Episode #88 – Roy Furr on The Fundamentals Of Writing Copy That Converts (because it’s NOT hard to make way more)

It’s John McIntyre here, the Autoresponder guy it’s time for episode eighty eight of the McMethod Email Marketing Podcast where you’ll discover one simple thing: How to grow your business within our Market? How to grow your business with marketing you know. How to get more customers? How to crank up the value of those customers? And automate things as much as possible, so you can run around at the park with the kids and do all like crazy cool stuff. Today all we’re talking to Mr. Roy Furr. Now Roy, I met him at Titans of Direct Response copywriting conference so it’s a while back and he was actually the copywriter for the sales for that conference, so he’s a you know, he knows probably some, a lot of the biggest copywriters in the world right now, and so I thought I’d grab him and put him on the podium, you know, get him to do a podcast with me on what he’s  up to and some of the copywriting strategies he uses to really get great results with his own list of *** clients. So today we’re gonna talk about  the value, I mean he has crazy value per email. You know that sort of value dollar per lead which we’ll hear about in the episode. We’re gonna also talk about some core Direct Response concepts cause I believe and he believes as well. Now a lot of this stuff it comes back to fundamentals. I mentioned last week about the opportunistic stuff that you, you really can’t be opportunistic  about business ideas or projects within the business or even tactics, that you can’t think, “oh im just looking for the next latest and greatest tactic to run for my business”.  It really does come back to fundamentals so we  gonna talk about some of that fundamentals today. to get this show notes of this episode of the McMethod Marketing Podcast, go to www.themcmethod.com/88. Now this week’s McMasters Insight of the week is, to know your values. Okay, so what does that mean? Well, we all make decisions based on whether we wanna go to the gym,  or not go to the gym or go out to party on a weekend, or spend time with the family or all the different things, all the decisions we have, we have a filter that we run our decisions through and that’s what made them, and sometimes we feel like we made the right decision. We fill our lives with that decisions and that feels good, and other times we don’t feel good about it. We question ourselves, we doubt ourselves. So the advantage of knowing what your values are and taking the time to understand them, your core values, what drives your decisions, is that you know, you have a conscious way of knowing when you made the right decision and when you didn’t. Okay, so I did an exercise recently and this is what I do. I got a list of four hundred different values. I actually did this exercise with a podcast guest who was on a probably a couple months back. His name is John Logar and you can find the podcast in the archives if you like and he helped me with the exercise. So basically we got four hundred different values, four hundred different things and different ideas like health and nutrition or family or love, all this different things and the idea was, out of those four hundred, you choose all the ones that resonate with you, and I ended up think I listed like seventy five and you do it again. Out of those seventy five I had thirty, and out of thirty I had twenty, and eventually we riddled it down all the way to five and then I ranked the five in you know  highest  to lowest and there you go. I had a set of values and it not so much about the deciding what the values are and the exercise, its more about eliciting them. Okay, you know diving under the hood of your brain I’m thinking what really drives you already. Okay, and what’s gonna happen is those shift, but the advantage of knowing this stuff is it really helps you to make decisions, to be clear on what you ‘re doing, why it’s important to you, what really matters. So you can wake up each morning, you can look in the mirror, and you know what you’re doing today is really moving your life forward in the way that you want to move forward. I mean, I think this is the key I have in that really satisfying and fulfilling life is that knowing what your values are and then crafting like creating a life that allows you to live out those values. I know I talked about a couple of weeks back about this idea of passion versus getting good at something. I think that’s the wrong questions to be asking. The better question is probably gonna be something along lines of, what are your values? And are you living a life aligned with those values? Because if you are its gonna feel freaking awesome. But  if you’re  not then it’s gonna feel pretty empty. Okay, so that’s the exercise. You could do it yourself, you go talk to John Logar. He’s a really cool guy, really friendly. You can reach him out via email. I think he has a Website might be Call John Logar and you can jump on phone call with him. Calljohnlogar.com I think that it is, I might be wrong. But something like that, anyway, that’s that, in this weeks’  McMasters insight of the week. You probably know McMasters by now, if you’d been listening to this podcast, but just in case you don’t, it’s a private community. VIP community you might say. With people who you know pay monthly fee for access to forum and training products and I get in these forum. I reply to their threads. All the members in there replying to their threads, and the whole goal here, of this sort of networking, it’s a bit of mastermind, you might think, is to really help people grow their business. Get more customers, with less time, with less effort, with less fuss. Because that’s what we all want, right? That’s why you’re listening to this. You do want more customers, you want them with less effort, you wanna, so you can do all that you know, so you can really live your life and with accordance to your values okay. So that’s what McMasters is all about, if you wanna know more about it and even sign up go to themcmethod.com/mcmasters you gonna get all the information there and I would love to see you inside the forum. That’s it for now, let’s get in to this interview with Mr. Roy Furr.

John McIntyre :

It’s John McIntyre here the Autoresponder guy, I’m here with Roy Furr. Now Roy is a copywriter, I met at the Titans of Direct Response conference a couple months back for the time he’s supposed to go live, a couple months ago in a Stamford Connecticut, which was a.. So Titans of  Direct  Response is an incredible marketing summit, marketing conference with all the big guys, Gary Bencivenga, and all those guys and then Roy turns out, he’s a copywriter who was at the conference but he actually wrote, from my memory he wrote a sales letter for Brian Kurtz  from Boardroom who actually put the events on. So Roy has worked with some of the biggest guys in this industry and direct response game. So I’ thought I’d get him on the show to talk about sort of the lessons he’s learned and sort bit about what we both go at our times, what was the core , some of the core concepts that  we talked about there. So get into that in just a minute, Roy how are you doing today man?

Roy Furr:

I’m doing very well. I’m doing very well and its, I feel honored actually to be in the podcast. I know what a huge effort these can be to put on and to connect with all the great people that you’ve had in your podcast so far and I feel honored to be a guest featured alongside with them, here so.

John McIntyre:

You’re one of them now man,

Roy Furr:

I guess. Yeah.

John McIntryre:

Okay, but before we get into some of the contents, we just, I mean we just discussed this a minute ago. Can you give a list now, just a background on who is Roy Furr and what are you up to?

Roy Furr:

Yeah. So in 2004 I got a degree in psychology and it was an undergraduate degree and I promptly got just about the best job to be qualified for with undergraduate degree in psychology which is a customer service job at a local gas company and it was an absolutely miserable job. So for people who didn’t pay their heating bill all winter and then the first warm day of spring came and we went out to shut off their service, I was the guy that picked up the phone, when that person called in, you know if you didn’t pay the bill and you started yelling at me because I shut off your service apparently. It was a horrible job, it was my first full time job out of college and it was really miserable existence but I worked from like noon to nine pm and most of the people don’t want to call the gas company after about six pm so I had bunch of time in the evenings to read and I’ve been you know a casual writer. My biggest commercial success as a writer was when my grandma bought ten copies of my self-published poetry book for all my aunts and uncles. But I found a book called The Well Fed Writer and I thought “Oh that’s an interesting title” and I started reading it and discovered this whole copywriting thing and that book in particular was in direct response copywriter so I quickly went down my own rabbit hole. But that was back in 2005, discovered direct response copywriting. By fall 2005 I had a full time job, basically running a marketing department for a small business at Oregon. We more than double that business over the next four years. Put it in the e-magazines list. The fastest growing small businesses in the country and had a ton of success there and then in 2010 I broke off on my own. I became a fulltime freelance copywriter. I wrote a lot of business opportunities stuff in that first year and then transitioned by late 2010 to almost exclusively working with the big financial publishers and doing direct response then. In late 2010 I got a lot of folks who copy know AWAI.  Every year they have their boot camp, as we’re talking it just ended. Unfortunately I missed it this year but in 2010 I was the guy that got the big ten thousand dollars check up on stage. I loved using that picture for being like the hottest up and coming copywriter.

John McIntyre:

How did you get that? I’m curious, what was the challenge of the…?

Roy Furr:

Yeah. So the, it’s kind of a multi layered process for choosing it but largely you get under their radar by working with AWAI. I mean obviously they’re kinda aware of all their students. But their most aware of the students who shop at boot camp and spend a lot of money with them and their even more aware of the people who work for them. And that year I wrote, what was their largest ever opportunity product promotion. It was a promotion that did so well that they had to actually shut down selling the product. Now normally what they do, and what they still do, is they launch a product. They don’t do like product launch formula model. They launch a product and they just sell it from that point forward. Well it did so well that a day or two Katy called me up and said, “I’m a little nervous cause too many people want this”, and I said, “well you should shut it down”. Then they said, “no we can’t do that. We’ve never done that, never done that”. And then about 3 or 4 days later they say, “Roy we’re gonna go with your idea. We’re gonna have to shut this down”, and so  within two weeks they shut it down  because it was just selling too well and then launched it again, as a, with even more content a few months later. But it was largely that promotion that like cemented the ten thousand dollar award that they offer.

John McIntyre:

Wow! That’s a cool story.

Roy Furr:

Yeah. Yeah.

John McIntyre:

So what happened? You’re at this thing; you got this ten thousand dollar thing then what happened?

Roy Furr:

Yeah, well at the time I had been just starting to do work with the big financial publishers and I got a bunch of gigs with various financial publishers at the time and one of them actually locked me up for the next eighteen months as an exclusive for them where I did a bunch of copywriting. I wrote my first million dollar promotion there. Had a lot of success with them and even had the opportunity to kinda do some copy chiefing like helping to run the copy in writing department in kinda in own position and then I went back out into the freelance world after eighteen months and I’ve continued to work with a bunch of other folks, and build my network work and just go for a ride I guess. It’s a wild world, even you know, even this big financial publishers it’s kinda a wild world to be freelancing and bouncing between them.

John McIntyre:

Absolutely, absolutely. Okay, okay.  Well lets, I’m curious just before going to cool direct response stuff, I’m wandering you know, after telling that story, where you trying to get to in five years’ time. Do you wanna still be a copywriter or do you want to have your own company?

Roy Furr:

Well one of the things that I’ve dealt in speaking with the best copywriters in the world, because I’m on a first name basis with  most of the best copywriters in the world and so I get to have conversations with them that  a lot of people don’t and there’s one guy who spoke he’s name is David Galland through he’s currently with Casey research. He was a partner in Everbank which is a huge online banking success story in the U.S. over the last couple decades. He hosted the New Orleans investment conference for I think eight years. He helped launch the Blanchard Group of mutual funds and he has billions of dollars of sales to his name even though you don’t know who he is. Well one the things he told me when I was working with him in the Casey research was like find a way to get equity stakes in business. I mean the freelance game is nice for a while earning fees and royalties, even some really substantial royalties. But if you can a find a way to become a partner in a business and use your marketing skills as your capital that your bringing to the table. That is the single best way to make bunch of  money off  marketing and off copywriting. And that’s far more better than being a freelance copywriter. And that’s, there’s a lot of time you’re thinking about building a copywriting team and developing marketing strategies online, offline. Understanding you know if it’s appropriate, is there a direct mail *** you can go into. Yeah that’s shrunk in last few years but you know the folks that I worked with that are using the mail are still getting incredible response rates so there’s less competition in that mailbox now. You know it may be cheaper to provide online but you know getting new customers through the mail is, its great way to go right now. Yeah.

John McIntyre:

That’s a cool idea. I think as a copywriter listening to this, this gonna be some of that. Cause I know I’ve been in that position before, right? Well I don’t do much copywriting these days but I’ve been in the position before and sort of want to keep going with the copywriting. I don’t want to become, you know very successful with it and that is interesting, I haven’t heard of that approach. Instead of just doing, I mean you can do small partnerships. Partnering  with say a traffic guy and doing like an internet marketing product but I guess the idea of partnering with big big big company and taking an equity position in that company cause that has much much much bigger potential than just your old deal.

Roy Furr:

Well I don’t. David’s example was an interesting one. There were less than ten founding partners and I don’t know how big Everbank is today. And I don’t think he has a stake in it anymore. I think he might have sold the stake. But when you just think about that, he is one of you know less than 10 founding partners in like the largest online banking success story in a last decade or two. There’s got to be something to that.

John McIntyre:

2.2 billion dollar market cap right now.

Roy Furr:

Okay, I’m sure he cashed out before that but still you know. And he’s done this over and over and over and over again. And it’s something like, I don’t know the exact details but I know *** has a partnership agreement with *** I don’t think he’s a shareholder because of something that I listen to a presentation that he gave. Where he just said he didn’t want to deal with being a shareholder.  Dan Kennedy he is a shareholder in multiple direct response businesses that the Kennedy’s hair, barber club being one that I know has some sort of stake in. You know these great copywriters are doing these you know over and over again. Gary Bencivenga, he actually said at one point that one of his biggest regrets of his career as a copywriter was not going off and forming his own business. So what did he do when he retired, he formed fresh pressed olive oil which is an olive oil of the month business that he has a stake in.

John McIntyre:

It’s very interesting. Like it’s an interesting thing, I think that sometimes it’s easy I mean, when I was learning how to write copy, and really like ****, like writing down things in my hand and reading books all the time, is it was easy to think while, you know, this really is the point here you know. Let’s just make some money, some sales, let’s just write some emails, you know, do that kind of stuff. But the end game is really to, I mean, it’s not really the end game. It’s basically, if you want to be wealthy, like if you want to end up with that F in your money, you need to get into a position where in you’re a business earner. Whether in its 100% of the business or you’re a partner in it, you split it so you write a copy and now the people build the business however the deal is you have got to get that point where you’ve got equity, where you own some sort of a business, some part of it, if you wanna become really, really, really wealthy.

Roy Furr:

An ideal business where you may work hard upfront but then you’re be able to set up processes and systems and stuff where you’re able to step away and still continue collecting those tracks without having to be writing copy every day for the business. You know that’s a great long term. When you think about something, I keep on going back to it, just because it’s an example that we’ve brought up, it’s an interesting concept with Everbank. You know it’s a bank, they don’t need a new sales letter every, every week or month or something. You know it’s…

John McIntyre:

It’s another thing too. Like i noticed with, in new *** marketing field, I find even with the Direct Response game is, not everyone of course, there is a lot of small thinking like this thinking let’s say like ten, twenty million dollars is a nice business to have. Yes its nice, but if you have like a hundred million dollars or five hundred million dollars or say like Everbank has 2.2 billion as far as Google is telling me right now. So like if you’re gonna play at those kind of levels, it takes much much much bigger idea and I think it’s quite difficult to build. Say a 2 billion dollar business on top of a few books. And you could probably say I like that. But its…

Roy Furr:

Yeah, yeah. Well Mark Ford and Bill Banner who are partners in Agora, and Mark has written about this under Michael Masterson. His book Ready, Fire, Aim, is like must read for everybody in the Direct Response business. They eagerly perfected the model of… They build a small business and then they’ll get to pass a million just by figuring out how to sell one thing. They’ll get to pass ten million by selling a lot of things that those same customers want and then after ten million, they start to spin off divisions and you see this with Agora all the time. Money Map Press used to be a division of Oxford club. Stansberry has divisions and separate companies. *** sweater actually kind of underneath Stansberry .So  they have this kind of you know family tree that early owned by Agora proper but it’s all this independently operating business units and we’re talking a very solid nine figure business with divisions of it that is still growing very fast. And that’s run by two copywriters. I mean if. Actually there was a sales letter that came out recently that said, basically if Bill Banner, because he was the founder and is the majority owner, I’m pretty sure. If he wanted to be a billionaire today, he could be, he would just have to package up Agora and sell it. But he doesn’t want to be a billionaire. He wants to like ride about the economy and own this business and he’s happy with where he’s at. He’s not just trying to cash out. But yeah, it’s. And they thought about building a publishing empire they figured out this model that’s outlined of Ready, Fire, Aim of you know essentially supporting the entrepreneurship of you know you got really good copywriter. Porter Stansberry was a really good copywriter for one of their divisions I don’t remember. And he said, “I want to write my newsletter”, and so he wrote his newsletter and launched the newsletter, you know now he has Stansberry. It’s you know this is the deep dark secret for a customers of this industry is that a lot of newsletter, you know copywriters have to be really sharp about whatever topic they write about. You know and that’s one of the benefits of finding an edge and sticking with it.

John McIntyre:

Right.

Roy Furr:

And you get really really sharp about a topic and so a lot of newsletters you know are written or compiled by at the front side of a copywriter.

John McIntyre:

The interesting thing that like, the interesting that you know that like Bill Banner and Michael Masterson they are copywriters. But there’s an interesting thing like where it’s not the copywriting part of their brain that built the company, it’s the entrepreneurial part of the brain.

Roy Furr:

No.

John McIntyre:

So you know let’s say the list out here, they might be a copywriter or consultant of some sort, but if you want to have a company, if you just don’t want  like writing sales letters or maybe passing a few things onto copywriters you have something small like that, and you have a company that  requires you know, you gonna have to put your copywriter hat on to write your sales letter. But when it comes to building companies, setting up process and hiring staff and all that sort of stuff, you’re gonna be an entrepreneur. So it’s an interesting reminder, a very important reminder that, I guess to think big, and that, like, you don’t have to be just a copywriter.

Roy Furr:

Yeah, I think a lot of times its kinda like the entrepreneur that started the business and got it off the ground and going. It’s not the entrepreneur that can take it to a hundred million dollar company and to some degree you can do that like in your head you can make that switch if you are like self- aware enough to do that. And so you know copywriting alone may help you build a one million dollar business or five million dollar business just by going out and writing a bunch of sales letters. But when you want to take that next leap, that’s when you should hire MBA’s because they tend to as a whole have kind of  negative impression that they are built  for middle management in large companies. But you have to have that kind of systems MBA mindsets that’s taught and figure out how you can transition I guess or put on different hats in different times, and say, “okay, we just need to sell products, I need to put my copywriter and marketing strategist hat”, but when I need to build this big business I need to put on my system builder hat and fill in the copywriting roles you know ideally so.

John McIntyre:

Okay, okay so I’m curious, just to change the topic a little bit, we mentioned Titans before, you we’re at Titans, I was there. What was your, we talked at some core concepts, or what was the gist of Titans? What you get out of it?

Roy Furr:

Yeah, I should actually bring out, I’m gonna use this as just a momentary excuse to talk about my  blog breakthrough  marketing secrets cause I’ve written about takeaways a couple of times and I just on Monday, well Monday as I speak, I wrote like the top takeaways for beginning copywriters. The funny thing was, to me the thing that jumped out so much was that there was like very little talk of tactics at Titans and so much about like mindset and not getting caught in kinda this little mind of the copywriting world, like going out to the big mind of like the whole world and thinking about your market and all of that. Like you know one of the things that was recommended a couple of times was reading about *** and how the best lawyers build their cases and that was completely fascinating to me like, we’re thinking about the different types of persuasion out there. And that, I mean that’s still fairly connected. There were a lot of talks there and to think about topics that might be thought of as kinda “woo woo” on like you know putting yourself on. I compared it to having a GPS and a lot of them talked about kind of variation on this like you have to enter, let’s say you want to drive from Los Angeles to New York City well you know you enter the address in New York City in your GPS and then you have to like stay on course for that entire trip and it’s a long trip. But if you stay on course you know like where you’re going, if you get off route, you have to get back on route. And to become really great, to become a titan at Direct Response or anything else like that’s one of big things that I took away is that you have to be kind of constantly aware of that GPS. I definitely did the same thing as a copy writer very early on. I wrote this in 2009, this letter for ***services that said something along lines of, imagine hiring the next Clayton Makepeace, Michael Masterson, you know when they’re basically fresh and whatever. Now the letter itself *** but the thinking behind that was sound. I mean that particular letter I don’t think generated me any business but it was actually like very similar to some of the stuff I heard from the Titans on stage.

John McIntyre:

It’s an interesting thing, I mean here’s a concept from I think Psycho-cybernetics is the book where you know getting towards a goal, getting towards anywhere in life its very pretty much  like sailing a boat or you know riding a boat across the ocean the reason being is that you never get on a straight line from point A to  B specially when your  sailing because your wind blows and you have to sort of  zigzag your way there. So wind blows and you get blown of course.

Roy Furr:

Yeah specially up wind.

John McIntyre:

Yes exactly and you zigzag back in, zigzag back and eventually you get to the destination. But I mean so often you lie, if it’s easy going, “Oh I’m getting so distracted and I’m getting carried away with this thing over here”. Those sort of problems and it’s tough to remember but it’s really important to remember that really the process of getting to that goal I mean whether you’re a copywriter right now or you already have a business doesn’t really matter. Getting to anywhere, you zigzag your way there. You can’t go on a straight line and even if you try. And it’s an interesting analogy, and sort of what you’re saying there, is that it doesn’t have to be perfect, it doesn’t have to be that straight line.

Roy Furr:

No it absolutely doesn’t.  And I think the ceiling is another great analogy. Actually my grandparents retire onto a sailboat and sailed from Indianapolis, Indiana which you know, you have to ride a lot of rivers for a while. But they sailed from Indianapolis, Indiana down to the Caribbean and all the way across over to South Africa and back. Like in their 60’s, I think they were in their 60’s when they went to South Africa. There was like 26 days, there was not a sign of human life, like not even a jet smoke trail across the sky. The whole world could have imploded, you know as long as the ocean is still there, and they wouldn’t have known it, for 26 days. And so well I grew up visiting them on their sail boat quite often and that really resonates with me. I enjoyed the idea.

John McIntyre:

I’m curious about what we talked the core direct response concept. So aside from, I’ve talked a lot about this in my, in training community which is that a lot of people get hyped up, they get excited about tactics, like headline template or a good sales letter template. When a lot of, I mean the core fundamental to me is empathy, getting inside someone’s head so much that you understand him or her better than they understand themselves. That to me is one of the fundamental concepts.

Roy Furr:

Yeah. There were six words that really like locked into my brain and I don’t remember where I heard them but it locked into my brain when I was fairly early on my copywriting career and its understanding your prospect’s fears, frustrations and failures as well as their dreams, their desires and what they see as their destiny. And like if you understand that, like what fears are blocking them from having a life they want, what are they frustrated with today in their life right now, what failures just keep bugging them , like things  they should have succeeded at but they didn’t and what dreams do they have for their future, and for what that can be. What immediate desires they want fulfilled right now.

John McIntyre:

How do you find some of this stuff out?

Roy Furr:

A lot of it for me, I mean, about the time that this podcast is published and I have a very small group of copywriters coming  to join me for three days in Lincoln, Nebraska to chat about this stuff and you know it’s a very big topic. But for me, part of it is actually just going and like…Well it’s a psycho-cybernetics technique of *** of your mind of just trying to put yourself in the mind of the prospect. In 2010, I got an interview with Bill Banner at AWAI and we talked for a while about his process for copywriting and this is largely what I try and do, is he just kind of imagines the prospect and it’s not like a real, defined process. But he thinks about you know for investors its somebody who’s maybe right on the cost of retirement and they’re realizing they haven’t saved enough money and they you know their just looking at their finances and they’re thinking, “oh jeez I can you know retire now and probably do okay for a few years”. But you know, am I gonna be greeting people at Walmart? Or am I gonna be you know checking groceries at the grocery store that I’ve shopped at for the last 20 years? You know,what’s my life gonna look like in 10 years if I don’t figure this financial thing out and get a bit more money there to back me up. So like really try and put yourself at the mind of this person at this point of their life and with all the past and all the future kind of crashing on them and then like, just you know this is in terms of   finding what to write about. Just to look through all your research, and the topics, you know the news around and whatever topic you’re writing about and like really look for what jumps out of you and I think while your inside that person in the field of their mind and just write about that in the best way possible and test it. And what starts to happen  if you like stay in the market for a while, is your imagination about who that prospect is what gets them excited, does start to become more accurate. You know and that’s why somebody has been in the business for twenty years is usually getting better than somebody who’s been in business for two years. There are great examples Denny Hatch had a book called Method Marketing where he had couple examples of people who wrote their first ever sales letter. And the book I think is out of print. But a few sales letters from super star pro copywriters and a few sales letters from you know people who weren’t even copywriters, who just sat down and wrote a letter and both because they did such a good job of kind of capturing the gestalt,  which is a term in psychology, the big picture of who the prospect was, what they cared about, how the business or organization met in there. They did incredibly incredibly well. And there was one like a fund raising chain letter, basically for like a children’s medical research place and they ended up like shutting it down even though it was making a ton of money, like this woman wrote this on her own, I think she was a nurse and she’s like “this is important and I just want you to send ten dollars, ten of your own dollars and on your letter head retype this letter and send it to like five or ten of your friends and ask them to send ten of their own dollars”. A lot of who they are, “it’s  just ten bucks”, and they made like hundreds of thousands of dollars and the hospital or medical research facility like shut it down because they didn’t want to be associated with this chain letter. But you know I’m like slapping my forehead about that. But and that was just somebody who really like understood, you know. It wasn’t a super star copywriter, so like, so understanding your market, that’s a great like fundamental in Direct Response getting back to your question but also just the customer process of like you know in order for me to buy from you, I have to know who you are first and so like as a marketer I have to introduce myself, like provide some sort value or unique perspective for something to like connect with this person first and then like once I’ve  connected with them then I can ask them to join in my list and be part of my  list and then when  like stat step has been achieved I can start trying to make a first sale but you know it has  to be a gentle sale not an expensive sale. Like the term trip  wire is used for those seven dollar offers or whatever which is you know it’s fair enough term whatever and then like a bigger sale from there and then you know maybe a big big sale or like a continuity sale after that . In the newsletter business there’s a bunch of  front in newsletter s that are less than a hundred bucks a year and then you know you can step up from there. There’s like thousand dollar newsletters that focus on smaller stocks with higher volatility and higher potential upsight. And then there’s like daily trading services where they’re providing you updates, and those are much more expensive.

John McIntyre:

Right, right.

Roy Furr:

And so it’s all about building that relationship and as you build the relationship and you deliver more value, faster value, more immediate value, that sort of thing. That allows you to raise the price. So they get more value, you get more value but it’s this like growing relationship.

John McIntyre:

Right, okay. It’s sort of ongoing thing that you know, I call a dynamic thing when people talk about how many emails should an Autoresponder view for example or when should you be contacting customers for leads, I say, “never”. It’s a relationship. And you can let them end the relationship by unsubscribing or cancelling or something like that. Otherwise if they don’t unsubscribe, like they don’t decide they don’t want to hear from you, then you keep on sending them stuff.

Roy Furr:

A great story. When I was working for that company out in Oregon they  published ***and for little while, because I couldn’t earn a royalty in the marketing department I switched into sales where I could get paid of sales commission but I was still doing direct response marketing I was just getting a sales commission.

John McIntyre:

Right.

Roy Furr:

And driving leads to myself and the rest of sales team. I very quickly became one of the top sales people because I found a way to filter out the people that wanted to buy the our really expensive solution like thirty thousand dollars. And what I did was, I started off with usually with really good conversation with them like maybe your ***. I got them to raise their hand and say you know, “I want a consultation about how your training my network to your organization” and then we would have that consultation. And then what I would do, I would just put it in our *** system, which basically I set up a  reminder that I would contact them back. And if I didn’t just made good conversations with them, I  might contact them back before the end of another week or early next week. And then as it went on and as their purchasing process cause a lot of it is B to B sale, purchasing process would drag out. I just kept contacting them until I got a yes or a no and you know I told them, I don’t like maybes, I like yes or no but if it’s not yet, I’m going to keep you know touching base and seeing how can I help, is there’s anything I can do today to move it along and you know it would start out with very frequent contacts, and then you know months later I might be sending somebody a note every two or three weeks and just say, “hey how are things going is there I can do for you today”. And it’s a little bit different when you’re doing like Autoresponders, you know not in a one on one sales process but the principles the same. Like when the relationship is hot, you contact them often but until they say no, like specifically “I don’t want to do business with you”. You should have a some sort of ongoing contact with them and just keep doing it until they say yes or no and I would have things go on for six months or more where other sales people would have completely dropped that lead and just you know not done anything with it after two or three times. I would get, I would have a thirty thousand dollar purchase order show up and everybody be looking at me like, “how the heck are you doing this?” you know cause I  talked a couple of those month which worked  out very really well for me and a bunch of other stuff too. So that’s really the attitude, I mean like I write my stuff daily. I write articles daily and it’s a different thing because that’s what I promised but that’s certainly how you should think about Autoresponders.

John McIntyre:

Okay. Well cool man. We’re actually right on time here. So before we go though, let’s talk more about, you know what’s going on with this breakthrough marketing secrets you know and where should the listeners go to when they wanna little know more about what you’re up to.

Roy Furr:

Yeah so five days a week, you know daily, essentially I write an article on something from the direct response marketing world or my experience. And you know generally, Mondays I answer reader questions. Tuesdays I talk about copy. Wednesdays I talk about web marketing stuff. Thursdays I talk about business strategy marketing strategy and Fridays I talk about whatever I want. And I don’t have a ton of readers but I have very excited and loyal readers. I try and deliver a ton of value. You know contrite to the teaching of some other people who do daily emails and that’s fair, what works for them works for them. What works for me, works for me. You know but I write a ton of content for that. It is how I announced my copywriting event. Registrations are now closed and certainly by the time this is published registrations are closed. But I will have a crew coming in to record that. But its, if you’re into direct marketing, if you’re into copy writing then there’s gonna be a lot of stuff for you in there so that’s it breakthroughmarketingsecrets.com. If you go there, the first thing that’s gonna happen is the video gonna start playing where you are going to learn the most valuable secret that I learned from Gary Bercivenga, who’s considered the world’s best copy writer. Years ago, this probably has contributed more to my success than anything else. It’s a secret that’s not just for copywriters, it for life in general and for business. In whatever goals you have. You’re gonna learn that right away and you’re gonna have opportunity to sign up and get few really valuable reports. There’s some for business owners, some for copywriters and some just good stuff.  And it will give you a chance to also try my daily stuff and I am happy to have you on subscribe if you ever feel like you know I sucked and you hate my articles or its just too much. I’d rather have you unsubscribe than complain in spam but I have ton of loyal subscriber who open up religiously within the first hour they receive it every day and my stats say that.

John McIntyre:

Okay.

Roy Furr:

Yeah so it’s a lot of fun. And gives me an opportunity to talk about marketing.

John McIntyre:

Cool man. Now I’ve got a link to that breakthroughmarketingsecrets.com and the show notes at themcmethod.com. Roy thanks for coming on the show man.

Roy Furr:

Hey awesome. Thank you for having me and invitation and opportunity to speak along sides of some amazing guys that you’ve had so far. I can’t wait to dig even deeper  into the archives and listen to every episode.

John McIntyre:

Cool man.