Brian Kurtz 12:15
Yeah, I mean, and that, you know, that you’re hooked up with Robert, who is, you know, the retention expert, the back end, the, you know, the second and third order is more important than the first for lifetime value, all of that. That gets lost. And so now I know why you wrote the book, and why, you know, why it was such a natural for you to do this and and the book is structured really well, because it’s, you know, he’s got, you know, part two is fail proof multi-channel marketing, and then part three is the ultimate multi-channel marketing funnel. And then it goes into things specific, no opt in lead capture, pre order form bump, retargeting ads. Some of the people in this group, I know do. I do some of them even. But there’s going to be stuff that you’re not doing for sure, because it’s very comprehensive. It really is. Caleb, congratulations on putting it together. Robert, do you have some questions for Caleb, or you want to move them in a different direction?
Robert Skrob 13:17
Oh, well, no, not. I would like to jump in. And thank you very much for your compliments on the book. As Caleb and I were first talking about this project and thinking through the reason why on earth do we need another marketing book, and how can we contribute to this? You know, really thinking through what Caleb was talking about, it came to me that this is very much like the Ben Suarez book, 7 Steps to Freedom where, you know, in that book, of course, Ben is giving –
Brian Kurtz 13:57
Did that include when he got out of jail? Also, I’m just gonna –
Robert Skrob 14:01
Yeah, how to get in and how to get out of there.
Brian Kurtz 14:03
Right, right, right. He’s an amazing marketer.
Robert Skrob 14:07
And, you know, this book, of course, was, you know, really promoted as, like a business opportunity. And it is, but it’s immense. And there is, there’s like, how to borrow money from a bank, and the process is something of the 1980s and so, you know talking with Caleb, it seemed like there was an opportunity to have this sort of, kind of, what Ben created, this the net profit generation system. But bring that, this multi-channel funnel, bring that to the forefront, and go through that. You know also, I want to thank Jack Turk, who is on today. Jack went through, I don’t know how many hours, 50 hours, 60 hours of recordings that Caleb and I did interviews and somehow sorted that out into, you know, what you have here. But I think the kind of going through the book a moment, like you were saying Brian, you know, in the beginning, you know, the real focus is kind of this number one problem that marketers are making in their approach. And really, the fact is, most of them focus too much on their ads and iterating the ads, and not enough on having a complete funnel. The next section this fail proof multi channel marketing is really all about the four direct response fundamentals that they’re really told in the context of how Caleb learned them from Gary Halbert, and bringing them forward in terms of making sure that you have a big idea that you know, because you could have all 20 profit centers in a funnel, but the things still not convert well, because you don’t have the right idea, you don’t have a clear understanding of your customer base, you don’t have a solid enough offer. And one of the things in speaking with Caleb is that, you know, he has worked with and trained more than 100 copywriters on his team, and so he’s taken these people who believe that they are Cracker Jack copywriters, and then had to mold them into direct response quality copywriters and understood what they don’t understand, and created exercises with them. And this book, one of the things that I think is absolutely brilliant, I’ve used it myself and with a number of clients, is something called the 10-50 which is a process of understanding your customer. And it’s if, you know, a lot of times people are like, Oh, this is a big waste of time. But I haven’t worked with anybody who has done it that hasn’t, like, completely changed what they believed about their customers and finally, understood how to do segments. I use it all the time with helping my clients understand how to do tiered pricing within their subscription businesses and so you know, this is just an absolute goldmine, and that’s just one chapter.
Brian Kurtz 17:34
Can you go a little deeper on that, just to get to give us a bit more of a taste?
Robert Skrob 17:39
So in the “Ten 50s” there is a number of prompts. There are actually 10 different prompts in the exercise. And what you’re doing is, you know, for instance, you know, identify the 50 reasons why your solution is better than all the others.
Brian Kurtz 17:59
This sounds like this is at Breakthrough Advertising too. This has a lot of similarities to what Gene Schwartz teaches too.
Robert Skrob 18:07
Oh, of course, yeah. I mean, there’s no one better there. I mean, Breakthrough Advertising was the foundational book that all of this stuff is built upon.
Brian Kurtz 18:16
I know, but it sounds like Caleb, and you really built on it even more.
Robert Skrob 18:20
Well, what I think was brilliant about Caleb’s approach is he has a system and that, I think Breakthrough Advertising was brilliant at identifying the end result that you’re trying to go for, and what Caleb has really by beating his head against the wall dealing with these copywriters who think they smart and really aren’t, is he’s figured out how to devise exercises that they forced them to be smart, whether they wanted to or not, and so, you know by having 50, it’s also similar to the Clayton Makepeace and even the Parris Lampropoulos exercise of creating 100 headlines. By the time you get to 30, you are now breaking new ground and having to force yourself to instead of iterating your preconceived ideas, it’s forcing you to come up with things that you never thought of. And then, because there’s 10 different exercises that hit the same thing from completely different angles, you make connections that you never would have made before by going through. So the exercise is simple enough. It’s you know, answer 50 reasons, your solution is better, identify 50 reasons to buy. Then it gives you some suggestions, but identify 50 reasons not to buy, and also gives you some examples that maybe that some people get stuck in a rut around reasons not to buy and. And this gives specific things that, like, hey, you know, start in the 50s, go down these route holes, so that it helps, you know, kind of helps with those prompts.
Brian Kurtz 20:11
Yeah, I’m thinking that this, Hey, Chris, you know, our next breakthrough advertising bootcamp we need, if with Caleb’s permission, of course, I’d like to incorporate some of the 10-50s questions, because we have something that we make people go deep by saying, you know people what they will tell you, what they won’t tell you, what they can tell you. But I think we don’t tell them to do 50. I’ll tell you that. You know, if they get to 10, it’s a lot.
Caleb O’Dowd 20:41
Yeah, and it’s an exercise. The hardest part of creating, like a brilliant sales message, is knowing what to say and who to say it to and how to say it. You know, like one of the greatest things that I ever read, and I’m pretty sure it’s in Breakthrough Advertising, it was Gene Schwartz saying, I’m not really a great copywriter, but I’m one hell of an editor. And that always stood out to me as it was just genius, you know, like the secret, like I used to watch Halbert, he would get a client, and he would have 30 days to create the advertisement, and he would write it in the last two days. So what happened the other 28 days? The other 28 days, he was masterminding this. He was researching, he was, you know, compiling all of the information in a manner that was very sophisticated, that resulted in great copy. The problem with like modern copywriters is they skip that, and they just sit down and start putting words on a page, and what ends up then is they end up with an advertisement that doesn’t convert. Because it’s not the writing process that results in the sales, it’s all of the research, the compilation, you know, the research phase that results in the sales. But there is no systematic way that so many people have. There’s the brilliant guys out there, the Bencivengas of the world. They have their system for doing that kind of stuff, for doing the research. And Bencivenga says, the game is won in research. But no one has a system. No one has a strategy. So what this is, is it is a systematic way to do your research, because the exercise forces you to go and do stuff that you would never think of doing yourself. But it’s in a very guided manner. You know? I remember Halbert used to play a joke on me. He would just say, Hey, listen, go and research that prospect for me. And, you know, I would just wander off into the woods of information and would come back and embarrass myself, whereas he would go and look for very specific things, get very specific answers that facilitated the creation of brilliant copy, and that’s what this is also. This is a very guided strategy for creating elite level breakthrough advertising.
Brian Kurtz 23:12
Yeah, you’ve done is brilliant, because we can’t all be Gary Bencivenga, we can’t all be Gene Schwartz, but we can be better at what we do, and the idea of putting it into a system of questions that you can follow and make it almost like a checklist, but you need to come from your gut too. I mean, you got to be willing to go deep into your customers. And the idea of research. I mean, Kim Krause Schwalm is huge on that, you know, she has a product called Research Beast, and it’s all about, you know, it’s all about the research comes first. I mean, Gene used to tell me, you know, when I gave him a book to write a package for, his first question was, what’s not in the book? Like forcing me to think about or our editors to think about, what more could we get for him to write about? That’s the tip of the iceberg, based on the fact that you’re going with 50 prompts, almost in different categories. I mean, I’m bummed that I didn’t read that part of the book yet. I’m going to that part first when I go back to the book. But this sounds just perfect for anybody who’s not a copywriter, who’s not, you know, a world class marketer, who wants to have successful promotions and successful sales letters.
Caleb O’Dowd 24:40
And I think, as well that, like, one of the things that Rob pointed out there, as well as like, there’s a self braiding in the exercise. You know, as Rob said, like it’s, it’s easy to create 20 answers, right? Increasingly difficult to create 25, 30, 35, 40 and the guys that get to 50 like the gap between what you can create and the remaining you know, like numbers you know, like if you can get as far as 30, but you can’t get as far as 50, that’s your gap. That’s the difference between where you are in greatness. So it’s very self-measuring, you know, it puts you in your place, and it highlights the gap between where you are and where you need to be.
Brian Kurtz 25:36
Yeah, and it sounds like it can be taught through what you have in the book, which is fantastic.
Outro 25:45
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 are 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-K-U-R-T-Z [dot] net [forward slash] help.