides a free fine-prevention safety audit annually by a retired OSHA inspector, a customer newsletter, 24 hour emergency trouble-shooting, easy ordering via e-mail or web site, and free classifieds for buying and selling used equipment on its web site creates “Complex Value Immunity” against a cut-price competitor. Or, for example, the retailer with a frequent buyers club, private sales, a newsletter, gift-with-purchase promotions, and an annual Super Bowl ticket drawing with tickets based on purchase points creates “Complex Value Immunity” against a cut-price competitor.

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Build on strengths

 It so happens that, right now, I’m engaged in one activity in my life where I’m having to overcome personal weaknesses instead of capitalizing on strengths, and I question my sanity in taking it on. Certainly in terms of financial opportunity, all my significant success has come in situations where my weaknesses were of nominal consequence and I was able to leverage my strengths; conversely, my greatest failure came where my strengths were of nominal value and my weaknesses were of profound importance. This is a very important idea when it comes to choosing between opportunities, setting goals and planning your future.

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Lead in niche markets

Although I’ve rarely found the opportunities to do this personally, because I do not come from any niche, when I have done it and do it, it is always exceptionally profitable, and I’ve evolved into the practice of steering clients in this direction whenever possible as well as choosing clients to work with who possess such opportunities. Personally, I’ve made extraordinary profits in publishing, mail-order and seminar businesses in the niches of chiropractic, dentistry and professional speakers; and exceptional earnings by consulting in information product publishing and marketing, business opportunities, and TV infomercials (although I hasten to add, my total consulting activity is much broader). 

Niche markets offer smaller opportunities than the mainstream, public marketplace, but they also provide a long list of appealing, offsetting benefits, including lower testing costs and investments, more predictable results, ease of message-to-market matching, affordable use of many media, high dollar units of sale, high margins, and so on. There is also this opportunity: to quickly and (relatively) inexpensively establish a visible, recognized leadership position.

Tags: dan kennedy, dan kennedy marketing, Dan Kennedys, Dan s Kennedy, direct mail, direct marketing, mailing list, small business, small business marketing, small business marketing ideas

Innovate as a way of life

Just the other day, I was listening to a recording of a speech by Joe Sugarman* and Joe said, “One good path to success is to learn all the proven rules and meticulously follow them. Another path is to occasionally break all the rules, because breakthroughs come only from breaking rules.”  Resonates with me; as you know, I wrote a whole book based on breaking rules. On one hand, I’m cautious about innovation; pioneers usually come home full of arrows; it’s often costly and time consuming……and I am always much more interested in “what works” than a new idea.  However, as Joe said, OCCASIONALLY, or I might say, at carefully chosen times, you have no alternative but to be the pioneer in order to move forward and in order to stand out from the crowd. It is, of course, the minority of times that you successfully innovate that you get noticed for, not the majority of times you successfully follow an already plowed path.

(*In case you don’t know, Joe Sugarman is a mail-order pioneer: first to sell electronic calculators via direct-response ads, first to use 800#’s. You may know him via his infomercials or QVC appearances for Blu-Blockers. But his JS&A ads and catalogs preceeded The Sharper Image and led in selling various electronic gadgets.) 

I think the best times to innovate are when you are absolutely convinced that the conventional wisdom; the already plowed path; the crowd is wrong. Just as an example, when I was getting started in the speaking business, everybody seemed to operate under the policy of billing clients for fees and expenses after their engagements (anything else was viewed as impolite and unprofessional), and most speakers who sold product from the platform sort of begged the clients for permission, and often sacrified that opportunity. Very early on, I determined that being in the banking and collections business did not serve my purposes very well at all - nor did speaking only for wages. So I insisted on a 50% fee deposit to take a date off the calendar, balance and travel expenses paid on site at the speech, and I refused dates where I could not also offer my materials. At the time, I was criticized by peers; told companies would never accept such terms; and called ‘unethical’ by agents and bureaus. Today, my payment policies are the norm in the profession. Another example: at a time when every vendor in a particular niche was offering only very expensive services requiring long-term contracts, I copied their marketing method but used it to sell a substitute product at a very small price (and quickly took in a couple million dollars) - I was convinced they were idiotically leaving a lot of motivated but unsatisfied customers behind by not offering a low price option.

An interesting survey of selected, successful, profitable large corporations turned up 74% that said they’d achieved their first big success with either a unique product or a distinctive way of doing business, although this breakthrough may not have come along until they had been in business for many years. Note the word: first. I also know many companies that are able to subsequently build on that first breakthrough more conservatively, to grow and stabilize their businesses.

The bottom-line, I guess, is that you gotta gamble. You try to gamble only when you must OR when circumstances look so favorable that it is irresistible, but you gotta gamble.

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The Successful Business Life

“To be in business is to be assaulted by relentless adversity and crisis; it comes with the territory.”

                        - Carter Henderson.

I’m very happy that I read this book fairly early in my entrepreneurial career, because this statement leaped out at me - everything else I’d read seemed dedicated to the premise that if you did things right, you could do business problem-free. This certainly was not my experience, and I was beginning to wonder if I was hopelessly screwed up when I first encountered this simple statement. With 25 years of entrepreneurial experience and 20/20 hindsight, I appreciate this profound statement even more. You see, it is my experience that even doing everything to the very best of your ability, and even trying to do everything with integrity, you will still deal with “adversity and crisis” constantly. When you are in an aggressive stage; growth, building, creating, then dealing with adversity, opposition, crisis, etc. is an unpreventable, unavoidable part of the game. The important thing to do about that is to make mental peace with it so that you do not overreact, or become so frustrated you can’t function or can’t enjoy what you’re doing, or conclude there’s something wrong with you, or worse, quit altogether. You’ll find throughout my writings about entrepreneurship a philosophical acceptance of the truth of the entrepreneurial experience as stated by Henderson.

How to build an exceptionally successful business life…….

Tags: Carter+Henderson, dan kennedy, dan kennedy marketing, Dan Kennedys, Dan s Kennedy, direct mail, direct marketing, mailing list, small business, small business marketing, small business marketing ideas

One of the great truths of finance is: “Money’s expensive when you haven’t got it.”  Multi-million dollar empires have toppled for want of a few thousand dollars. If/when you lack cash, you usually must pay an exorbitant price to get it, will gladly do so at the moment, but will often bitterly regret the terms of the deal later. This begs several ideas:

•           It is better to be the one with money than the one without

•           Be eternally reluctant to do anything that so diminishes your cash position that you might get into trouble

•           The time to get money is before you need it

•           No matter how severe your immediate need, stop to thoroughly consider the long-term ramifications of the terms

Tags: dan kennedy, dan kennedy marketing, Dan Kennedys, Dan s Kennedy, small business, small business marketing, small business marketing ideas

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