EP371 Magnets Sell

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Magnets Sell

I wanted to get a bit mechanical and answer some of the questions and comments that have been coming in to the email box. If you have any topics you’d like me to talk about, hit me up at Ken@IncomeStore.com. I do read every email. Sometimes it takes a couple of days to a couple of weeks to get to me if I’m out of town, but I do read them all. If you’ve got an idea for a podcast that I have not covered, I would be happy to. One of the comments or questions that came in was, “Could you talk a little bit about some specific nuggets that could help a product or service flow quicker through a sales funnel?” A sales funnel by definition is when you look at your potential audience. A lot of people like to draw it like a universe at the top and then down are some planets like a funnel. Picture putting oil in your engine. You take a funnel so that you can start with a big gallon and then siphon it down into something thin that will get through the hole in your engine block.

Conceptually, selling something is the same thing. You start with something big, maybe the whole audience in the United States, 338 million people. Though that’s the universe, that doesn’t mean they’re all qualified prospects. You’ve got to ask some probing questions to see, “Who’s interested in my product?” That’s one thing, but of the people that are interested, who could afford your product? Of the people that can afford your product, do they even want your product? The concept of a sales funnel is through different types of questions or emails or commercials. You weed out the people who are not interested in what you have with the people that truly are. Then you get to the point where you have a qualified prospect. They have the money and they’re qualified. They are interested in what you have to offer, but you have to find a way to incentivize them to give you a fair exchange of dollars for your product, in exchange for money for value.

What are some things that I’ve either seen in my life or offered up a suggestion to other companies to move their sales funnel faster? Meaning, how can we sell more stuff faster? That’s what I’m going to cover in episode 371. I want you to write down, “Magnets for selling.” As we know as a child, if we put two magnets together and we have the different polar ends away from each other, they will stick. Some magnets are so strong you can’t even break them apart. A magnet is something that has a force, and everything has a forced inside it that pulls, but you can also use magnets in selling. Let me give you some examples. For hundreds of years, people have had a lemonade stand or a booth at a trade show or the market.

I remember I wrote a book once in the beginning paragraph, talked about the oldest sign ever noted in mankind, it was 7,000 years old or something like that. It was carved into a stone or steel and it said, “Behind these walls is a marketplace.” It was a sign so that you would know the vegetables and stuff are on the other side of this wall. That’s not a magnet, that’s just a sign. The point is if you go to a trade show and there’s booth after booth, why do you go and walk up to some booths where you quickly will walk by ten other booths? Often you will see a tiny magnet at the front of a booth and it’s something you can’t walk past.

It could be a Twix candy bar, it could be a breath mint, it could be a pen, it could be a six-inch magnet acting as a ruler. The point is it’s a giveaway so when you walk up to the booth, you stick your hand in the jar, which then gives the opportunity for the person behind the candy jar to ask your name and ask you how you’re doing. Start a conversation that might lead to a sales presentation, that might lead into interest and you might buy something because they had a mint Life Savers. The mint Life Savers is the magnet for selling. The question to you is, “What magnets are you using in your sales funnel?” You don’t have to have a booth at a trade show to use a magnet. Let’s talk about real estate conventions.

I’ve been to so many hotels. We travel a lot where you hear this big ruckus in a big banquet room down the hall and you see hundreds and hundreds of people rushing into this auditorium. Over the years, I’ve walked up to these in a lot of times. It’s one of these weekend real estate events where they’ve been advertising for $50,000 to $75,000 for two weeks to get hundreds of people in a room. The magnet is the first 100 people who show up will leave with a brand-new tablet, like a mini iPad or something. Are the people coming to sit through two days of real estate seminar? No. They came for the free tablet, but you can’t get the tablet until the end of the first day as long as you’re there the whole day.

They force you to sit through a presentation. How many people have been in Orlando, Florida? You go to a restaurant or some store and right outside the store it says, “If you sit through a 90-minute presentation for timeshare, you don’t have to buy anything, we will give you tickets for you and your whole family to Disney World for the whole day for free.” I’ve sat through those presentations because I have four kids. I wanted free tickets and I almost bought a timeshare, but that’s the magnet. We cut a radio commercial for our ribbon cutting open house for our new building in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. At the end of the commercial, it says, “If you share with our staff what your company does, we’ll enter you for a chance to win a new MacBook Air or iPad.” That’s our magnet. We’re going to give away a couple of MacBook Air, a couple of iPads and we’re doing that because the radio reaches a lot of people. We need something strong that guarantees business owners in town will walk through our new campus and get to meet us and greet us.

Here’s another one for you that I’ve used throughout the years and a lot of insurance people have used this for years. I used to run some direct mail. We would do 2,000 to 10,000 mailers and it would say, “If you show up to Al’s Steakhouse,” I would always pick the best, most expensive steakhouse in the town. “If you come out and listen to Ken Courtright talk for an hour about Income Store, Ken will buy you a steak dinner and a couple of drinks.” Every time I’d go to a city, I’d have anywhere from fifteen to 45 people listen to me for an hour and it would drum up a ton of business. Did they come to hear me talk? No, they came because they eat at this place all the time. They want a free dinner but then they go, “This is interesting. You do what? I give you money and you buy me a website that makes money. Then you manage it and split the revenue 50/50 and guarantee X percent from that asset.” All of a sudden, the pinballs go off in their head and two weeks later they’re calling my brother, Billy, or my buddy, Mike Engstrom, to do a deal. How many times have you driven by a location and it says, “Buy one, get one free?” The free one is the magnet. If you buy one, you’ll get one free. How many times have you driven by the jewelry store and you see those crazy signs, “Everything 75% off?” The magnet is the discount. The question is, what is your magnet?

Let me explain another magnet. I have seen a lot of people online where they will create a digital product like a training course and for a month or two they’ll sell it for $300 to $500. It’s on their website and they’ll sell a few. Then all of a sudden, I’ll go to their website a month later and it says, “Sign up for our monthly program for $6 a month, and for those of you that sign up in the next two weeks, I will give you my $400 course for free.” That is a very strong magnet because people almost paid $400 for it the week before and now it’s free if they just sign up for $6 a month with no commitment.

How hard would it be to generate a monthly club of something at $6 a month, knowing there are no strings attached, there’s no contract, you can cancel it any time if you could give away a free $400 digital item? Once that digital item is made, the cost is nothing to keep it on your website. It’s free, it’s digital. You can give that away for free, which has no more hard costs. It’s a very powerful magnet. Here’s the key. What you have to figure out is what is the lifetime value of a customer for you? In your lifetime and you get a new customer, what does the average person give you in their lifetime in gross revenue? Write that number down. What are you willing to pay upfront in a magnet to get that customer to join your company as a customer?

One thing Dr. Oz does, he offers up his two-point-some-odd million email list, if a new product comes out that he believes in, if they’re willing to give up 50% of the gross sales price. If you come out with a new product, maybe a hair loss cream and it works, it’s $28. If you give Dr. Oz $14 of the $28, he’ll put it in front of two million people and you’ll move a lot of product. Here’s the problem. You’re going to lose a lot of money on that. Your profit might only be $5. It’s going to cost you $7 a bottle, but you’ve got your brand overnight in front of two million people.

Think about Groupon. The concept of Groupon has come up with a way to drastically deeply discount your item. Put it on Groupon and then Groupon still gets a huge percentage of that. It is going to be a loss leader to the nth degree. However, Groupon does an incessant amount of endless marketing for a period of time and not only do you move a ton of product, it gets your brand in front of so many people so quickly. Groupon has made so many companies. It has also hurt a lot of companies because they get addicted. It’s like crack, cocaine. They can’t stop using Groupon, but it costs them money every time. A lot of companies have even gone out of business because they move too much stuff too quickly.

I’d like you to think of three things you could give away that have a hard cost and a real value, but it would stop people in their tracks and get them to say, “There’s no way did they offer me that.” What are three things you could give away if you wanted to go bigger, go home, where it would stop people on tracks and they’d go, “He offered me what? She offered me what?” Here’s the question, what if you did offer that? What do you think about the repeat purchases, the referrals? The branding alone from a huge magnet is intense. For branding purposes alone, magnets can be priceless.

Some of you heard that my wife got invited to the White House. We were at the White House. We were in the East Wing. We were listening to a presentation by Vice President Pence, then we got out. We went into the hallway and we were yacking it up. Everybody couldn’t believe they shook Vice President Pence’s hand. All of a sudden, a lady looks at me and goes, “Say something again.” I said, “My name’s Ken.” She goes, “You’re the guy that’s always on Sirius Radio. What’s the name of that company?” My wife goes, “He’s the voice of Income Store.”

For branding purposes, our magnet is a weekly dollar spend on Sirius Radio because the branding alone is physically priceless. What do we have to give away? A lot of money upfront to get on the radio. It’s expensive, but when we walk in to do a presentation or sign autographs for books, my wife and I get mobbed because they know who we are from Sirius Radio quite often. Ask yourself sometimes, what could I give away as a magnet? What item could I buy as a giveaway or what can I do?

Here’s what I want you to do. If you could come up with three things that would hurt your gut to think that you’d have to give away but you could offer them on your website, in direct mail or on the radio and it would get so many people to call your company to inquire about buying your stuff, what could you stomach giving away as a magnet? Think of three magnets that would be gut painful to do but you know if you offered them, it would get your phone ringing like crazy, your email box flooded in, and it would immediately help you sell stuff in your sales funnel. Go start a magnet right now.

Important Links:

• Ken@IncomeStore.com