TCC Podcast #81: How Sales Skills Improve Your Copywriting with Mike Saul

For the 81st episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, Kira and Rob talk with copywriter and marketing specialist, Mike Saul, about copywriting, sales, marketing, and a lot more. Kira first met Mike at a lunch-time gathering of copywriters in New York City and after talking for a little while, realized Mike had a lot of great advice to share with our listeners. In this podcast we talked about: •  how a 13-year-old’s newspaper route led to a career in sales and copywriting •  the book that he used to help a client go from a $500K monthly loss in $1 million in monthly revenue •  how his sales experience informs what he does today •  what he learned from selling burglar alarms—price is not the most important thing •  the relationship between sales and marketing in what copywriters do •  how to write an “air tight” argument for your solution •  how to overcome objections on your sales page •  the checklist he uses when he writes sales pages for his clients •  why sales people in California have to leave the house after •  the list of people he has learned sales and copywriting skills from •  credibility versus believability and which one really matters Lots of good stuff in this episode. To hear it all, click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.   The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: Staton Island Advance Mandolin Brothers NAM Show Todd Brown The Ultimate Sales Letter by Dan Kennedy Brian Tracy Zig Ziglar Gibson SG Fender Telecaster Glen Garry Glen Ross Chris Haddad Clayton Makepeace’s Checklist Joe Schriefer Bob Bly John Carlton Dr. Robert LaPenna Better Call Saul Email: tinymjs.gmail.com Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group Intro: Content (for now) Outro: Gravity   Full Transcript: Rob: What if you could hang out with seriously talented copywriters, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes and their habits, then steal an idea or two to inspire your own work? That’s what Kira and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast. Kira: You’re invited to join the club for episode 81 as we talk with marketing strategist and copywriter Mike Saul about how a newspaper route launched his copywriting career, how preconceived notions affect your success, credibility vs. believability, what baby bottles, Santa Clause, and getting a first date have in common, and the learning resources he likes most. Kira: Hey Mike, welcome to the show! Rob: Mike, we’re glad to have you! Mike: Thank you for having me, guys. Kira: So, we want to start with your story, Mike. How did you end up in marketing and direct response copywriting? Mike: It probably goes back to when I was 12 or 13 years old. I grew up on Staten Island, which is one of the five boroughs of New York City, so about 13 I started playing guitar. And my parents decided that they weren’t going to buy me a really nice guitar so I had to get a job at thirteen and we perish the thought these days, with all these entitled children, including my three. So anyway, I started delivering the newspaper, The Staten Island Advance. And I actually split a route with two brothers. The two brothers each had a route each but they were too big, so the mother split each of their routes and made a third route. It was kind a rent deed route, it wasn’t officially recognized by the Staten Island Advance. So that route got cycled through the neighborhood kids; most of the kids couldn’t do it so I said alright, I’m going to give it a shot. I had twenty one stops on my route. And I started delivering the paper and anybody I wasn’t delivering to on my route, I would knock on the door, ask if they wanted it, and I started selling. So, I built the route up to 41 people from 21. Now, why 41? Because I was warned by my friend’s mom, that, if you add one more house, we’re going to split the route again, so I said okay, well, that’s great... really good for getting rewarded for all my efforts, right? And at that point, I really knew what bureaucracy was all about so that’s how I got started in selling. I was just knocking on doors and trying to sell the Staten Island Advance on delivery. From there, I went to a high end guitar shop, which close about a year ago, year and a half ago, when the founder actually passed away and I was selling high end guitars on Staten Island at a place called Mandolin Brothers when I was 14 and 15 years old. And when the owner and the head sales guy would go to the NAM show, in California, I was actually running the showroom by myself. So, that’s how I got my chops in sales. Now, how does that move into marketing? Well, a lot of times you’ll hear people say, okay, you know, copywriting is salesmanship in print. Now, I don’t agree with that. I take Todd Brown’s approach, which is “copywriting is really marketing in print”. So anyway, fast forward a while, I had some sales jobs, I sold alarm systems, I sold mausoleums, people were just dying to get in, I liked to say; I sold life-alert, the “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” guys, which was in-home sales, which is just amazing. Talk about immersing yourself in the training and then actually having to sit and talk to somebody for two hours at a time and compel them to move forward by showing them the benefits and everything. And then from there, I started working online. So that came about 1999. You know, there were other stories. When I started selling alarms for ADT I went in there and they didn’t know what to do with me because everybody was just sitting around waiting for the phone to ring and I was doing my own marketing at that time and I had no idea what I was doing, but I was knocking on doors, I was sending out letters to new businesses that were opening, I was a commercial sales rep, I was going through existing customers and asking them if they wanted burglar alarms in their home; I had no idea what I was doing. So then fastforward to the online world, I started out with a financial advisory service. Not a licensed one, so for lack of a better one, a stock-pick service. That’s the best way to put it. And the guy I was working for, he was very aggressive with his marketing; he had turned a little bit of money into a lot a bit of money, so he was telling everybody how he could do it. He decided you know what? I want to do an infomercial. He wound up spending a ton of money on an infomercial and was getting destroyed. He was on a pace to be completely destroyed - to lost millions of dollars. So, we sat down one day, he asked me if I could help. “You did sales for a long time, could you help?” and I said okay, you know, sure. And I sat down and I got The Ultimate Sales Letter by Dan Kennedy who was my first copywriting mentor, I guess we could call it, with that book, and I read through it and I said geez, a lot of this looks familiar in the ways I learn how to sell. People like Bryan Tracy and Zig Zigler, those are the people I learned how to sell from. And I sat down with the infomercial script and we rewrote it. I wasn’t a great writer, I’m still not a great writer by any means. We rewrote it, I put in the pieces of persuasion that I feel would help, and we turned it around. We went from losing about $500,000 a month to eventually doing over a million dollars a month. And it wasn’t all profit, of course, there was a big media spend in there and a lot of that money came on the back-end. So I was not a partner in that business, which was stupid of me, I had an option of being a partner. Who knows if he would’ve really came through with giving me what I was supposed to get anyway... but that’s another story for another podcast, right? The Bitter Resentment Podcast, right? Not The Copywriter Club Podcast. Rob: That’s the next one we’re going to start. The Resentment Podcast is on the list, for sure. (laughs) Mike: So, I don’t know, but instead, I continued to be an employee there. I did a couple more things there, that relationship ended, and then I really immersed myself into marketing. And becoming a copywriter. And really focusing on three niches. The quote on quote stock pick-niche, I don’t like to call it the advisory niche because you know, real advisers are licensed and it’s much different; that copy is much different; there’s a lot of heavy regulations there. I know there are a lot of regulations in all copy to follow, so it’s more like the stock pick niche or the financial market niche whether it’s binary options or forex or futures or whatever it is, so not just stocks. And then I got into the B2B niche, specifically with software and services. And that was another big pivot for me, because when you’re marketing B2B, even though I believe marketing is marketing is marketing, there are definitely some idiosyncrasies and some quirks with the B2B market. Rob: Mike, tons to unpack there; I’ve got pictures of you sitting in a boiler room, I’ve got pictures of you sitting on your bike, you know, going house to house. So, let’s talk about sales for a minute, because I think a lot of people jumping into copywriting without a sales background have to learn how to do that through copy or whatever. You were doing this at thirteen! Is there something about your personality that made you naturally gifted at sales, or did you have to learn the skill and starting out that young, what are some of the first lessons that you learned as you were going door to door selling newspapers? Mike: Well, motivation is a big thing, right? I wanted a Gibson guitar, or a Fender guitar. I wound up getting both: a Fender Telecaster and a Gibson SG, because you know you have to have both. And if you don’t play guitar, you have no idea what that is. But, that was my motivation back then; all I cared about was my mother bought me a guitar. It was a starter guitar, and I wanted something better, and she was like, “Yeah, I’m not buying you a $400 guitar. Now granted,