Perry Marshall is a renowned business strategist and author, recognized for his expertise in the fields of online marketing, Google AdWords, and sales strategies. His works include best-selling books for entrepreneurs and marketing professionals.
With a career spanning over two decades, Perry has established himself as a thought leader, constantly pushing the boundaries of digital marketing and sales psychology.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- [04:26] The importance of considering lifetime value over immediate gains
- [09:00] Adapting business models to survive and thrive in any economic condition
- [12:34] The Art of the Minimum Viable Pivot in business restructuring
- [14:45] The immense opportunities emerging from economical shifts
- [16:58] Perry’s take on the current educational system
- [19:10] Agility and quick thinking in today’s market
- [21:50] How wartime sensibilities can be applied to today’s business landscape
- [24:20] Strategies for addressing immediate customer crises
In this episode…
Are you prepared to adapt to the rapid changes demanded by today’s business world? Do conventional methods suffice in times of upheaval? As companies face the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a need for offensive strategy instead of passively reacting. So how can you navigate these challenges with agility and resilience?
Perry Marshall, a strategist for online marketing, expounds on the necessity of flexibility. Entrepreneurs must be able to adapt at a moment’s notice. The importance of building trust and exceeding expectations, combined with swift evolution, can serve as the foundation for a thriving business.
In this episode of the Timeless Marketing Podcast, Brian Kurtz sits down with Perry Marshall, as they dive into lessons for traversing market conditions and finding strategic business opportunities. Perry highlights the continuum between transactional JV)deals and integrated partnerships as well as advice on tailoring business models.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Brian Kurtz
- Brian Kurtz on LinkedIn
- Chris Mason on LinkedIn
- Perry Marshall on LinkedIn
- PerryMarshall.com
Sponsor for this episode…
This episode is brought to you by Titans Xcelerator.
Titans Xcelerator is a private mentorship program for direct response marketers.
It is one of the most giving communities and serves as the de facto board of advisors and marketing insurance policy for over 250 of the best and brightest direct response marketers, copywriters, media buyers, marketing agencies, senior executives, anyone in direct response marketing, who is committed to growing and scaling their business.
And you don’t need to spend 10s of 1000s of dollars either.
Titans Xcelerator is 1/10 of the price of most groups of its kind.
And with a private membership, you’ll receive access to the full presentation from today’s episode, along with the Q&A and discussion that followed.
As an added bonus, you’ll receive access to a vault filled with many more private calls just like this one.
The bottom line: you don’t have to grow your business alone.
If you want to see how Titans Xcelerator can help you grow and scale your specific business, go to BrianKurtz.net/help
Episode Transcript
Intro 0:03
Welcome to the Timeless Marketing Podcast with Brian Kurtz, your connection to insights from some of the top direct response marketing minds on the planet.
Brian Kurtz 0:16
Hey, it’s Brian Kurtz here, host of the Timeless Marketing Podcast. Today’s episode is a clip from one of the two-hour calls inside Titans Xcelerator, my private mentorship program for direct response marketers. Before we get to that, I have one question for you. Do you have a marketing insurance policy? If you don’t, you need one. And that’s why I created Titans Xcelerator, which is one of the most giving communities and serves as the de facto board of advisors and marketing insurance policy for over 250 of the best and brightest direct response marketers, copywriters, media buyers, marketing agencies, senior executives, anyone in direct response marketing, who is committed to growing and scaling their business, the bottom line, you don’t have to grow your business alone. And you don’t need to spend 10s of 1000s of dollars either.
Titans Xcelerator is 1/10 of the price of most groups of its kind. I know because I hosted a group that was over $20,000 a year. If you want to see how Titans Xcelerator can help you grow and scale your specific business, go to briankurtz.net/help. That’s B-R-I-A-N Kurtz [dot] net [slash] help. And with a private membership, you’ll receive access to the full presentation from today’s episode, along with the Q&A and discussion that followed. As an added bonus, you’ll receive access to a vault filled with many more private calls just like this one. Again, if you want to see if Titans Xcelerators are fit for you with no obligation. Go to Briankurtz.net/help. That’s B-R-I-A-N Kurtz [dot] net [slash] help. And feel free to email me directly. I respond to every email with questions about this episode. Or just to say hi, brian@briankurtz.net.
Now onto today’s episode. And so I’ll let Perry take over from here. But I would just say this too, and I’ll try mine also, but Shane, I think that you have to, I think it’s really important to find out the people that you want to partner with the most, what you can contribute to them first, Perry take it away.
Perry Marshall 2:47
So I think there’s a continuum. And on one extreme, you have the hit and run JV deal. And then on the opposite end of that continuum is a symbiotic relationship. And the definition of a symbiotic relationship is you’re so interdependent, that if they separate the two of you, you both die. Okay, and so, so you need to let the clutch out on this.
Usually, you can test drive one of these things as a JV before you get in bed with them. And then you also have the issue of, you know, how the money is split up. And, you know, that’s very, very different depending on you know, there’s some situations where your JV partner, let’s say that you’re the supplier of the product being sold, and they are marketing it, there are some situations where you get 10%. And that’s fair. And there’s other situations where you get 90%.
And that’s fair. And it’s only determined by what’s going to make everybody happy and who’s really delivering the value, which is not always obvious at the beginning. Because sometimes, sometimes somebody’s delivering the crack cocaine and that appears to be the most valuable thing, but then somebody else is delivering the philosophy and that’s why people stick around. Right?
Brian Kurtz 4:26
Yeah, I also it’s a funny thing, because I think if you’re looking for a windfall every time, you know that’s going to be a very bad situation. And you’re so right about you know, everything is negotiable. Everything is and you have to always think about lifetime value. Like if you’re if you’re supplying a product, for instance and taking 10% But you have three other products in the pipeline and you’re getting the names 10%.
You might not, you might not even take 10%, you know, you’ll have, you know, you know, so that kind of thing. And if you’re a one shot Mark, if you’re a one shot product and you don’t have any marketing availability, then you might need more. And then the marketer is supplying something that they didn’t want in the first place, they’re buying it from you, that’s like, that’s cold to them. Because they, you know, that especially like in COVID, if one of my mastermind members is a chiropractor, he can’t see patients, although he might be able to see patients under my situation that I shared with Philip.
But if he can’t see patients, he’s going to dropship supplements, he’s going to dropship a laser. And he can do that with somebody who’s got a product that he would just pay for, whatever, just because he’s able to keep in touch with all of his patients. So it’s a really good point that the deal is not is not, it’s not a one size fits all by any means. So Perry, what do you want to do first? Or if anybody has a question about that? I don’t know.
Perry Marshall 6:09
Well, so I had a conversation yesterday with Bob Regnerus. And he had a great phrase, which was serving is selling. And Bob is a well, he’s his direct response veteran, and he’s done all kinds of things. And his business in the last three years is called Feed stories. And they do they do, they do video, push it into Facebook feeds, they get people’s stories really nailed down. And, then they manage Facebook traffic and stuff like that. And, Bob, in the last month, Bob has been besieged with business. Okay, it’s like all these people that were on the fence suddenly are pulling the trigger, which is kind of the opposite of what you would assume.
And by the way, I just have to say, you can’t assume you know, anything right now. Like, like, it’s all like a big reset button just got punched. And there might be a few really obvious things like, you can’t go to a restaurant right now. Okay. But other than that, like, you don’t know what you don’t know, it’s a, it’s a big blank canvas. And, and, and what, like, if I were to offer a theory about like, what’s up with Bob, um, the world just switched, as of roughly March 15, from carrot to stick. And it the world used to be about, hey, you know, if you do all the stuff, you know, you get the, you know, get the cherry on the sundae. And you can make a million dollars, and all of a sudden, how am I gonna stay alive? And I think people went from doing business with the person who has the slickest sales pitch, to doing business with the person that they trust.
And those are two completely different people. Okay. And this, this is the time when the overdeliver Brian Kurtz approach suddenly starts paying off big time. Okay. I had a guy sign up for a program that we offered a few weeks ago called slingshot recovery. And it’s basically like, kind of like an 8020 Chaos Crash Course. And, and so you got a big discount if you sign up in Renaissance club. And so we have this email that goes out that people reply back, it goes right to my assistant, and it says, why did you join Renaissance club and there was a guy. He said, Hi, I live in Australia. I’m in the trade show business, which is completely decimated for the foreseeable future. I have no visible income coming in. I’m down to my last $1,500.
And while I read Perry’s books, I’m like, I can trust this guy. Well, if a guy’s done last $1,500 and he’s given you probably 300 was the amount with 100 More next month. Uh, that requires a lot of trust. And I have a member who speaks of trade shows. I have another client who’s in the trade show business. They sell software that people use to process trade show leads and stuff like that. And like, well, there ain’t gonna be no trade shows anytime soon. Like that whole thing. And also notice, you know, like, if, if somebody came up with something like a vaccine or something tomorrow morning, a catering business, a restaurant could be open in 48 hours, right? They could just probably bounce right back to a trade show. Not so fast, right? So there are fast reset businesses, and they’re slow reset businesses. So he’s in a business that’s dead, and it’s slow reset, so this is not good.
And so he’s like, What do I do? And I said, alright, well, here’s the one thing that you can be certain of, is, there’s a lot more bleeding next now than there was two months ago. And bleeding neck being like, other than having the money, it’s the most important criteria that causes a sale to be made, is if blood is squirting out of their aorta and splattering on the ceiling, they’ll pay any amount of money to slap a bandaid on that thing and not bleed to death, okay, which is where a lot of people are. And I said, I said, so. You’re not in the trade show business, you are in the sales, conversion business. Okay, and your customers who thought they were gonna go to a trade show, and may or have a booth or whatever, they are now at home, but they still have to hit their numbers. So here’s what you need to do. Use, here’s what we know.
You know, because we’ve been working like I know this guy, you know, he would be like one of your top guys, Brian, he, you know, okay. Just like I said, you know more about sales funnels and sales processes and sales follow up and sales conversion than 98 or 99% of your customers. So what do you do? You pick up the phone, and you just call him and you go, talk to me, what’s going on right now? And just listen. Right? Like, you have some relationship with them. Like, they have API calls, you have API calls into their system, you’re, you know, you’re you’re sending them data and stuff, okay. So like you at least know their name, even if you don’t have a relationship with them. Talk to you know, I have hundreds of customers who have sales processes.
Maybe I know somebody, maybe I can help. I don’t even know what you need, you know, what’s going on with you talking to me. And, you know, if the guy’s like sitting at home, and he used to have his office, and now these kids are running around downstairs, and he’s trying to be a national sales manager, and he’s got to meet his numbers, and nothing’s going on and whatever, then probably I said, 80% of these guys, there’s a way that everything’s supposed to work, you know, when, when when they have the trade show, the leads are supposed to go into this bucket and go to this person. And the brochures are supposed to be mailed out and emails are supposed to go out. And the marketing person and the salespeople are supposed to call them.
And the distributors are supposed to get the lead and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, well, I know that’s supposed to happen, but 80% of the time, it’s not happening. You’re gonna get in there and fix it like, oh, well, you know, you had a trade show in January. And you got all these leads in Oh, my goodness, look at that. Nobody’s called any of them. Right? And like you marshal their forces. And I said, ” Now, here’s the thing, I cannot tell you. I cannot tell you sitting here on the Zoom call, what your business model is and exactly how you’re going to get paid for that? I don’t know. Okay, what I do know is they have a bleeding neck and you know, something they don’t. And you have band aids and they don’t have any. So like, don’t run away from the chaos, run into the chaos. And just go start solving problems. And this is what mod Regnerus means by serving is selling.
Because if you spend an hour or two hours with that guy, and you work all this through, you are in the most trusted list that is that exhibit a of overdeliver it’s like wow, you know, I thought these guys were just like, put this app on our iPad. My goodness. These people are geniuses, you know? Oh, maybe they’re hiring you for several $1,000 a day to straighten out their sales team. Or maybe they want you to be their sales team. I just fired six of my sales guys, I don’t even know what I’m gonna do. Can I hire you? Okay, sure. Like, I don’t know this, but this is how you have to think. Here’s another metaphor that I found very, very useful.
I think it’s actually very true. So the way the world was two months ago was, you’re in a, you’re in the parking lot of a Walmart, and it’s paved for acres, right? And you’re walking around with a little bag of seeds in your gun. Are there any cracks in the sidewalk that I could stick a seed in, and it might grow, that there’s not already big weed, you know, growing out of it. And maybe, maybe you’re pulling out, we’d see you could stick a seed in there and then hope that it would grow. Well, what happened in the middle of March was that there was a big giant, like an 8.5 Richter scale earthquake. And now there’s a 100 foot canyon in the parking lot. And it’s 900 feet deep. And there’s all the soil you could ever want, with no weeds growing in it. Okay, because the world has fractured. Okay. And so, in January, I wrote a series of blog posts. I said, these are, these are my, these are my predictions for 2020 to 2029. I predicted all these things.
And the very last one, like the countdown, the one at the end number one was, this is the agility decade. Okay, now, that means a lot of things. Okay? One thing that is just, bam, totally true as of middle of March, right? Everything, all the rules are different, everything’s so everything is like you got to pivot fast. One of my longtime clients, David Nadler, coined a great term, which I love: Minimum Viable pivot. Like, what is the least amount of complete reengineering that will make your business work? Well. So here’s where we’re at: the earthquake has happened. The roof of the Walmart is caved in. I mean, at least the sports section is caved in. Maybe they’re still selling clothes somewhere else, but the bicycle and the baseball gloves and the footballs are all you know. Ain’t no sporting events at all.
They moved the food section around so you can still buy food and there’s still people coming there. And they built little bridges. They built little catwalks over the 900 foot Kravis so that people wouldn’t fall in on their way in. Right. And they’re like, Okay, and like the whole world is completely turned around. Okay, so bureaucracies, okay, I think one of the things that is going to be more and more and more obvious in the next month, two months, three months, is the absolute failure of the institutions and systems and bureaucracies that were supposed to be taking care of us. Okay, so the World Health Organization, pretending Taiwan doesn’t even exist.
Okay, when Taiwan is the only country that’s doing fine, okay, now, somebody go figure that out right now, I happen to know it’s because Taiwan officially doesn’t exist because China, you know, is insisting that Taiwan doesn’t exist. It’s like a dysfunctional family. Where, well, you know what China is? And I know China, I’ve been there six, I probably spent two months of my life living in China in the last 20 years. China is the country where grandpa molested the granddaughter. And it never happened. No, no, no, no, that didn’t. No grandpa is great. Grandpa is awesome. We have posters of grandpa. We have to sing songs about grandpa. Okay, Grandpa is a child molester. Okay, but, you know, and we’re gonna, you know, everybody’s gonna have Thanksgiving dinner and nobody’s going to talk about it. Okay, so there, that’s China. Okay, so anyway, so you’re gonna see like that Like, like, the World Health Organization not doing its job.
I think the college I think the college education bubble just burst. It’s not obvious yet. But I think it, I think, I think that gig is over. Okay. That’s a whole other conversation. And so, like these bureaucracies, they can’t move fast. And the people that run them, they’re not actual, like real problem solvers, they’re bureaucrats. Okay? What has happened is now, the whole game is what an Agile person can rush in and solve a problem now. This morning, I woke up at like four o’clock, and my brain switched on. I can’t imagine that happening to any of the rest of you. And I couldn’t sleep for a couple hours. And I connected a dot. Okay, and I remembered this book, Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville. I read it in college, it’s one of the most brilliant books ever.
Okay. But here’s the story behind this book. 1835. The United States is 50 years old. Everybody in Europe is talking about the United States. It’s all anybody’s talking about, you see what’s going on over there? Like non stop, okay. And the aerosol aristocrats are scared shitless. Okay. And so the French send their smartest guy to America and they go, go over there and tell us what is going on. And so Alexis de Tocqueville goes, and he spends a few years living in America, and he writes this book, and he says, Let me explain America, okay? And like, you go chapter by chapter by chapter, this guy, he nails it. And even 170 years later, he’s still got it, right. He nails American culture.
Now, there’s this interesting chapter. It’s called, why democratic nations are naturally desirous of peace and democratic armies desirous of war. Okay, now, this is really interesting. And before I explain this, I want to connect the dots for you. We’re at war. Okay, this is a war time. Season. We’re not at peace anymore. We’re in war, or war with a virus. But it’s still a war. Okay. And a lot like eBay. You notice how similar this is to 911? I was at war. In fact, it started the Afghanistan war in the Iraq war. Okay, there could be worse started over this wouldn’t be surprised.
Okay, so this is war. So here’s what he says. He says, In peacetime the military is the fastest place to nowhere, ever. Okay, like, you’re gonna get your job and like, you’re gonna march or go to, you know, boot camp or whatever, and there’s nothing going on. Okay, all the smart guys. Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville. All the smart guys are in commerce. Right? They’re making their fortune building factories and farms. Gals. Yes. Sorry. You know, yes, women, everybody. Everybody’s making their money and commerce. When war comes to the battle line, the military becomes the fastest path to advancement.
So, now, now this war, you have to ask, okay, so what’s the military here and now? Well, the military is like, whatever protects people from their life caving in. It’s whatever protects people from the enemy, which could be COVID masks. It could be Doctors and nurses, it could be anybody who can figure out how to save your business. Anybody who could figure out how this government loan thing is gonna work out or, you know, anybody figure out how to turn a brick and mortar into a virtual anything like that. That’s the military. Okay. And, and in so, the military, again, metaphorically, is now where the action is. Okay?
And all of the smart people, it takes a while, like, it doesn’t happen overnight. But pretty soon all the smart people figure out, dude, like, this is where the action is. This is where the advancement is, man. Like, if I want to get rich and famous, like, this is where you do it. Okay. And so, you got to understand that that’s agility that’s exhibit a of agility, like, like, I’ve had several conversations in the last few weeks. They’re like, dude, put a fork in it. It’s over. Get out. Don’t save the burn, save the people run out of the burning building. And don’t look back. This is Sodom and Gomorrah. If you turn around, you get turned into a pillar of salt like that lady. Okay. Like it’s over. Scorched Earth, nuked, detonated. Done, right, that does that life is over, mourn it, grieve it, cry, and then machine gun, the wreckage, right? Which is like, you know, the airplane crashed into your machine gun, all the instruments so that the, you know, the Foreign Intelligence can’t dissect the airplane and listen to the tapes and stuff. Right?
And you move on, like, like, Next, go find somebody who’s making COVID masks and help them or whatever. Okay, so I’ve had several conversations like that, like, You’re, like, normal, gun, normal, dead normal over. You need to like go do this. And, and so and so. Like, that’s what you got to do. And, there is if you can let go of whatever you thought you were doing before and move into solving the bleeding neck stay ahead of the curve. See around the corner. Most people are only thinking like two days ahead, and you’re thinking weeks and months ahead. Then you can pivot pivot pivot pivot. And I think there are going to be tremendous opportunities for advancement, especially if you over deliver, and if you understand that serving is selling because if you’re valuable, they’re going to figure out how to keep you around.
Outro 28:04
Thanks for listening to the timeless marketing podcast with Brian Kurtz. Visit briankurtz.net, and click podcast at the top of the page for a full transcript and show notes. If you’re interested in working with Brian personally inside of Titans Xcelerator, go to Briankurtz.net/help to see how Titans can help you grow and scale your business. That’s B-R-I-A-N Kurtz [dot] net [slash] help.