Episode #65 – Craig Garber on Building Powerful Systems to Create Unlimited Leads and Sales

John McIntyre:Hey, it’s John McIntyre here, the auto respondent guy, and it’s time for episode 65 of The McMethod Email Marketing Podcast, where you’ll discover one simple thing: how to make more money with every single email that you send. Now today, I’ll be talking to Mr. Craig Garber, the King of Copy and the author of How To Make Maximum Money With Minimum Customers. 

Now we’re going to talk about today how to get leads, how to increase the value of these leads and how to lower the acquisition costs of these leads. Now this reminds me of Perry Marshall’s conversion triangle, where you get three main things in any business. You’ve got the traffic that’s coming in; the conversion that you’re … you’ve got to convert that traffic and make it do something; and then the economics, which is where you increase the amount of money that they’re going to spend with you. That’s where you sell products, sell services, whatever. Okay?

That’s a little bit about what we’re talking about today, how to bring those leads in, how to lower the acquisition cost, which is the conversion stage, and how to increase the value, which is the products. This is Craig Garber’s main expertise. He started as a copywriter. He’s very high priced. He charges, it looks like, $60,000 for a proper funnel and strategy, and he does … Most of his bread and butter is publishing and consulting and all this sort of stuff. I’m really, really honored to have him on the show today.

Now to get the show notes for this episode of The McMethod Email Marketing Podcast, go to themcmethod.com/65. Now this week’s McMasters insight of the week is a good one. Now in case you don’t know, McMasters is my private training community where you can get training products like the McIntyre Method, pages that convert, all in the community. You can also jump in the forum, ask me questions. It’s the best way to get access to me, daily access. I’m in the forum everyday, posting, answering questions, all that sort of stuff. That’s McMasters. Let’s talk about this insight.

So Joy stated a little while back, “I think I’m doing my sales funnel wrong. What should my sales funnel look like?” It’s a good question. It’s a very, you might say, fundamental question. Not so much basic, but it’s fundamental in that your sales funnel is to get back to that Perry Marshall thing. That’s the conversion mechanism. That’s how you’re taking the traffic and making it buy something. It’s important. 

Say, Joy, for example. She’s in a position where she has a website that gets a lot of traffic and a lot of organic traffic. She’s not doing paid traffic as far as I know. For her sales funnel, my suggestion was … Before she does anything else, she needs to start optimizing the traffic that she has. She needs to have an opt-in on every single page of that site. She needs to optimize those opt-ins so that’s she’s getting the maximum amount of leads every day and every month, right? 

Then the next stage will be the work on the, say, email marketing side of things and work on creating story-based emails that sell every day, every three days, whatever, and then take the cash that that generates and then go and start building a more complex sales funnel, which you can use on paid traffic. Okay? 

Now once you get into paid, the sales funnel gets a little bit more complicated, but it’s still … Let me boil it down to a few similar things, which is you need to be able to buy the traffic and make a profit on it. The sales funnel is just how … That’s what you use to make a profit on it. So you need to find ways to convert people at a higher rate and make more money every time they buy something. So these are things like upsell, these are things like order respondents, it’s very simple, and we’ll talk about that another time. We might talk about … I think we talked about that last week with Mike Colella, okay? 

You might want to go check out that episode if you haven’t done so yet. At the very least, the actionable takeaway right now, and this is why the McMasters insight of the week is here, is, if you haven’t already, you need to make sure that you have an opt-in box on every single page of your site, and you need to optimize that. However much traffic you get, set up a split test and … literally, a ghetto split test is what I call them. This is where you say, “All right, I am going to need a thousand visitors or two thousand visitors to really get some statistically significant stats here.” 

Then you go, “All right. Well, maybe it’s going to take two weeks to do that.” In a spreadsheet, you write the date, June 1 to June 14, and you just write down the traffic that you got for that and the amount of unique visitors and the amount of opt-ins you got. Then you work out your opt-in rate. Then you change something, and then you say June 15 to June … what was it, June 15 to June 29 is another two weeks. Write it again and see if your change improved … Change in the copy, change in the offer, change in something. Change in the layout, change in … Maybe you added a pop-up plugin or a Dreamgrow slider plugin, just do that. 

You do that over and over again, you’re going to get a really high opt-in rate on your site. Then it’s going to be time to use some of the knowledge you’ve learned in the email marketing podcast to make those leads buy something. Okay? That’s it for now.

Now as for review … Oh, by the way, I keep forgetting to mention this, if you want to know more about McMasters or get into the community, you can check it out at themcmethod.com/mcmasters. 

Now, reviews. If you want to leave a review and spread the word about the email marketing podcast, that money-pulling goodness, go to the iTunes store, search for The McMethod Email Marketing Podcast, leave me a review. I will read it out on the show. Shoot me an email too to say you just left me a review. I will give you a virtual high five. If you come to Chiang Mai, I’ll buy you a coffee or a [beef 00:04:34], whatever you want.

[inaudible 00:04:35] listen to questions, then we’ll get into this interview. Today’s question is, how do you generate traffic? Good question. If we could all solve that, if we all could answer that with a really good, solid answer, we’d all be rich. You got two options, especially … we’re talking about online. 

Two options. You’ve got organic or paid. Organic is you’re doing search engines, blog, that kind of thing. It’s free in the sense you don’t spend money for it, assuming you’re doing all the SEO yourself, but it takes a long, long time, unless you really know what … I’ve got friends who are great at SEO and they know how to use private blog networks and some of the spamming tools out there, and they can get things ranked very quickly. But unless you’ve been doing this for a while and you really know what you’re doing, it’s not going to work that way. It’s going to take you a long, long time to generate traffic with SEO, okay? That’s your long term, your slow-burner strategy.

If you want to get things going fast, grab some cash and make a decision that you’re going to figure out paid traffic whatever your budget is. Whether it’s you can only afford to spend 5 bucks a day or 150 bucks a month, that’s cool. At least do it. Right? I kind of shudder when I think about it. If I just started spending 10 bucks a day on paid traffic 2 years ago, where I would be today. Okay? Whether it’s $5 or $10 or $20 or $50 a day, just go and start doing paid traffic and use the information you’ve learned in this podcast to build the sales funnel. Okay? That’s it for now. Let’s get into this interview with Mr. Craig Garber.

It’s John McIntyre here, the auto respondent guy. I’m here with Craig Garber. Now Craig is known as the King of Copy. He got started as a copywriter, but now he’s moved into … he like consulting, publishing. He’s got a great website with, he tells me, over 2,000 pieces of content, webinars, a whole bunch of cool stuff. Now while he got started as a copywriter, his main thing now is basically building systems to get leads, dramatically increasing the value of those leads, and then lowering those acquisition costs. This is some really cool stuff, sort of advanced, I think, but extremely valuable to a business that’s in operation. We’re going to talk about that. One thing he mentioned before, before I hit record, is that he’s a little bit different to some of the other copywriters out there and the marketers, where there’s less hype and less aggression, and less trying to make them feel bad about themselves and just copy that makes them feel good but also makes them buy stuff. It’s be nice copy, I don’t know what you’d call that. I’m [inaudible 00:06:41] into that, and I meant it. Craig, how are you doing, man?

Craig Garber:Great, John. Thanks. Good to be here.

John McIntyre:Man, good to have you on the show. Before we get into the content for the day, give the listener a bit of a background. I tried to do a little bit, but you can probably do a better job of a background of who you are, where you’re from, what you do. 

Craig Garber:All righty. You did a good job. Basically, I grew up in the Bronx, probably the worst area of the world you could live in, and I actually have a pretty shitty whole life, and I knew I had to get the hell out of there in every single way possible. I went to college and became a CPA, believe it or not. Got into sales after a few years as an accountant, and then I was a financial planner. I had my own financial planning practice at the time. I worked with mostly high network business individuals and business owners, managing their money and setting up shareholder agreements, buy/sell agreements, funding and insurance and stuff like that. 

But having said that, I did okay for myself, but it was more like because I was real diligent about follow-up. But I was like most small business owners. You get a client in front of me, and I can convert her, but I didn’t know how to get the clients. On a whim, I saw this ad in an insurance industry trading magazine for some marketing programs, so I bought it. I was like all in, I bought the top level and stuff, monthly account annuity. It was really eye opening for me because, for whatever reason, the program didn’t work. It was a good program. 

I think, just sometimes, you look back, you can’t connect the dots moving forward. You go back and you look, and I think it didn’t work because it wasn’t my destiny to say as a financial planner. I’d be on the phone with the people. They were like, “Listen, I don’t know what’s going on. You’re so much more advanced with this. You’ve taken it to all kinds of levels. I don’t know why it’s working.”

Anyway, it didn’t work because it wasn’t my destiny, but it taught me so much. It opened my eyes to direct response, and I learned for the first time that you can attract this instead of chasing it down. For me, that was … It happened in ’93, I believe. No, in 2000. That was my biggest “Aha” moment and still has been, because … The fact that you could attract leads instead of chasing it down was such a relief because I found the process of … You’re basically begging for business, and I found that so degrading. Degrading for me as a “professional,” and degrading for the customer who’s getting hounded. I wasn’t rude or anything, but it’s just constant follow-up, follow-up. I said, “There had to be a better way,” so that’s what direct response opened my eyes to. I started getting into copywriting and writing that on copy for my pieces, and I started studying [inaudible 0:09:21] late Gary Halbert stuff. 

I was doing it in Fort Lauderdale at the time. I live in Tampa, Florida now. Halbert, I found out in Miami, which is just twenty five, thirty minutes from Fort Lauderdale where I lived. I put my first [long-form sales audit 00:09:37] together for Gary, and it was a forty-page letter. I told him about my background, everything. Everything I’d learned to do-

John McIntyre:You used the sales letter to get in touch with Gary?

Craig Garber:Yes.

John McIntyre:That’s badass, man.

Craig Garber:I had an order form in there. This is back before you could download music. I read in some interview … I heard in an interview he liked Neil Young, so I burned … Remember this? You probably don’t, but they used to get to burn the CDs. I burned the CD on my old computer, downloaded this group like cover, put the whole packets together for the guy, mailed it out. 

I had an order form in there, testimonials. The call to action was basically, “Look, can I buy you lunch and spend a half hour with you? I think I’m really good at this. I’d like to do this for a living.” But my daughter at the time had just been born, and see, I have three kids and said, “I don’t want to be thinking that I could do this, and I don’t really know,” because like everything in life, you don’t know the … Sometimes, things seem easy but they’re never actually easy. 

There’s always more to it than the surface. I said, “I wonder if this guy would talk to me for a half hour and educate me.” That was my drop down offer. My big call to action was, “Would you mentor me for 6 months? No, would you mentor me?” I said, I’m not the kind of guy that’s looking for free stuff. I’m just looking for an opportunity to learn. I’ll work for free, whatever.” Anyway, so I send this package out to the guy, and I mail it to him. I don’t hear anything for a week and a half. 

I did what every other good marketing person does. I put the packets together again, burned the CD, the whole 9 yards, and I mailed it out to him again a second time. Waited two weeks, nothing. I said, “Okay. Let me just see if can do something different.” This is when, I think, the Internet has just been around a little bit, so I found a woman that I knew Gary did business with. I told her my story, and I said, “Listen, can you help me get this letter in front of him?” She was, “Yeah, yeah, no problem. Send it to me, and I will FedEx it to him,” so I sent a FedEx inside a FedEx. She got it. 

A week and a half later, on a Tuesday, I get a phone call. Tuesday afternoon, around 4:30, and I see on the caller ID, Gary Halbert. I said, “Holy crap!” It’s like being a guitar player and you see Eric Clapton or Jimmy Page on the phone for you. Right? I talked to him and he said, “Yeah, I got your package. I’ll be happy to meet with you. I’ll give you a call next week.” I said, “Okay, no problem.” But I wrote down his number, because I worked real hard to get that lead now. I’m not waiting for you to call me back.

The following Monday, I called him up and I said, “Hey, this is Craig Garber. Remember we spoke last week. You told me to give you a call, and I just wanted to follow-up with you. Can we get together this week?” “Yeah, come down.” I came down that week, Thursday or Friday. We went down to Pink’s on South Beach, had lunch together, and he asked me questions. Some of the questions he asked me, I didn’t understand why. They were more like life questions. But in retrospect, now I understand them. But he said he was willing to mentor me. 

So I worked with him for 6 months, and he basically launched my career. He took to me to his seminar, he got my first clients there, and that was that. I had a good opportunity. That was March of 2000, I think, so here we are. What I do now is I probably take on one or two copywriting jobs a year, big ones. I have smaller things I work with, but I spend most of my time consulting with clients. If you go to my website, kingofcopy.com, I’ve worked in over 102 different industries, more than 300 clients. I spend most of my time consulting and helping them build lead generation systems that typically get them much better qualified clients and much higher rates of response. 

I also help them increase the value of those clients and, in that process, often is as you said, we’re able to lower acquisition cost as well. I publish products. I publish an offline newsletter. We just started our 9th year. It’s called Seductive Selling. I publish marketing programs, and then I have some other side businesses that I work on as well, outside kingofcopy.com. There you go.

John McIntyre:Man, you’re doing it all. I love the story about Gary Halbert, man. I had no idea. That’s such a badass genesis story. 

Craig Garber:Thanks, thanks. Of course, I turned it into a product.

John McIntyre:Absolutely.

Craig Garber:But look. I think, sometimes, when you don’t know anything, you are more apt to do things that when you have a little more information, you’re a little more afraid of. I think that’s where I was at that stage in my life. I didn’t have any formalities. I was being sincere, and I wasn’t looking to get anything off the guy. I just wanted to ask him questions, spend a half hour. I had a guarantee. I said, “If you think I’m an asshole, I’ll donate $250 to your favorite charity.” I guess the guy met with me, and he saw I’m not the kind of guy … I’ve got a really good work ethic. 

I literally come from nothing, and he saw that I wasn’t … A lot of people will … I’ll never get what Gary said once I wrote my first sales letter for him. It was compelling. It’s kind of jaded, but it was very true. Sitting on his couch in Miami, he looked at me and he said, “Craig, congratulations. Now, all anyone is going to want from you the rest of your life is a free sales letter.” And I didn’t know what he meant by that, but unfortunately, that’s some of the stuff you have to deal with out there. 

I guess he saw I’m not that guy. I’m not the guy that looks for anything for free. That’s an abnormal thing for me because I’ve done everything myself, which is good and bad because sometimes, I should probably be more willing. I’m getting better at that, at accepting and asking for help. I think being green like that was probably why I did it. I really just felt responsibility to my family. I didn’t want to make any stupid moves financially. That was really what that was.

John McIntyre:Yeah, yeah. I mean, it reminds me a bit of … I mentioned this podcast before. I mean,  knowing you’re on the same level. Like this podcast, this would be episode 50 or 60 by the time it goes live, and … The people that have come on here, I think I mentioned them before the call, like John Carlton and Perry Marshall, some of these guys. Now I know, after doing this, it’s not actually very hard to get in contact. 

Some of these guys have gotten on Facebook. The mere fact that I’ve had a thirty-minute call or an hour call, whatever it is, with them, and then that goes public, it’s generated so much … Social proof would be the best word for, and it’s not even that hard to … Like most people just don’t know how easy it actually is when you get out there and you hustle a little bit. I’m just sending them messages on Facebook and via email. 

I mean, this is … I follow up a lot. I think John … I think I had to follow up more than twenty times with his assistant until we finally locked in a time, so it does take a little bit of effort. I think your story right here is just a great example. When you hustle, when you actually … When you want something, you’re like, “I’m going to get that. I don’t care what it takes, I’m gonna try anything.” It’s almost impossible to fail.

Craig Garber:Yeah. And you know what? I refuse using the formula that I had learned from these guys, and I’ve seen it work in my financial planning business. I said, “well, I like to [know 00:16:26] if it works, it works. People are people,” so you’ve just got to keep following up. I believed in it, and there’s no downside. What did it cost me? An hour to put together the packet he signed? It was nothing. It was very … A lot of upside, no downside to [this show 00:16:39].

John McIntyre:It would have been a lot of fun too, burning that CD out and … That would have been fun.

Craig Garber:Yeah. It was exciting. And then when I started calling, it was like, wow, this is … It was almost surreal because at that time, I’m thinking, wow, this is … Like I said, it feels like a superstar in your little world is calling. 

John McIntyre:That would be an interesting strategy to use for … Like I wonder how many people you could use that for. I wonder if you’d get in touch with like Brad Pitt or Will Smith, send them a package, read a few interviews with them, get an idea of what they’re into and then come up with a package like this and do it, send a few of them. I’m wondering if you could do this with some really high up people that would just otherwise be impossible to contact.

Craig Garber:I think people like that have major gatekeepers. That might put the kvetch on that. Let me tell you right now, the other thing that … A reason why Halbert met with me, and I can tell you this 100 percent because I’m the same way, I spent money with him. There’s a big difference when a customer of yours, who spent decent amount of money with you, calls on you and asks something of you. Then when someone says, “Hey, I’ve been on your list for 5 years, and I love your stuff. Can I do blah, blah, blah?” Then you look on your shopping cart and like, “That’s interesting.” 

So he’s been on my list of 5 years and he loves me, but he’s never spent a dime. Now he’s asking for something else for free besides the 500 tips I’ve put out in that time. Hmmm. So don’t kid yourself. There’s a business component of it as well that is in effect there. It’s not likely that the second guy gets through to anybody because it’s not … Somebody who sort of takes that road has other baggage with personality quirks that make the kind of relationships they want incongruent and impossible. The guy that’s done the right thing, there’s a lot of opportunities that can come for both of you. But that guy that’s kind of like the freeloader who loves your stuff and has never spent a dime with you, there’s very little that will ever come of that. How you do one thing is how you do everything, I’ve learned. Your qualities are pretty consistent throughout.

John McIntyre:Yeah. I found with a lot of this guys who’s sitting and up there and they’re quite successful, I think, for me, I usually boil it down … Maybe it sounds too simple, but I usually boil it down to just be cool. Just don’t treat them like they’re a god and don’t look down on them. Like be their friend. Be cool. I think that gets you 90 percent of the way there. Like if you’re being cool, Of course, yeah, it’s going to make sense. Of course you want to buy one of their products. If you actually care about who they are and what they do, of course you want to buy one of their products. That’s like a little bit of common sense.

Craig Garber:Yeah. It’s like go to a restaurant and, “Hey, I really like your restaurant. Can I have some free food?” Wait a minute. [inaudible 00:19:25].

John McIntyre:That’s a great example.

Craig Garber:No, seriously. I mean, look. It doesn’t even make sense but yet, people do to people who sell intellectual property, and they feel it’s different. Some people say, “Hey, I just had a question for you,” and I’ll say, “Hey, no problem. You can book some consulting time on my website.” “Well, it’s just a question.” I said, “I’ll tell you what. Call up a New York attorney and tell him, I’ve got a question for you. When can we talk. See what the response is. The problem is, if someone doesn’t value your intellectual property, they’re not going to value their own intellectual property, and that is often one of the bottlenecks on why they’re not making the kind of money or at where they want to be at.

John McIntyre:Hmmm. I haven’t thought about it that way. That’s a great point. Let’s talk about this forte of yours, building systems to get qualified leads and then pumping up the value of that. Give me the 40,000-foot view. Where’s the best place to start?

Craig Garber:Basically, the most effective way of doing this is using something called two-set lead generation. I have loads of old books and magazines. Really, it started like in the … The earliest I’ve seen it, in the late 1800’s. For most people that are listening to this call, you’re probably familiar with … If you’ve seen ads for … now I’m having a brain fart. Atlas, the Charles Atlas Dynamic Tension System, have you ever seen those old ads? You’re young, so you may not have. Charles Atlas was a guy, used to run ads in like every comic book imaginable during the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. He still runs the ads. Atlas, he had a whole series of cartoon stories called Making a Man Out of Mac. 

It was basically this scrawny guy that gets sand kicked in his face at the beach. Mac feels like crap, and this big guy walks around and he gets his girlfriend or something like that. So Mac says, “I’m going to go get fit.” So he goes to Charles Atlas and buys his system. The next time the guy comes on the beach, Mac beats the crap out of him or something. So Charles Atlas ran these ads, and the ad would say something like … I actually have a webinar on my site. It’s called how to be … You just go to my site and there’s a pop-up. The actual ad is on that webinar. You basically have a little ad that says, “Hey, would you like to have bigger muscles, be more fit, stopped getting sand kicked in your face? No problem. Order this book, it’s only $0.25, 17 ways to lose fat, reduce this, whatever.” Right? Then you get the book that comes out to your house, and the book has all this information. At the end of the book, it says something really simple like this: If you think the techniques in this book can help you out, and if you want to learn more about them, we have this system, the Charles Atlas Dynamic Tension System. Here’s what’s included in the system, blah, blah, blah, and here’s how much it costs. It will really help you out. See, what that does is this process … now obviously, you can do it online. 

In fact, it’s probably … In almost every industry, it’s too costly to do it offline unless you have a … If you have a good-sized back, that’s not true. If you’re selling anything with a customer value of $2,000 or $1,000 enough, you can use this offline. You should. So what this does is … where most people do is they put an ad out there. It says, “Buy my stuff,” and 99.999 percent of people that see it are going to say no, and then they move on. If serendipity occurs and your paths cross later, they say, “Oh yeah, I remember I saw that 10 years ago. I want to buy it now.” You have these ads, what they do is … this free report, it’s establishing a relationship. Because in one of these booklets, you’re gonna discuss … Personally, you’re giving away some great content. You’re positioning yourself as an authority. 

The second thing is, the customer came to you for this information. You’re not chasing them down saying, “Hey, hey, you want to buy this? You want to buy this?” You have a different sort of relationship. You’re controlling the relationship. Now you’ve got the contact information so you could stay in touch with them, especially online. You get a simple email, right? Now you could follow up and continue to build and develop that relationship. The people get to see … the customers, your buyers, get to see who this person really is. The level of trust you’re able to develop with something like that is much quicker and much more effective than, “Hey, you want to buy my stuff?” It allows much quicker conversions. It allows you to sell at much higher price points, and it positions you from day one as an authority. It’s just a much cleaner … much, much gentler system and much more effective. 

John McIntyre:Okay. Online, we’re talking about basically driving traffic to like a squeeze page or some page where someone can get a free report, and then they get it, and you get their email address. Then you send them … I miss the classic marketing, where you get a squeeze page, you give them a free report and send them emails to make them buy your stuff.

Craig Garber:Correct. Correct. But it could be … it doesn’t have to be a free report. Like on our [pool 00:24:19], we do free report, webinar, loads of stuff. The thing is, there’s four situations where you almost are … If you don’t do it, you’re screwed. One of them is if you’re showing something expensive. Why? Because people are not just handing over lots of cash without any info. Second thing is, if you’re selling something complicated, it’s difficult for the consumer to understand. 

For example, things like life insurance, some legal procedures, medical procedures. Right? Third is if you’re selling something that has a long lead time. From the time you buy it to the time the service is delivered, like home remodeling, for example, the thing that’s good about that is you control the whole process in this free report. You’re preventing any … When you have big projects like that, shit happens. If you’re smart, you’ve done your lead generation properly, you’re preventing any mishaps. 

Also, in certain industries, the person is a lot more vulnerable to get somebody else in there. For example, life insurance. It takes a long lead time for that, because you’ve got to take a medical exam. Lots of times, if there are any glitches and stuff along the way, someone else comes along … Now that the people have made a commitment to buy life insurance, well, they’re a lot more open to get another agent in there.

By you having this free report and the ongoing follow-up, you’re controlling that process better. Then the fourth one is, if you’re dealing in an industry where there’s a high level of skepticism or unscrupulousness, which is, let’s face it, a lot of industries nowadays, and the free report allows you again to be transparent and see that … It’s your opportunity to say that’s  … This is your differential. You’re able to identify your differential in there and show how you’re different. This two-step concept is … Honestly, man, it’s like the eighth wonder of the world for me. It’s really-

John McIntyre:I haven’t been around for long doing this, being a couple of years, so maybe I’m just too new to kind of see it. But I’ve wondered before, like … I mean, online, everyone does this. It’s always like, you get a website and it’s like, “Download my free ebook.” I have a hunch. I don’t have any actual data to really say this with any sort of confidence, but the hunch is that everyone is so used to ebooks, at least online, it’ll probably be a different ball game when you get off, but at least online, everyone gets so used to ebooks, just so used to what everyone else is doing that it starts to lose its effectiveness. 

Because what we’re really talking about is give them something free, some resource, whether it’s a report or something else along those lines, and then selling to them after that. Like, is the whole free report model, do you think that’s been overdone? Or is it going to work? Or are there better ways of going about doing that?

Craig Garber:Well, in my opinion, I think you’ve got to touch people across as many different medias as possible. Print, by far, is the toughest media to sell in. There’s a lot of issues when you have a free report. Number one, is it well written? Number two, is there character in there? Number three, is there usable content in there that your buyers can actually apply and learn from? Number four, how do you sell in there? 

Listen, we’ve all downloaded free report. We’ve all bought information that it is just so hard … you wouldn’t mind your bird cage with it. It’s just a lot of things. I think, nowadays, if you’re smart, you want to take advantage of multiple medias like audio, print, video, webinars, things like that, because everybody … There’s three kinds of buying modes. There’s auditories, people hear; there’s visual, people see; and then there’s kinesthetics, they go by feel. The more senses you engage across more different media, the more likely you are to engage your buyer on one of those levels. 

As you said, there is so much, “Hey, free report and free ebook, whatever,” because there is so much of that, you really got to do a good job on everything you’re doing. The other thing is, and I talk about this on my book, the two ways … There’s really only two ways you develop chemistry and rapport and people get to see who you are. It’s frequency and consistency. Any relationship you have, the good ones that you have, right, the better relationship you have, I guarantee you that they are either better relationships because you have more frequent contact with people, or … I’m sorry, consistency. I’m sorry. I meant the quality. Or when you do have an interaction with someone, the depth of that conversation and the quality of that experience that you walk away from is really good. Unless you’re doing both of those things anyway, it’s not going to work. 

I have signed in to many a website where I get something. I don’t hear for the people for God knows how long. Then the next thing I hear, months later, is when they’re selling me something, I immediately unsubscribe. That’s not the relationship I’m interested in having. You look for frequency and quality. And if you put those two things together on a consistent basis, you’ll have a very good relationship with people. 

As long as you’re consistent, where … I had a client years ago in a mastermind group I used to run, and he never really had a good relationship with his list. Super nice guy. The reason was because every week, he was kind of selling something different. I said, “You can’t tell somebody this is the best way to make money one day.” I don’t only have made-money clients. In fact, I don’t have very many of those. Most of my clients are proper businesses. Not that it [inaudible 00:29:40]. It’s not, but they’re not biz ops. So I don’t like that biz op mix anyway. But I said, “You can’t tell someone, hey this is the best way to make money this week; then next week, oh here’s a great way to make money.” Then it’s real estate biz op and it’s like, come on, man. What if I met you in person and every week I tried to sell you that stuff? You would be like, “Oh my god, I got to get away from this guy!” Right? So whenever you’re in a selling position, everybody always has a track. You’re always running on a track on their mind, and that track is where is this guy going to screw up? What people are looking for is inconsistency. 

Even if they don’t know this, and they … If you ask them what they’re looking for, they couldn’t articulate it. But the glitch that people have is, when they see something out of whack, they may not say, “Well, he’s been inconsistent because,” but they’ll say, “Something is not right here. I don’t know what he’s [inaudible 00:30:33].” As a salesperson, when you’re running on that track, you’ve got to be aware of it. You’ve got to be super consistent. You can’t have a different game every week. That’s just not how successful people work, and that’s how successful people respond to you.

John McIntyre:Yeah, man. It’s interesting you say that, because … talked a lot about auto respondents on this podcast. It’s not a pure listing, they can have an auto responder. I’ve been asked before, “Can you promote multiple products?” I mean, like I said, the answer is yes, but it’s not as simple as that. You are going to completely destroy your credibility if you jump from one product to the next, unless there’s a logical reason. 

I think some people think that if they get some traffic and they get it to opt-in and they get it onto a list, that they can just do whatever the hell they want. The list isn’t people. It’s like they’re not real people in that list. They’re just numbers, and if they just send out lots of offers, they’ll make lots of money. It doesn’t work like that. These are real people, and you have to build a real relationship. That means that you have to kind of play by certain rules. 

Craig Garber:Correct, and that is 100 percent right. I have not had too many [mentalists on 00:31:33], but I had one guy that was a [mental in mind 00:31:35] who just passed away. Everybody [inaudible 00:31:37] so don’t become my [mentalist 00:31:39]. Gary Halbert died and then my friend Christian died. Anyway, Christian Godefroy, a real successful guy over in Europe, and he said to me one time I went to visit him in Portugal … Because when my wife was in England I had to either hang out with my mother in law or go somewhere else. 

It was a very easy decision to go somewhere else. I visited Christian. We spent like a week together. He said to me one time, he said, “Craig, I was stuck on writing something.” And he said, “Craig, think about what you want to bring into the world, not what you want to get out of it.” That always stuck with me the rest of my life. This was about ten years ago he told me this. The thing is, you can’t … Everybody wants to make money, but that’s your problem. I have this saying, “Don’t make your problems my problems.” Your job is to think about what you can bring into the world, how you can be a problem solver for your buyer. They’ll buy from you, or they wont, but you can’t have the mindset of, “Man, I’ve got to get some money out of my list.” That might work once, but you’re not going to stick around a long time with that sort of mentality, and you’re not going to get a lot of respect.

John McIntyre:Yeah. I think this is kind of like … I mean, this took me a while to get, saying the whole fundamental, entrepreneurial realization where making money isn’t actually about making money. It’s actually about finding people who have problems and basically solving them and charging for it.

Craig Garber:Correct. Right. The best salespeople are not good salespeople. They’re not slick operators. They’re good problem solvers and they’re able to listen and understand and ask good questions and figure out what’s really the trouble here, and then delivering solutions that makes people’s lives easier. They’re not these guys with lots of exclamation points and whatever. Your cash registers like ,,, Computers like the cash … That’s not. That’s not [crosstalk 00:33:32].

John McIntyre:If someone is a good salesman, they say that guy could sell ice to Eskimos. But that guy would be the sleaziest salesman ever, because Eskimos don’t need the ice. So even if you could sell them ice, they’re not going to come back and buy anything else from you because they just realized that you convinced them to buy ice, and they don’t actually need ice. 

Craig Garber:Yeah. You’ll [inaudible 00:33:52]. You’re right, John. Yeah.

John McIntyre:Yeah, man. All right, Craig. Well, we’re right on time here. Before we go, where’s the best place for the listener to go and check out your stuff and learn more about you? I know you’ve got a book out there as well.

Craig Garber:Yeah. I have a book out called How To Make Maximum Money With Minimum Customers, and anybody listening to this podcast can go to maxmoneyprogram.com. You’ll get the book. You can try my offline Max Money Club, which comes with my monthly newsletter. You could try it for free. You get membership site online if you get … It’s like twelve reports, free issue of my newsletter. You get to participate on a monthly call we have, audio access to every prior call we’ve had, video case studies of upsells, copywriter boutiques, everything. 

You can try that for free when you go to that website and order the book there. It’s maxmoneyprogram.com. If you’re in the States, it’s even free shipping. You can go to my site at kingofcopy.com and check out all the stuff there. Like you said, we have about two thousand posts on there, I’ve been around a long time, and I have free webinars, tons of information. You’ll learn a lot on that site.

John McIntyre:Sounds good. It sounds good. I’ll have links to those things in the show notes at themcmethod.com, so people need to go get the links. Great. Thanks for coming on the show, man. It’s been good.

Craig Garber:John, I appreciate your time. I hope I gave you guys some good information, and thanks for inviting me.