EP 671 – Marketing Wrong? Here’s The Right Way To Marketing With Randy Dickinson

NCS 671 | Marketing Wrong

NCS 671 | Marketing Wrong

 

Are you marketing wrong? You’ll know you’re marketing wrong when you’re selling to earn the buck, rather than selling to give customers solutions. In this episode, Scott Carson’s guest is Randy Dickinson, a Marketing Automation Expert and the Founder of Dickinson Marketing Services. Randy talks with Scott about how being successful is not about you. It’s about getting to the point where you can help others. When you do marketing from this position, your customers will respond 10x better to your offer because they’ll sense that you genuinely care about helping them solve their problems, rather than looking at them as mere cash sources. If you want more nuggets of marketing wisdom, you’ve come to the right place. Tune in!

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Marketing Wrong? Here’s The Right Way To Marketing With Randy Dickinson

You know how much I love marketing and how I believe it’s the true lifeblood of every business. No matter whether you’re selling tiddlywinks or selling notes, you’ve got to be marketing. I know so many people that come from a non-marketing background. You’re doing your career, your job, you’re punching the clock, you’re doing something. When you get into the true entrepreneurship of what you’re doing in the note business or the real estate space, you’ve got to develop some skills. You’ve got to start developing some things.

I’m honored to have a special guest. He is a marketing strategist who trains business professionals on the things that make marketing work and how to eliminate the things that are killing your marketing efforts. I heard him speak in Denver at Aaron Young’s Magnify Your Wealth Seminar and Conference. I enjoyed how he talked and what he shared. I loved it when he started off telling, “You’re doing it wrong.” For many people, they are doing it wrong. We are honored to have the one and the only Mr. Randy Dickinson joining us here. What is going on, Randy? How’s your day going?

It’s wonderful here in Southern California and you don’t have much heat yet. We’re not having bugs like they are on the East Coast. We don’t have high humidity. I’m going into the ocean. You can’t beat stuff like that.

You and I were talking beforehand about how a lot of people make mistakes. They have this great grandiose idea, writing a book or, “I’ve got an idea for something,” but they don’t have a plan. Let’s talk about how important that is, whether it’s a marketing or a business plan a little bit? Let’s start off there.

What’s amazing is now, unlike ever before, you can start a business, you can tell a few people and within twelve months, you can be a millionaire. We’ve all known people or seen people. We’ve heard stories that Bill Gates and Zuckerberg didn’t go to college. Everybody says, “I can do that too.” There is that real positive energy that this can be done. There’s no question it can be.

Those guys, even though they accomplished it, they didn’t do it without a plan, marketing, or with a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff that you’d never see and hear about. You go on the internet and someone says, “If you do these three things, you’re going to have $1 million. You’ll never have to work and you can sit on the beach.” They’re marketing to you and people so want it, they buy into that.

Let’s be honest. If you don’t have a plan, you’ll get exactly what you plan for, nothing. It’s hit and miss. You’re rolling the dice every single day and you may get lucky 2 or 3 days in a row, but on day four, you don’t know why it went wrong in days 1, 2, and 3. You’re starting over every single day. You have no leverage and no ability to anticipate because you didn’t plan anything. Don’t go out there without a business and marketing plan. Know what you’re doing ahead of time. It doesn’t take long. It’s not rocket science. It just requires a little bit of effort.

When you talk about how people are doing things wrong, let’s dive into that a little bit. I heard you, but our readers out there didn’t. Let’s share a little bit about how people are doing things wrong, besides not having a plan?

The number one thing that people do when they do it wrong is we get excited about what we’ve learned, what we know, what we can accomplish, what we do. When I’ve got all this information and knowledge, what I do is I run to the internet, website or email and I’m going to tell you about it. I’m going to say, “I’m Randy Dickinson. I’m 45 years old, I’ve done this and I’ve learned all these things. I’ve gone to Tony Robbins and we learned this. Now I’m putting it all together and I can show you how to do it in three steps, what I’m doing. For the next five minutes, I’m going to tell you everything in the world about what I’m doing and how much I can help you.”

After a while, the people go, “I don’t care about you, Randy. You see, I’m sitting here at home. My daughter is sick and I don’t know if she’s got COVID, flu or cancer. What I’m trying to figure out is can you help me? Thanks for all the information, but I’m out of here.” They don’t listen for five minutes. They listen for four seconds.

The biggest mistake people make is they think that people care about what they’re doing and they don’t. Honestly, Scott, if you think about it and when people come to you, they don’t care about you, but they love what’s you can do for them. If you’re going to interest anybody in your business or your marketing at all, you need to tell them what I’m going to do for you or what you’re going to get from it, not about yourself. Later on, they may ask you. The number one thing people do wrong is they make themselves the hero of the story. You’re not the hero. The client is. You’re just the Yoda.

If you think of Star Wars, you think of Mark Hamill or Luke Skywalker. He’s bouncing all around, up and down, making mistakes and doing all the things. Yoda is always in the background, steady, confident, and sure. He’s the guide. He guides them through the problem, helps them when he’s up, makes sure he keeps his focus. When he’s down, he elevates them back up again, but he never ever is the hero. Yoda never gets the glory. Mark gets the glory, but the guide is the one that makes it happen. In your marketing and your business, be a guide. That’s probably the biggest thing. If people could change that, their business would change.

We’ve all seen it and been on stages, especially different stages. People get up there in the first fifteen minutes and how awesome they are, and they lose the audience quickly. I see this in the financial world too. As an ex-financial advisor, we have that in common and an ex-banker because I would always. As financial advisors, we have that in common. It makes me cringe when I bring in a financial advisor, somebody helping my clients, a banker and they start going into all these deep, crazy things, PE ratios and all this stuff.

My client’s eyes glass over like, “I’m confused.” A confused mind is a no-mind that either hangs up, it swipes right, it goes onto something else or checks out. They go to their phone to find something else to get their attention. You’re exactly right, “What’s in it for me?” It’s what the people were thinking. You’ve got to keep that in mind when you’re speaking. What are some of the tools or tips that you tell people how to get to that, “What’s in it for me?”

Let’s use a website because that’s the biggest marketing piece that most people have nowadays. Since it can be done quickly, you can spend $7 to $8 to get a hosting account. You can go to Wix or buy WordPress. You don’t even have to buy WordPress. If you get your hosting account, it’s free. They’ll give you a template for it. You can throw up a site.

For less than $100 a year, you can look as powerful as a $10 million company. Everybody knows that now. You show up on this website and now you have an opportunity in four seconds to convince somebody that what you’re talking about is going to be valuable. One of the biggest tips is you need to understand your audience and what do they care about?

If it’s not about you, then what is it that they care about? I do coaching, consulting and things like that, but if I’m talking to another coach and I don’t care how good my ideas are, he’s not looking for coaching. He’s looking for clients. He might talk to me and he’s not in his head thinking, “That’s great.” He’s thinking, “If I can keep talking to him, I’m not going to have time to get some clients and he’s not hearing me.”

The number one thing I say you do is to know exactly what your clients are looking for. What problem can you solve? There are a number of ways we say that, “What is your client lay awake at the light at night. I’m thinking about her when he and his wife had pillow talk. What did they talk about at night? The secret stuff.” That’s the stuff that they are looking to solve when they get up in the morning.

If you’re that guy, then they flock to find you. If you could market nothing but solutions to the world and you had the solution for whatever it was and people could figure out how to find you, you’d never have a problem getting a client or making a sale, but people don’t. They’d rather talk about themselves and their cool process, all these neat tools they bought. They put in pop-ups. They do all those things to distract you, to get you to sign up and do something when all people want to know is, “Can you solve this problem? When you do, what’s it going to be for me at the end when I’m all done?”

Imagine you hurt yourself and you go to a doctor for surgery. You’re thinking, “Is it’s going to take away the pain? When I wake up, am I going to be able to walk, run, or lift weights again? What’s the end result when I’m done?” If he says, “When this is over, you’re going to be able to lift your weights and you’re never going to feel any pain again,” you sign the dotted line. That’s all you wanted to know. All the other stuff you don’t care about, his degrees, where he went to school, as long as he’s competent and you can do it, you’re there. That’s I think people over-complicate the issue.

Most people make it more complicated, drag it out a lot longer than things need to be. I’m a big of the KISS method. Keep it simple, stupid.

We’ve all gone to the internet and we scour it. If you looked 20 or 30 years ago and I was still in my prime then. If you said, “Randy, do you have a funnel?” I’d have gone out to my 1971 Toyota and looked at an oil change funnel. That’s what I am thinking about. Funnels didn’t exist and people didn’t get too distracted with funnels. I talked to them that before, TV advertisers spent a lot of time educating you. They didn’t talk about the competition and didn’t worry about that.

They told you what they did and how they did it. With TV came along, they learned how to get real creative in 30 seconds. All of a sudden, there’s no education. You could go into TV there are a lot of products that you and I see. We don’t have a clue what they do. They don’t educate us anymore and engage us. They don’t bring us to a point where we’re intelligent and we can make a decision. The guy that does that in his marketing now is uncommon.

NCS 671 | Marketing Wrong

Marketing Wrong: If you don’t have a plan, you’ll get what you plan for – nothing.

 

You could call this our second tip. What can I do that sets me apart from everybody else? If you use the same language to everybody, the same jargon as everybody else, then the listener says, “If you talk like everybody else, you sound like everybody else, then you must do what everybody else does. If that’s the case, then what’s your price? If you’re all the same, I’m going to get the best price I can. You’re a nice guy, but you’re not $50 cheaper. I’m going to go with the other guy.” You got to figure out, “What is it that I do that sets me apart from everybody else?” People don’t think about that.

That’s what they call the unique selling proposition.

You can use all kinds of language, but when you keep it simple, the bottom line is you can say, “Randy, why should I do business with you? If you are a plumber, there are 28 plumbers in the phone book in my city. Why should I use you versus the other guy?” If you can’t answer that question, he goes, “If you can’t answer it, I’m not going to be your guinea pig.” People wonder why they don’t get enough business and don’t spend any time on it, Scott. They don’t think about it.

You say, “How can you have a business where you don’t think about the thing that you do that’s going to get your business more than anything.” What happens when you go through a COVID time and times get rough? What’s the number one thing people quit doing? Marketing. “I can’t afford marketing. What’s marketing supposed to do for you?” “We’ll get you more customers.” I can’t afford to get more customers, so I’ll quit doing that. They go out of business and they wonder what happened.

That’s one of the things I think that helped make us successful and good at what we do is we have a marketing first mindset versus, “I’ll fit the marketing and my clients around everything else.” You ask me something like, “When you were scheduling, what do you do these every day?” I’m like, “We try to do an episode every day.”

For the most part, either me being honest when he’s on the show or having somebody on mine. That’s our driving factor. How are we getting the word out to the readers out there about who we are, what we’re doing and how we can help them? Many people say, “We’ll get to it later on,” or never get to it is what it comes down to.

The number one answer I often get is why they’d not market this as well? “I work on referrals and word of mouth.” Of course, I say, “How’d that work for you in 2020?” “It didn’t work.” “What are you doing now?” “That’s why I’m talking to you because I need some help.” If they’d have been continuing their marketing throughout the year and now marketing change, there’s no question about it, but it didn’t go away. You marketed in 2020. I marketed in 2020. We’re still in business.

That pain point became different for many people and that’s the thing that people forget about is they keep doing the same thing that they were doing several years ago, or trying to market like they did all this, “We’re not going to change.” You have to change what you’re doing depending on what’s going on in the market, what your audience is looking like, what your focus is. You’ve got to tweak things on a constant basis.

One interesting thing that we’re not saying, but it’s behind the scenes, is when you go into business to start any business, there are a reason and a purpose that you go into business. If it’s not client-centric, in other words, it’s not about helping someone achieve or accomplish, then your business starts to spiral down from the beginning because marketing then says, “What can I do? What problem can I solve?”

If you’re going into business and it’s all about making money for you, then when it comes to solving that marketing question, you don’t have an answer. You don’t have anything to talk about on your website because it’s, “Come buy from me so I can go buy a yacht and this car I’m standing next to.” People now are seeing through that.

At the very beginning, it’s like come to Jesus moment as, “What are you doing with your life? Are you here to serve or are you here to make $1?” They’re not mutually exclusive. It’s not like you can’t make a $1, but if your energy is going all toward making the $1, people are saying, “I don’t want to spend my time with those people.” I think COVID had forced a lot of people to start thinking, “If I’m going to go back, I’ve got to have a reason.” When push came to shove and people had to choose, “Feed my family or a business,” they chose what they needed to and if you were about making a $1, you were done.

We see that in real estate and marketing. People can read between the lines. They can sense it. If it’s all about you making $1, you might make some money at first, but you’re not going to be long-term. Even built that following or that trust in delivering content or delivering value versus the value going into your pocket and not being exchanged for something that the client needs or problems being solved.

If I can go to point three and it’s what you do in your business as well as anyone that wants to get ahead, succeed and not be common at some level needs, whether you want to call it coaching, consulting, help or counseling. You can’t know enough by yourself. We always do. We need good help. If we removed all the help from our lives, that means there’d be no trash, water guy, electrician and we’d die in seven days. You got to get good help. You’re not saying to the world, “Don’t use me because I had to get help.” Tiger Woods has more help than probably anybody ever got. Tony Robbins had his mentors and he had his good help. Everybody that’s followed him has good help.

The most successful is saying, “It’s not about me. It’s about getting to the point where I can help others and there are some other people that help me help. I’m all about paying for good health because that puts me ten steps ahead of my competition. They can’t do what I do because I was taught by someone that was taught by somebody. That little line there puts me in a situation and place that no one else can compete against.” Get good help, whatever you’re doing, even if it’s going to be free. Read a book. Do you recommend books to your clients?

All the freaking time because it’s so many lessons or learning can be passed on in a variety of fashions. I think that books can be a mapping to overcoming obstacles or avoiding pitfalls more in a lot of cases. I’m a big fan of Seth Godin. I talked to him via email a couple of times, but that guy has been a mentor, whether he knows it or not, for years. It’s the same thing from Jim Rohn, as well as some of those names out there for you. I had a good chance to have Mark Victor Hansen on my show. He has been a guide for several years.

I got to go on a mini stage was Zig Ziglar. The guy was a prince of a guide. When he talked, he exuded knowledge. It dripped off. You wanted to be close to it because you realized there weren’t wasted words. He wasn’t full of himself in any way, shape or form. He was out to help people and being around him, you realize, “I’m a better person just because.” Imagine how wonderful your business would be if the comments that people made are, “I’m a better person because I’m around Scott.” Who wouldn’t want to do business with you if that’s how everybody felt about you?

I think that’s probably the missing thing in our marketing messages now. We’re so caught up with of the business side, call it marketing and business and all those strategies, having funnels and all the various software, that some of the basic things of how to win friends and influence people. Some of those tried and true philosophies. It’s people reaching people’s hearts, touching hearts and that’s the beginning of commerce. People want to do business with people. They feel good with and people that they trust. You can’t get that if you’re all you’re doing is worrying about money. Unfortunately, it doesn’t.

One of the things I think you and I are both talking about is listening to your clients. It’s listening to the people out there versus shouting at them for them to listen to you. You’re asking questions and then shutting up to listen to what they’re going to tell you. We all know that if you market effectively, people will tell you what they want and how they want to be part of it.

People will tell you what they need help with it. It’s the thing in teaching and webinars. I’ve always seen that when I thought of an issue and it bombed, it’s not because I thought it was great. It’s because it wasn’t valuable to my audience. Every time I listen to the true questions being asked or the big problems I focus on, it always explodes a lot more exponentially-wise than I thought.

Have you ever had a situation Scott, where you meet someone for the first time and then you start talking because they asked you a question, and within a minute, you realize, “I forgot their name already?” We’ve all been there. How does that happen? No one ever came up to me and said, “Randy, I remember your name, but I forgot your face.” What we focus on, we seem to remember more than other things and clients are a part of that. What we focus on, we remember.

You heard me give an example, one of the things we do when we talk with them, we do our fact gathering and we’ll ask them, “What’s keeping you awake at night? What problems and obstacles are you facing right now in your business? If a year from now, you were standing here and looking, what would you have accomplished? What would you have overcome?” Those are little ways we try to get to that information.

If you listen, they’ll tell you one thing. They’ll give you what I call the external. If I did this, my business would be down. You’re sitting here thinking, “If their business is down, I could sell them this.” Immediately, they’re giving you, they’re opening up and you’ve immediately said, “What can I get from this? Now I could sell them this.” That’s what we do oftentimes.

The real sensitive or the caring marketers can dig a little deeper and find out, “That’s what’s on the outside. Maybe if there’s something underneath that.” “What does that mean, Randy, if you lost a little business?” “If I lost a little business, it means I couldn’t send my daughter to private school anymore.” The real problem this guy’s facing is more than a little loss of business.

NCS 671 | Marketing Wrong

Marketing Wrong: Being successful is not about you. It’s about getting to the point where you can help others.

 

If you’ve got a solution that will solve the problem that puts his daughter in school, is he going to buy that versus some guy that sells them a lead? There’s no question. You find out maybe that beyond that, he comes from a belief that says, “If a man can’t provide for his family, he’s worse than an infidel.” This guy’s got a deep-seated and deep-rooted feeling of providing and provision. When you hear his problem, he says, “I don’t have enough leads.” You could address that.

If you can give him and show your solution how it’s going to provide for his family, dealing with that deep-seated, his reaction to you in relationship with you will be ten times better than what he is to someone that’s selling. We sometimes miss the golden opportunities to provide help because we don’t listen long enough and don’t ask the right kinds of questions to find out what people care about. You can’t jump in and say, “Scott, come on, what do you care about?” We can’t do that. We have to be sincere about it.

When we’re working with clients and you start hearing the same stories, and you jump to conclusions without listening to a little bit more, we’ve all been responsible for doing that and I know I’ll do that. There were times like, “Listen, be quiet and shut up. Turn your phone off. Turn the distractions off and be present in that moment.” That’s one of the biggest things, whether you like him or not. One of our ex-presidents, Mr. Slick Willie, Mr. Bill Clinton, always commented on that. Wherever he was at, he was always in the moment. He could remember people’s names. That was one of the things that helped him build trust and rapport with people, whether you’re Republican or Democrat.

It’s the same thing with George Bush, the first one. He would always take time at the end of the day, along with Ronald Reagan, to write personal notes to people that they met along the way. It’s that listening to people, hearing the little things along with it, whether they shared their kids and pets, their favorite colors and recipe, something like that. Taking the time to listen will set you apart because if you can mention that people like, “They were listening to me.” That builds trust along the way. It’s easy to do. You just got to shut up and listen.

Imagine you’re talking about a dead instrument here and I’m an investor. I’m cautious and I’m not certain, but for 15 to 20 minutes, you’ve been talking to me about my family and different things, and you’re listening to me. When we turned the key, we opened the door and we’re getting into the investment things now, whether I recognize it or not, I already felt, “This guy listens.”

It turns into something now where I have to make decisions and choices. I let my guard down a little bit because I’ve already learned that you listen. Most people can’t open up until they believe that person cares a little bit. Before I’m going to tell you my deepest secrets about my finances and that, I’ve got to believe it’s not only safe but that it’s worth my time to share it with you.

That listening element, aside from gathering information, does a lot on the other way, when that person sees you listening, what it does for them. It’s one of those simple things that two people up there, one’s highly successful the other one says, “I’m always smarter than him. I’ve been doing it longer. Why does that guy sell more than me?” They don’t get it. Sometimes it’s these intangible little things like listening and not being the hero.

I don’t know if we’re on point 4 or 5, but one thing about in terms of mistakes people make, they do not practice the things that they say and they do. They say things like, “I’m better off if I wing it.” I don’t know if you’ve ever talked to anybody that has done work in plays and stuff like that, the amount of practice. They don’t go to that script for a Hollywood movie and say it the first time without probably practicing 100 times their intonations to get their head right when they say certain things.

They don’t wing it. The professional speakers, how many times do they practice that speech when you see it on TED Talks? 50 to 100 times, every word and pause is done for effect. If you and I are selling and marketing, to think that we’re good because we can think on our feet, that it’s not better off if we practiced it and know it. If you practice and know it, which means then it’s fun and present in your mind.

Now, I can listen to you because I don’t have to think about what to say. I already know what to say. That’s in my mental capacity. My heart and my soul are engaged with what you’re saying and I can only do that if I don’t have to think about what to say. Practice the things you’re going to say. For some people, that sounds so old school, but it’s what people respond to.

Once a month, we’ll do a banking blitz. We’re on about dial for dollars for 4 or 8 hours in some cases. I will Zoom it and we bring people on to watch. I think back to when I first did start calling banks back in 2007 to 2008. I practiced 50 times in front of a mirror before I made phone calls. The guy in the next room over is a mortgage company. He was like, “Are you okay? Are you in there talking to yourself?” I was like, “No, I’m practicing. I’m role-playing what I’m going to say, how am I going to overcome an objection or if they ask me a question, I know what to say. I’m not stumbling over myself.”

You’re right, I think a lot of people think marketing, “I’ll wing it in one thing. I’ll throw something up there and it’ll be fine,” versus practicing it, tweaking it and looking at it so that they look professional. It rolls off their tongue or it rolls across the internet as professional versus being hodgepodge and thrown together in a lot of cases.

Instinctively, we know that. For example, you take an NBA basketball team and you take the All-Star game. The talents and skills are there, but if you put an NBA team against the All-Stars that had practiced, had played and let’s say you ran a two-minute drill, the team would destroy the other team. They practice it. They know what to do when certain things happen. The guys that are one-on-one experts wouldn’t stand a chance.

You’ll take it back to the great UCLA teams, that stretch, and you can look at their practice. It was the same thing in and out. The ball barely touched the ground because of the passing, but that wasn’t a lot of crazy shooting. It was a lot of that drill, that muscle memory of getting good at the little things over and over again.

They were one of the best conditioned and talented teams out there because they practiced what they preached. It wasn’t doing and throwing half-court shots up or trying to dunk from the free-throw line. It was simple. Bill Walton was an interesting character. Everybody worked that system and it worked. A lot of people don’t put the systems in place and try to hodgepodge it together.

I don’t know if you’ve ever played basketball, but there’s that point it’s like a 45-degree angle between the baseline and the top of the key, where you’re on an angle and you say, “Should I try to swish it or do I bank it?” There’s that certain spot there when you go up and you turn around and look and you’re caught between. John Wooden had this practice. There was a guy, Dave Myers. He played for UCLA.

I went to high school with him and played with him. I talked with him afterward and he said, “I can’t tell you how many hours we spent in practice banking that shot. When we got to that place, we knew we didn’t have to think. It became automatic.” When certain things become automatic, that means you’re free now to think and focus on other things that other people aren’t focusing on, which puts you in a better situation than all your competition.

When it comes to my mind, thinking about that is the big fundamental who made it into the NBA Hall of Fame, Tim Duncan. He was famous for his bank shots. He was automatic from that 45-degree spot or the top of the key on the free-throw line. He wasn’t out throwing three-pointers but banking it. It was almost automatic. It wasn’t sexy, but winning four rings and making the NBA, that’s sexy.

The fifth point, it’s along that same thing in terms of what we can do in terms of the low-hanging fruit and it correlates with the one practicing here is when someone asks you, “Randy, what do you do? Scott, what do you do?” I have to practice myself because I usually say, “I work with businesses all over the country and in 45 minutes, I can show them $100,000 of additional revenue without spending another nickel on marketing or advertising.” I’ve said that 1 million times, but there are times I’ll be in a social situation. I go, “I probably shouldn’t say that now.” I fumble and then I say something, “Let’s keep it simple. I’m a marketing guy.” They go, “Okay, great.” I shoot myself because I go, “Why did I say that? I know better.”

Sometimes we don’t want to engage or we’ve never practiced it and we miss that opportunity because if I set the first one and that person is a business owner, I’ll probably say something like, “$100,000, really?” They’ll say, “How do you do that?” They advanced the conversation. Imagine if you sell real estate and they say, “What do you do?” “I’m a realtor.” “I’m not buying or selling.”

In their mind, they dismiss them. “Scott, what do you do?” “I buy debt.” “Thanks.” They’re gone because what I said had nothing to do with what they care about. If you can formulate whether you want to call it an elevator speech, I call it a one-liner, I have a format that I teach to do that, but it’s focused on what an audience that you serve cares about. I’ve done this and talked about it. This is embarrassing.

Sometimes I’ve gone into a restaurant out here in Southern California. I’d go into the Corner Bakery. I’d sit down there and there are people after a while. You didn’t recognize and you’d walk up to them, say, “Excuse me, I’m working on my marketing program. Do you mind if I tell you?” I say my one-liner and then when I’m done, “Can I ask you what you think I do?” They say, “Okay.” I practice on it. If I don’t get the right answer that I need, which is, “How do you do that or $100,000, really?” I know I need to refine it. I need to keep working on it.

I could tell you out of 1,000 people I may have told that. I don’t think five people still do it and have one that they regularly say. Even my coaching clients that I do, I test them every now and then. I’ll come back in 3 or 4 months and I’ll say, “Tell me your one-liner.” They go, “We did that, huh?” They suddenly realize that they haven’t been doing it in a long time. They miss the opportunity of serving again that says, “Here’s what I do that can help you.” You leave with that and if they’re not interested, that’s fine. You’re not being offensive in any way.

NCS 671 | Marketing Wrong

Marketing Wrong: We miss the golden opportunities to provide help because we don’t listen long enough and ask the right kinds of questions to find out what people care about.

 

We can maybe do this. It’d be interesting to give you an idea, Scott. I’m putting myself on the line here, but give me a business and let’s role play it for a second. I show your readers here what it sounds like or could look like. I’m winging it. We did not practice this. I have no idea. Pick an industry and then tell me what it is so at least I’d have a little bit of idea. You need to pick an industry you need to ask me and I need to do it. Pick an industry and I’ll be that guy.

You’re a podcast production company.

We’ll do the first one the way somebody might say it.

What do you do?

I’m the producer for a production company.

Okay, awesome.

Where can you go with that if you’re hearing it? When you asked me, I now have control of the narrative. I get to paint whatever I want to paint. You’ve given me carte blanche to do it and as soon as I said, “I’m the producer of the podcast company.” It’s like blank stares and now I’ve lost control of it because I have no clue how you’re going to feel about that.

I don’t have any idea of what you’re going to think about that. Whatever direction I go, it could be wrong. I could insult you, offend you or appear pushy to you. I don’t have a clue what to do. I have to move on. I miss any opportunities there. People miss opportunities all the time because they don’t do this. Let’s do it again. We’re making this up on the fly.

Total off the wall here, but we’re winging it.

We didn’t practice this time. I’ll do the same one again. Let me give you a different way of how I might create it.

Randy, what do you do?

Scott, you probably know people that listen to podcasts sometimes when they’re driving to and from work?

Yeah.

Scott, in my company, we work with people like that and we present them a message that demonstrates that they know and understand their audience and it gives them a way to sell and talk about what they do to where people get to respond to them. I made it up. I’m not saying it’s any good, but you can clearly say, now you go, “I listen to podcasts. Would you help me? My buddy listens to podcasts and it opened up a conversation about something that people care about.”

Maybe not him, his brother, sister, wife, mom, but who knows? At least it gives me the opportunity to talk about what I do because now I know generally people care about sharing a message. I’m going to relate it to that. If I know the audience directly, then I’ll get more specific. Give me another one. Let’s try one more.

Let’s say you’re a real estate rehabber or a real estate investor. What do you do, Randy?

I work in real estate. I’m an investor and I rehab homes.

Are you a realtor?

No.

The reason I say that is that it happens a lot. When you’re an investor, I hear people say, “You’re a realtor or you’re a mortgage broker.” They don’t tell you the time to go through it, “I fix and flip homes.” “Okay, great.” “It’s like Flip this house. HGTV, that kinds of stuff.”

Let’s do it again. We’re winging this.

What do you do, Randy?

A lot of people, when they get to my age in life, we’re trying to figure out how to augment our retirement, make a little bit more, so we’ve got a little bit less. I take homes that are somewhat distressed and I find people that are interested in creating an income. I’ll rehab the home and allow them to create retirement income.

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Marketing Wrong: When you practice, the process becomes automatic—putting you in a better situation than your competition.

 

What income are we talking about?

How much can I make? I don’t expect everybody to wing it like I did, but you don’t have to wing it. You get to sit and plan it out ahead of time. This is one of those times where if you were a basketball player and you couldn’t shoot a bank shot, you’d go to your coach and say, “Coach, how do I do this? Help me.” If you’re working with Scott, he can help you do this.

Scott, you got an education. You show your guys how to do this. My guys, they call me and say, “Randy, how do I do this?” I help them do that. It’s a talent and skill because we’ve been around a long time. If you don’t know how to do it, ask somebody, get some help to get this done because it will make all the difference in the world.

It’s part of the reason we came up with the tagline, “Turning problem properties into profitable solutions.” It depends on where I’m at and I’ll tweak that a little bit in the last part. I turned problem properties and profitable solutions for myself and my investors. I’ll shut up and that’s like, “Investors? Tell me more or we invest in real estate and split the returns with our investors and the owners.” I never say I’m an investor because it’s too broad or generic in a lot of cases.

One of the things and a little quick hint, if you’re doing this or anybody, is I often lead with, “Scott, you probably know somebody with,” and then I state the problem. You probably know somebody that has invested in real estate if that was what we’re talking about here. “You probably know someone that has rehabbed a house, maybe. You probably know someone that’s flipped a house or used some of these things.”

What I do if that’s the problem, I’d say, “Scott, you probably know someone that doesn’t have enough money in retirement. We’ve got a process. I’ve got a process. We solve that and we can put money in your pocket. You can live not only a happy retirement, but you can do the things with your kids and your grandkids.” Now people are sitting here.

That’s a whole different story than someone that says, “I work with people and I invest their money.” That doesn’t cut the same way. If you can say, “You probably know somebody with this problem. We have a process that solves that problem, which allows you to enjoy this.” If you fill in those three big blanks if you did nothing else, but that you would have a great one-liner.

If you practice it, it rolls off your tongue and sounds silky sweet when someone hears it. Not to repeat mine, but I work with people all over the country, small businesses, and I show them how to find additional revenue of $100,000 in 45 minutes or less without spending another nickel on marketing or advertising.

Here’s the problem. They need more business and revenue. I’ll show you how to find $100,000 without spending another nickel or dime on marketing or advertising. That’s the process. I hit two of those things right there. You can do it without spending any more money, $100,000, and everybody’s got that problem with needing more revenue. You can hit those things in your little one-liner and you practice it as we talked about earlier, and you say it again to where anytime someone says, “What do you do?” You get your wife, kids and staff to say it.

Now you have a salesforce going out there at the same mission scope message goes out to everybody. It becomes viral in your own little world. If they hear the same message and all these different channels again, it sticks where people hear that, “I heard that before, isn’t that what that Randy guy said?” “That’s what he does.” If you change your message all the time, then nobody hears the same thing and it doesn’t get that stickiness.

Someone said, “Randy, what do you do?” I could say, “You probably know people that struggle trying to figure out one-liners. We have a process to create a sticky message so when people hear it, they don’t ever forget it.” Would that work? Would that resonate with a marketer that said, “I need something sexy and glitzy would that stick?” We made that up. It’s not hard to do. If you don’t do it all the time, you got to practice it.

How frustrating it is when you see different messages going out by our clients or people marketing different things. I see this oftentimes when I’m going to meetup groups where people pull out a business card and they got five things they do on it. They’re Jack of all trades and a master of none. I had a peer of mine who reached out, “What do you think of me when you see my name?” People sit below confused because he’s trying to market 3 or 4 things online at the same time. I’m like, “They’re all different. I don’t know what you’re doing.”

I don’t know if you’ve ever read the book, Building a StoryBrand by Don Miller. It’s a great book. Don talks about clarifying your message. One of the things he talks about there is he says, “If you’re confused, you lose.” There’s an analogy we often use. Imagine right there, Scott, you’re sitting there and I throw you a bowling ball, that’s one of the things I do and then I throw you another bowling ball, that’s another thing I do.

Now, you got to keep these two bowling balls in place and then I throw another one at you. Now you’re juggling three bowling balls. What happens when I add one more thing to the mix? Something’s got to give. In that sense, don’t confuse people and give them more bowling balls. For my clients, I say, “You and I need to be low cost to our clients because people invest time, energy, and money to talk, work and be with us.”

If you can be as low as cost possible, it makes life simple. One of the ways we do that, imagine you get an email letter. Scott sends me an email letter and he says, “Randy, we’re doing all this stuff.” At the bottom line, he says, “I put together this thing here. Could you go ahead and evaluate it?” It’s sixteen pages long. I’m not going to read his letter. I’m not going to read a sixteen-page attachment. That’s a too high cost for me.

If he says, “Randy, could we get together, talk about something and set up a time? Just reply, yes or no.” I go, “I can do that on my own. I could hit reply. Yes or no and I’m done.” That’s a low-cost response. Be low cost to your client, make it easy for them. Use language that’s easy to understand. Do a one-liner and say the same thing. Make it low-cost for them to support, endorse and refer you. Don’t make your business so complicated they can’t tell anybody else what you do.

That’s a huge thing in marketing. In the old days, marketing had these long emails. The shorter the emails were twenty lines of texts or less than 100 words and a lot of times with the 4-word or 9-word email is short and sweet to the point.

NCS 671 | Marketing Wrong

Marketing Wrong: If you can be as low cost as possible, it makes life simple.

 

It’s fun to write a letter like that, how we’re talking and you skip a line. It’s almost like a little movie when you read those when they’re done well. I think people enjoy them. Learn to write that way. Another great tip, Scott. Thanks. Learn to write the way you talk and people will engage. Marketing is not overly complicated sometimes.

I think we overthink it many times.

“Look at these guys. Look at that page. I could never do that. I got to have to copy sixteen pages to write a sales letter.”

Randy, what’s the best way for those that are reading to us to reach out to you and to have you help them with their business or their one-liner?

I have a phone number that I use in my marketing. It’s (714) 706-1040 and you can text it. Text the word Randy to (714) 706-1040. You’re going to get a little message back. It’s going to have my email address there and it’s going to take you to a website there. They’re explaining what we do and how we do that. You can say, “Can we talk?” If we do that and say something, “Scott said something,” we’ll send you out something. I’ve got a whole little one-liner, little practicing that kicks you through those steps and how you can do it.

If they get ahold of you, you can let me know because I’m not sure if you texted anything other than Randy and they’re a little goofed that up. I don’t want to do that, but let Scott know you want that one-liner and I’ll get it to Scott. Get ahold of Scott here, I’ll send it off to him and then he can forward it on to you. Make sure you let Scott know you want that, and I’ll make that available to you.

Randy, this has been awesome. I’ve enjoyed this. Interesting people you’ll meet in Denver. One of the biggest things. I think many people overthink it and they don’t practice it. They don’t have a plan and honestly, that’s wanting your expertise. Help them unwind that and putting that plan in place for what they’re trying to do, matches up with the message they’re putting out.

Thank you so much. It’s been a blast talking marketing with someone that understands it and appreciates it. It’s great to talk with you, period. Thanks so much for having me on. I’ve enjoyed the time.

Randy, we’ll have to have you back again at another time. That’s going to wrap it up for this episode of the Note Closers Show. Check out, Randy. Read what we talked about there about shortening our message or coming up with something short and simple. I don’t want to say elevator pitch, but it’s that to let people know, but also listen. Listen to your existing clients and the people out there that are surrounding you.

Don’t forget to role-play. Sometimes role play with your spouse, mom, dad, wife. It can be a good thing because a confused mind is a no-mind. That’s what marketing is all about. Clearing up the focus of your message and what you’re trying to do to help them and not help you. If you do that, trust me, you don’t pay off exponentially, then you try and go out there and ram down somebody’s throat. Go out, take some action, everybody and we’ll see you all at the top.

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About Randy Dickinson

Randy is a marketing strategist who trains business professionals on the things that make marketing work and how to eliminate the things that are killing your marketing efforts.

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