Fri, 24 July 2015
How many hours do you work on vacation? You don't. But then what about the e-mails? How do you deal with clients? Are you supposed to just close down your business? This episode shows you how we deal with vacations at Psychotactics. We've been going on our "three-month" vacations since 2004 and have had to work out a few "tricks". And you can use them too—and ensure a splendid vacation, instead of just "work by the beach". -------------------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: The Secret to handling email on holiday Useful Resources About Time management—The Carpe Diem Method of Finding Work (And Vacation) Time Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic Products under $50: http://www.psychotactics.com/products/under-50/ So how do you subscribe to this free podcast? To subscribe to the podcast, please use the links below: iTunes | Android | E-mail (and get special goodies) | RSS
The TranscriptHi, this is Sean D’Souza from psychotactics.com, and you’re listening to the Three Month Vacation Podcast.This podcast isn’t some magic trick about working less. Instead, it’s about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time. This is the Three Month Vacation. I’m Sean D’Souza. In February of 2005 I had no intention of checking any email. That was because we were on our vacation in the South Island. Now New Zealand is a set of islands, as you probably know. There’s the North Island where we live, and the South Island. In the South Island, it’s truly breathtaking. It’s got rivers and mountains and glaciers, and there we were at Fox Glacier. Now Fox is an amazing glacier because it’s in close proximity to both the rainforest and the ocean. Now that’s pretty rare with a glacier, but the ice flow on Fox Glacier is also amazing. It changes as much as three meters a day, so it’s a pretty crazy place to be, and there we were walking on the glacier. When we had done that walk, we came down to check email. I didn’t check email for several days, and there was this little hut right next to the glacier. Yes, there’s email everywhere these days. I switched on the computer expecting nothing much, and there it was: an email telling me that our entire membership site was non-existent. This is the power of email. It can take a perfectly good day and make it an absolutely rotten one. In today’s episode we’re going to cover this topic of no work on vacation. We’re going to look at email and how to deal with email in vacation mode, and then how you deal with social media, and finally what do you do about clients while you’re on vacation. Let’s start off with the first thing, which is dealing with email. Part 1: Dealing With EmailImagine you’re having a great day and then you get a phone call. It says a child is in hospital, your child is in hospital. It doesn’t matter how happy you were at that moment. Your mood changes. Immediately you want to take control. Immediately you want to be with that child. Immediately you’re transported right back to that situation that in a way you can’t control, but need to be there. Now email isn’t quite the same situation, but it still has that power. It still has that power to pull you back into that work mode. You’re sitting somewhere having a margarita enjoying the sunset, and then you read email and your mood changes. You’re back in work land. It can be a good email, a bad email, a frustrating email. It doesn’t matter. You’re no longer where you are and you’re some other place where you shouldn’t be, which is back at work. How do we deal with this at Psychotactics? Remember that incident at Fox Glacier where I read that email? It made me feel terrible. I’d just gone up the glacier. I was in this absolutely stunning mood. Then I had to read that email. The point is that I couldn’t do anything. That website was down. They had erased it down to zero pixels. Then they did a backup of that website, the one that they erased, so we had nothing. Then clients started writing in telling us that the website was down. Then I had to write back to clients. I spent several hours at that little hut responding to email. How do you deal with such a situation? How do you control this so that you’re not completely dealing with work the whole time that you’re away? Because you need to leave email at home when you go on vacation. Here’s how we do it. For one, we don’t check the primary email. We get someone else to check email while we’re away. Here’s how it works. When that someone else is checking email, they’re getting rid of all the stuff that really takes up a lot of your time, so any spam, any offers, all that just goes in the trash straight away. Now on a day to day basis I probably read it because it’s valuable and I’ve subscribed to it and I want to read it, but while I’m on vacation I don’t need that email. All of that goes trashed right away. What else is left? There are emails where someone has not got a download or someone needs some kind of help. Usually there are canned messages, so there are messages where they can get their downloads or things that come up on a frequent basis. It’s very rare that you’re going to get new episode all the time. Most of the emails that you’re responding to, they are old matters, and if you have canned messages, and I use Text Expander on my computer, and those canned messages go out and the matter is resolved. This leaves us with the urgent email, the email that simply cannot be ignored. There are two ways to handle this. The first way is to create an email address like, say, vacation@psychotactics.com. Then you instruct that person to send email there only if it’s absolutely critical, that it cannot be put off in any way. If it’s super critical, than they should have your phone number and they should get in touch with you. Then again, let’s assume you want to keep it just to email. You have the special box with a special email address, and you notice nothing is showing up day after day, because after all, the box is for urgent stuff and there isn’t any urgent stuff. You don’t give up. You just and you check that email repeatedly several times a day. Then you realize there’s nothing there after all. You wait for the phone call, and the phone call never comes. We have been going on vacation since 2004. We work for three months, then we take a month off. In that month we almost never have to deal with email because all of it is taken care. The stuff that needs to be attend later is put in a box. When we get back, we deal with that. And so you remain email-free. But email isn’t the only way that people can get in touch with you these days. There’s also this menace called social media. Let’s talk about social media, shall we? Part 2: Social MediaIn May 2015, after doing an infoproducts workshop in Washington D.C. and speaking at an event in Denver, we headed off to Sardinia. We moved from the south of Sardinia right up to the north. There was this wonderful hotel called Hotel Cuncheddi, or Cala Cuncheddi. I had 500 megabytes of data, so guess what? I was going to use it. Except there was a small problem. This data was connected to a satellite. You only got 500 megabytes, and if you exceeded those 500 megabytes you had to buy more data. I went outside and I took some pictures of the beach. It’s a glorious beach and beautiful views, and I uploaded three pictures. Instantly, my 500 megabytes was exhausted. I couldn’t surf the internet anymore. Now if you know anything about the internet and technology, that’s impossible. Anything uploaded to Facebook is probably going to be a few megabytes, maybe four or five megabytes. You can’t use up 500 megabytes in about 30 seconds, but there was a glitch in their system. Because of the glitch, I couldn’t access the internet, I couldn’t check Facebook, I couldn’t go on any kind of social media platforms. And so I didn’t. I found the beach. I found that I didn’t have to look at my phone, I didn’t have to look at the iPad. I did what my grandfather and my father did. I actually went out and enjoyed myself. Just because you’re not checking email doesn’t mean that you’re not connected. When you get into this whole deal of Facebook or Twitter or any social media stuff, you get involved in something. Maybe someone is going to talk about global warming or gun control, or something about some politician or something, and immediately it yanks you back into this frustrating situation where you’re either for it or against it and your mood is spoiled. You’re not looking at the beach. You’re looking down at your phone. You’re looking down at your iPad. It might not be work, but it still takes you away from where you should be. It still messages to ruin your mood. It still creates that state change. That’s not usually for the better. I hope that I’m going to take Cala Cuncheddi with me wherever I go, where I can upload three photos and then I’m done and then I can’t access the internet anymore. It is a price to pay because we’re so tied to our phones and our iPads and our mobile devices. Yet it’s so critical that we step away from it, because somehow it pulls us back. Remember that clients can still contact you. They can send messages to you through Facebook Messenger or through some method like Skype. Immediately you’re yanked back. I know that asking someone to get rid of their internet while they’re on vacation is like asking them to get rid of one of their arms. But I can tell you from experience that it’s good. I say this with a lot of reluctance because I want to hold that phone, I want to take the pictures, I want to upload them, I want to do stuff like that. The moments that I’ve not done it, the days I’ve not done it, they have been truly splendid. So no email, and definitely no social media. That takes us to the third part, which is how are we going to deal with clients? What if there’s an emergency? Part 3: How Are We Going To Deal With Clients?I remember the year that Renuka and I got married. We told clients that we were going on our honeymoon. It was amazing, because everyone said, “We wish you all the best.” One thing that they made sure was not to contact us in any way. How about making it a honeymoon every single time? How about staying away from clients while you’re on vacation? This is what your parents did. This is what our grandparents did. They went on vacation. No matter how rich they were or poor they were, they just left their work and in the summer they would go to some place like a village or their hometown, and they were completely cut off from work. We live in a different world and we think we should be connected to our clients all the time. Really this depends on you. It depends on how you set up things. When we have courses we make sure that the courses end a week before we go on vacation, so we can tidy up everything and then we can go on our vacation. In fact, before going on vacation we pack our bags three or four days before we have to get on the flight, and then the vacation starts while we’re still in Auckland. Then we leave. No one contacts us about the courses. No one contacts about products that they can’t download or can’t get, because someone else is handling that. Only while we’re away someone else is handling that. Then it’s the third thing which is the membership site. I go into 5000bc.com, that’s our membership site, and I go there, I don’t know, 15, 20 times a day. If you ask a question, I respond with just the answer or sometimes I’ll write a series of answers, do an audio or video even just to give you the answer. Our clients, they get used to this level of response, but the moment I’m away they know I’m away. If I were to pop in, and it’s not like I haven’t tried, they instantly tell me I should leave. That I need to go and enjoy my vacation, because that’s what vacation is all about. What you’re doing is you’re actually setting up the client’s so that they tell you to go away. That’s what our members do. If I try to check email or if I try to get back into the membership site, they tell me to go away. What we’ve done from the very start is inculcated in our clients the fact that our vacation is sacred, so they treat it like that. They treat it like as if we’re going on honeymoon. Every time we try to get back, we get a rap on the knuckles and we’re back in Margarita land. We’ve made a big deal about the vacation, and I think that’s what you need to do as well. You need to tell clients that while you’re away you can’t be reached. Of course they don’t reach you, but are there any exceptions to this rule? Of course there are exceptions to the rule. The point is that you are checking email. I’m checking email 270 days in a year. When I’m at work, I’m checking email, I’m go to the forums, I’m go to the membership site, I’m going on social media. It’s very hard to just slow down and go okay, I’m not doing this anymore. I’ll try, but it’s nice to get booted out. It’s nice to go and enjoy yourself and have a good time. Even when I got that email at Fox Glacier it wasn’t like I could do anything. I couldn’t bring the website back up again. In fact, the website was down for 17 days. When we got back, we apologized to our clients. Then we got back to work. We got to building 5000bc. That’s where it is today. Many of those clients, they’re still with us today after all of these years.Vacation time should be sacred, should be a place every go to where you can re-energize and relax and learn stuff about cultures, and then come back and get back to work with full gusto. SummaryThat brings us to the end of this podcast. Three things that we covered. The first thing is if you need to have email attack you, then create a separate email address and only the urgent stuff goes there. Even better, just don’t get any email. If there’s something utterly urgent, they’ll then call you. Otherwise, get someone to deal with the email with canned messages. You want to stay off Facebook and Twitter and any kind of social media. You want to put yourself in a situation where you’re just disconnected. Finally, you want to train your clients right at the start. You want to let them know that vacation is a time when I’m going to be away. You will be surprised at how they respect this almost like it’s a honeymoon, every single time you go on vacation. It’s 5:59 AM and it’s time for that walk and to listen to some audiobooks and podcasts. I hope you’ve been enjoying this podcast. If you have been enjoying it, please go and leave a review on iTunes. If you haven’t already subscribed, it’s that big purple button. All you have to do is go and click it. If you’re on Android you can go to Stitcher and download the Stitcher app, and you can get all the downloads. I’m on Twitter @seandsouza and on Facebook at Sean D’Souza. You can email me at vacation@psychotactics.com. No, just kidding. I’m at work right now. Email me at sean@psychotactics.com. This episode, for instance, was a response to someone asking how do we deal with work on vacation. The answer is you don’t. We’ve got to cartooning course starting off shortly. I don’t know when you’re going to listen to this podcast, but if you don’t get the cartooning course this year, then it’s all the way into 2016, so the cartooning course, which is thatwww.psychotactics.com/davinci. At the end of the year in November, we’re going to have the first 50 words course. This is a course that shows you how to start a podcast or webinars or write stuff in your articles. The first 50 words it drives us absolutely bonkers, and the first 50 words course shows you that. You’ll never have to struggle with the first 50 words ever again. You’ll become an amazing storyteller. That’s the first 50 words course. You have to be on the Psychotactics newsletter list so that you can get the notification when the course is due. That’s pretty much it for this episode. Thank you for tuning in. Bye for now. You can also listen to or read this episode: #50:The Early Years-Psychotactics-Moving to New Zealand |
Mon, 20 July 2015
How did you get to New Zealand? That's the question I get most of all from clients. And there's a story, a very interesting story behind our move from India to New Zealand. Here it is?and with some cool music too. How did you get to New Zealand? That's the question I get most of all from clients. And there's a story, a very interesting story behind our move from India to New Zealand. Here it is—and with some cool music too. In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: What I was looking for, when I was 13 years old Useful Resources and Links The Power of Chocolate: The Power of Psychotactics Chocolate Marketing -------------------- So how do you subscribe to this free podcast? To subscribe to the podcast, please use the links below: iTunes | Android | E-mail (and get special goodies) | RSS The TranscriptHi. This is Sean D’Souza from Psychotactics.com and you are listening to The Three-Month Vacation Podcast.This podcast isn’t some magic trick about working less, instead, it’s about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time. This is The Three-Month Vacation. I’m Sean D’Souza. One of the questions that I get most of all is how we got to New Zealand. What caused us to leave India and to get to New Zealand? What were the early days like? These are questions that subscribers at Psychotactics want to know all the time. This is the 50th episode and so I thought that’s good idea. Let’s puts in the Psychotactics story here so that you can listen to it and enjoy it. Part 1: What I Was Looking For, When I Was 13 Years OldWhen I was 13 years old, I had a thought. I wanted to live in a place that was half-city and half-country. Mumbai or Bombay as it was called back then, was very polluted and noisy, not good enough for me, obviously, and I wanted to move to a place that was half-city and half-country except I didn’t know about New Zealand. I’ve never been to New Zealand, probably never even seen any photos of it, but in my mind, I was clear that it had to be half-city and half-country. I say half-city because I love the city. I like people. I like going out and seeing people, and I like the energizer level of the city, but I love the country as well, and I thought if I could find a place that was half-city and half-country, that would be great. I wasn’t thinking of New Zealand. I wasn’t even thinking of leaving India. I was thinking of moving to a place like Bangalore which is in South India. It’s called the Garden City. As I grew up, Bangalore got more congested and busier, and it became just another city, so we started looking out for other countries. We looked at the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. These are mainly the immigrant countries. Canada was very cool. I went to the Canadian Embassy and they said, “What’s your profession?” I said, “I’m a cartoonist.” In that documentation that they gave me, there were six different types of cartoonist to choose from, and I thought, “Wow, this is a very sophisticated place,” because when you go to most of these places, you don’t find cartoonist listed as a profession. We didn’t go to Canada. We didn’t fill out any forms. We didn’t do any of that stuff. We did the same with Australia. We went to the embassy. We got some forms. We didn’t do anything. Then, eventually, a lawyer came from New Zealand. He was an immigration lawyer and he looked for our papers, and he said, “No.” He said we didn’t have enough points to get to New Zealand. He said that we needed to try later, but it didn’t look good, and so, we gave up. We just gave up just like that. Part 2: Getting to New ZealandThen, I was walking down the street several years later, grocery shopping, and I ran into this friend of mine. Her name is Joan. Joan says to me, “What are you doing here?” I said, “I’m grocery shopping.” She said, “No, no. What are you doing in India? Weren’t you supposed to go to New Zealand?” I said, “Oh, yeah. We were supposed to go, but we did all these paperwork and they said that we couldn’t go.” Then, she said, “You should try now.” She gave me a card and I contacted the immigration lawyer, and that was the start of our merry dance with Indian bureaucracy. I don’t know if you’ve been in a bureaucratic country, but Indian bureaucracy is way up there. You have to go to the police and to the passport department, and you’re going back and forth, and back and forth, and back and forth, and spending enormous amounts of time just in this back and forth movement. Anyway, nine months passed, suddenly, late at night, almost midnight, we got a call wherein we have 12 months to make that trip to New Zealand. That’s when something amazing happened. Everything became lopsided in our favor. I know this sounds crazy to say lopsided in your favor, but it was almost like there was a design to stop us from leaving. Everything that came our way was amazing as long as we stayed in India. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like we had a rough life in India. The Renuka’s company was a Swiss company and it is the largest fragrance company in the world, and they used to pay for everything; for our stay, our car, we had a chauffeur. It was good life, but the moment we decided we wanted to move was as if a force came in, trying to keep us back. At that point in time, Renuka’s boss, he didn’t know that we were leaving. Almost at the moment we decided we’ll be leaving, he decided to put her in charge of the entire Asian region, which was a big job. When he found out that we were going to New Zealand, he offered to pay the entire airfare. He said, “Go to New Zealand. Have a good vacation. Come back and take your job back,” and we said, “No.” It was the same for me, I had an office. I had staff. I have three-hour lunches. We used to go bowling in the middle of the day. It was a very good life and we had to check up that life and then go into this complete uncertainty of New Zealand. When we left the country, I had just a handbag full of clothes. Not because we didn’t have clothes, but because I wanted to bring all my computer equipment along, so instead of the usual baggage that people bring with all their staff, I had my huge monitor, and then the CPU which weighed a ton, then a scanner, then a printer, and that was what I brought to New Zealand. Everything else was coming in bags later on, but that was the stuff that came with me on the flight. When I’m talking about New Zealand, I often say that we didn’t know anyone in New Zealand, but that’s not quite true. We knew one person and that was Wayne Logue. Wayne was someone that I had met on an internet forum. I was part of a cartoon forum called the Wisenheimer, and Wayne, he was part of that, too. I said I’m coming to New Zealand and he said, “Oh, I can help you.” This was the amazing part. It almost seemed like, “Wow, where did Wayne come from?” We didn’t know whether he was just a crazy guy, a serial killer, and I think that it crossed his mind as well because that’s what … We had a conversation one day and that’s what he said. He didn’t know anything about me. He didn’t know whether I was going to show up, but Wayne actually got my mobile phone, he got my P.O. Box, he got a rental apartment, he did all this stuff not really knowing whether I existed or whether I was just pulling one big April Fool’s Day joke on him. Then, he showed up at the airport and I was able to stay at his place for a week. He had got this rental apartment. He moved me to the rental apartment. He had a hamper full of goodies for me like Kiwi stuff, red socks. When I say “red socks” I mean red socks because we were doing this whole America’s Cup campaign and those are the red socks that they were selling. There were all these things that were essentially very New Zealand-based in that hamper. The landlord’s name was Barry. Barry showed up. He said, “Do you need anything?” I wasn’t quite sure I needed anything. Barry shows up later with half-a-full of forks and spoons, and iron and ironing board, and he just leaves it outside the door so that I can get started. This was New Zealand for me. It was full of friendly, wonderful people that just went out of their way to do stuff. This was a fairy tale start to New Zealand, but it got even better before it got worse. Within a week, I was calling up people from the phonebook. I called up maybe 200 people. These designers and marketing agencies and advertising agencies, and I had a job. I had a job as a web designer. I’d studied a bit of Flash. I didn’t know much of it, but the company that hired me, they didn’t know any of the Flash stuff, so it was very new, very interesting, until I got the job. By day two, I was sick of the job. I wanted to quit. I emailed Renuka. Renuka was still back in India at that point in time. She was going to follow in month or so. I said I wanted to quit the job. She said, “No, no, no. Hang in there.” Renuka has always been this person who had a job and I’ve always been this person who never had a job. I always ran my own business freelance. This job, I don’t know what it was, but it just drove me crazy. I had nothing to do. The whole time I was there, I probably built one website, which if you know me, that drove me absolutely crazy. It was like being in prison. Then, I got made redundant, and that was the second happiest day of the entire year. The first being the day I got to New Zealand, but this was fabulous. There was just one little problem though. We had just bought a house the week before and we had a mortgage for over $200,000, and now, we both didn’t have jobs and we had to pay that mortgage. Part 3: What Were the Early Years at Psychotactics Like?What were the early years at Psychotactics like? For one, it wasn’t even called Psychotactics. It had this very embarrassing name called Million Bucks. As you probably heard before, I was headed back to India and I had this book called “Good to Great” by Jim Collins, and it asked a question, what can you be the best in the world at? I was a professional cartoonist at that time and I couldn’t answer the question. I thought that Calvin and Hobbes was the best cartoon in the world and I couldn’t beat that, and so i wanted to do something else. I don’t know why. Maybe it was a new county, but I wanted to do something else, and so I just decided to jack up everything I was already doing, and then, throw myself into this crazy crevasse. One day, I just decided I was going to get into marketing. I don’t know what happened. It was as if I took a billboard and put it up on Main Street, and said “Sean D’Souza is not going to do any cartooning anymore,” because all the work I was getting, book covers and magazine covers, and illustrations, and advertising agencies, stuff to be done, and it all stopped. Just overnight, it just stopped. It was as if I’d made these announcements all over town. It just stopped. Then, I had to go out and find some consulting work to do. Now, I was part of a networking group, but would you trust a cartoonist to then advise you on your marketing? Plus, there was this terrible name called Millions Bucks. Even so, I remember what Wayne had told me when I got to New Zealand. He was talking about the cartooning stuff and he said, “John found the pavement. Just go and meet people.” That’s what I did. I just founded the pavement. We used to go to all these events to speak where there were two or three people, or people who were half-asleep, and the amount of mistakes that we had to make along the way were phenomenal. As you know, the Brain Audit itself came about from this very, very bad episode where I stood before an audience of about 20 people and started speaking about the Brain Audit, and then I forgot what I had to say. Then, Renuka had to come and take me aside and we have to have a break for 10 minutes, but from that came the Brain Audit, and from the Brain Audit came our entire business. Along the way, we had all of these little speaking engagements at this rotary and what they call SWAP here, which was sales people with a passion, I think. We’d go to these events and it was this drill over and over again, and this is what I tell people, “You sit behind your computer and yo expect things to happen, but there is a lot of ground work that’s happening, a lot of ground work, and we had to do all our ground work.” The years just flew by until one day, I was sitting at this restaurant called “D-72″ with my friend Eugene Moreau. We were talking about this whole badly-named company called Million Bucks. He said, “You send out a newsletter and you call it Psychological Tactics, and you call the newsletter Psychotactics, so why don’t you name your company Psychotactics? I thought that was a good idea, and so, we named it Psychotactics, and that is how Psychotactics came about. It wasn’t like Million Bucks was totally hopeless. We had millionbucks.co.nz. If you know what a frame-base site was, it was a frame-base site, that means Google couldn’t index it, and yet, we had 1000 subscribers to that website. Now, if you go back to archive.org and search for millionbucks.co.nz and go back in time like the year 2000 or 2001, you will find this terrible-looking site with very small fonts, probably 5 or 6-point. Then, right at the bottom, you had to read all the stuff and then get right to the bottom, and it said, “Subscribe Here.” You literally had to read every word before you subscribe. Today, I sound very confident, but at that point in time, I wasn’t feeling confident at all. I always felt like a fraud. I always felt like someone was going to tap me on the shoulder. Even when opportunity was thrown in our face, we were reluctant. At one point in time, a guy called Joe Vitale, he decided that he was going to promote our book, the Brain Audit, which was just a PDF. It was just 16 or 20 pages. We didn’t have any credit card facility. New Zealand was way back then anyway. It was like you couldn’t get any facility and we’d been looking for three months, and doing the research and spinning, and spinning, and spinning, which is what a lot of people do, and that’s what we did anyway. He gave us a week, and in that week, we had to figure out something and we found ClickBank. Sure they charged over 7.5%, but it was wonderful for us. It was fabulous that we could actually take a credit card. We got back to Joe and said, “We are ready.” He said, “Oh, this week, I’m busy.” Then, the next week, he was busy. The next month, he was busy. Several months passed, but in those months, someone found our website and they started buying the Brain Audit, and that’s how we started selling copies of the Brain Audit online. We didn’t change that 20-page book for ages, for probably over a year, and we sold about $50,000 worth of that book before we even made a single change. By this point, we started speaking at events and getting more confident about selling the book at the events. People will buy the book just on the enthusiasm. Back in 2002, the whole concept of any book was like weird. Some people didn’t even have an email address back then. They would ask for the book on a CD. We kept pushing and we kept going to events, and we kept contacting people on the internet, and we still do that today. After all these years, we’re still doing exactly what we did back then. When I started out, I always believed that things would get less busy, and yes, they do get less busy if your goals are very limited and you want to earn just as much as you did before. We earn a lot more than we did before, but now, the money has become less a focus. Now, just writing books that nobody else is writing, doing them in a way that nobody else is doing them, all of that takes a lot of time and effort, and that’s why I wake up at 4am everyday. In fact, as I’m doing this recording, it’s now 5:52am, and I enjoy every moment of it. Auckland is half-city and half-country. It’s an amazing place, and New Zealand, no matter how much you read about it or look at it in the pictures or in the movies, it is absolutely astounding, and you should visit. I hope you’ve enjoyed this little, mini episode on the Psychotactics history. If you’d want more of this, how we started up our workshops, how we started up our courses, the kind of trouble that we went to, and these personal history stories as it were, write to me and let me know so that I can give you some more stuff. If you haven’t already subscribed to this Three-month Vacation Podcast, then make sure to go to iTunes and hit the “Subscribe” button. Every subscribe really helps the rating of this podcast. If you’ve already done that, then, make sure that you tell your friends about it. Two or three friends that you tell today make a big difference to this podcast. That’s me, Sean D’Souza, saying bye for now. Bye-bye and do write in. You can also listen to or read this Episode: #49:How To Get Better, Higher-Paying Clients With Testimonials |
Thu, 16 July 2015
How do you avoid losers as clients? How do you completely sidestep the clients that don't pay, cause trouble and push you around? Surprisingly, the answer lies in testimonials. There are elements of testimonials that cause clients of a certain kind to get attracted to you. So how do you harness that latent power of testimonials? And how do photos, details and tone come into play? Find out in this podcast. -------------------------------------- In this episode Sean talks about The whole concept of testimonials and why we are more like elephants. He covers: Useful Resources and Links 5000bc—How to get reliable answers to your complex marketing problems?
iTunes | Android | E-mail (and get special goodies) | RSS The TranscriptThis is the Three Month Vacation. I’m Sean D’Souza.African elephants are one of nature’s most amazing communicators. They rumble, they roar and snort, scream, and they trumpet. Yet most of their communication is never heard by humans because it is on the level of infrasound. Infrasound is an extremely low frequency rumble that falls way below the hearing range of human, and yet humans can feel t sound. Michael Garstang, a meteorologist at the University of Virginia explains how elephants communicate. Many of the rumbling calls occur at the level of infrasound. This is a very low frequency rumble that’s below the audible hearing range of humans, he said. Humans can hear the upper end as a rumble, although you’re not hearing it in your ears. It’s more like feeling the vibrations in your diaphragm. This feeling, rather than hearing, is what we encounter when we run into the concept of testimonials. Today we’re going to look at this whole concept of testimonials and why we are more like elephants. We’re communicating through this infrasound, this low level. We can see the testimonials but we’re not exactly paying attention to what’s written there or what’s presented to us. Instead, we’re kind of communicating in a completely different way. What are the way that testimonials communicate that we’re not aware of but we can feel? The three elements that we’re going to look at today are the photo, the detail, and the tone. Let’s start off with the first one, which is the photo. Part 1: The PhotoIf you were to go to a dating site today and start to look at the photos, you would find that something very interesting starts to fall into place. That is you are choosing some people’s photos over other people’s photos. Why do we do this? It’s because we recognize something within the photos, and that something draws us to that person. Now this doesn’t just occur on dating sites. If you go to a marketing site, and let’s say you look at the site where you have all these promises like become a millionaire overnight or get these results very quickly, look at those photos. As you scroll down to photo after photo after photo after photo, you find that you don’t really like many of those people, but you haven’t read any of the testimonials. You’ve scanned them but you haven’t really read the detail in the testimonials, and yet the photo is sending this low frequency message. This photo is telling you these people aren’t like you. They are different somehow. They’re more greedy or they want quicker results. They don’t want to work for it. Even if you had not a single word of text on that page, you would still feel uncomfortable. Then you could sense someone who wanted that kind of result, who wanted to be that millionaire overnight, who wanted all those quick results. They would find those photos very appealing. This is what happens with photos. Photos send out this message, which means when you’re putting your photos of your clients on your website, you can’t just take the clients that give the best testimonials. You’ve got to put clients that are very, very reliable, clients that are ethical, clients that you like, clients that you want to work with in future. Those are the photos that you want to put on your website. Why? Because it’s like a mirror. There is a message that’s coming out from those photos. That’s why on Psychotactics we have photos of people that we like, clients that we’ve worked with, clients that we’ve gone out with, clients that we would love to have all the time. The results have been very clear. People often get on our courses and they say, “How do you get such great people in your courses?” They come to our workshops and they go, “Wow, this is amazing. What kind of filtration system do you have in place?” When you look for that answer, at the very core it is the photographs. Whenever we put up a photograph of a client that we didn’t like just because we needed a testimonial, we start to get other clients that are similar to that client. If you want to try an experiment and put all the bad clients, all the clients that don’t pay you on time, they give you a lot of trouble, put their photos and you’ll start to see that low frequency rumble going through, that communication going through, and you get more clients just like that. You put in some good clients, clients that you like to work with, and you start to see the clients that you want to work with show up time after time. It’s a simple filtration system, and yet it works amazingly well. But photos alone will not do the job. Of course they’ll attract clients that you want but they still need some more information. What is that more information all about? The more information is the detail that is in your testimonials. This takes us to the second part where we start to explore the detail in your testimonials. Part 2: Explore the Detail in Your TestimonialsWhat is this detail all about? Let’s take a look at one of the testimonials at 5000bc.com, which is our membership site. The testimonial reads like this: 5000bc is one of the few sites I’ve been a member of that has so little drama. There are no huge fights, no negativity. Everyone tries their best to be helpful. Then it goes on to talk about how he’s been a member of several membership sites over the years and how they’ve charged over $100 a month. They were big and crowded and scary. Some had just a handful of members and some were strictly moderated, and some were just overtaken by promotion from the members, and how 5000bc is the only membership site that he’s stuck with year after year after year for over nine years. As you’re reading that testimonial, what you’re getting is a feeling of safety, of being in the safe zone. That when you’re in 5000bc you don’t feel overcrowded and pushed around and all these promotions coming at you. You suddenly feel that you can ask a lot of questions, that you can get the answers, that the people out there are people like you, because that’s what we’re looking for. That’s what we’re looking for in the photos. That’s also what we’re looking for in the detail. The testimonials start to reflect what you want to be, where you want to go, how you want to be. A lot of testimonials don’t do this. They don’t explain that experience or they don’t give out that experience. What they do is talk about how great they are. It doesn’t come from a user experience. It comes more from how great that website wants to be rather than how safe you need to be. When a customer comes to your site and starts to read the testimonial, they need to read the experience from the user’s point of view. When they do that, then they feel that mirror effect. They can feel that low rumble coming through and they know this is the place where they would thrive and succeed and move forward. Whether you’re selling a product or a service, what you’re looking for first are photographs, because photographs form that first mirror. But then the second thing you’re looking for is the user experience. It’s not so much about how great it is but how the user has gone through that feeling of feeling insecure and now you’re feeling great. Or they needed some questions answered, and how the questions were answered. Or how they weren’t expecting to find such a fun group, and then how they ran into an honest, fun-loving group. All of this becomes the experience. It becomes the mirror. Immediately you feel I need to be part of this place. I need to be part of this experience. As you ask the six questions that I mentioned in The Brain Audit, you start to get this response from your clients. You start to get the response that you’re looking for, which enabled them to give their experience. That is what others get attracted to. Suddenly 5000bc is filled with all these happy, friendly people and you have a great experience. This is true for your own product and your service as well. When you have your workshops, when you have your training, when you have your courses online, when you sell your products you will find that most of the people, if not all the people, are remarkably similar. Their ethics are similar. Their behavior is similar. You don’t have trouble. Or you can have a lot of trouble if you start to put in photographs and experiences that are not congruent with what you really want to achieve. This takes us to the third part, which is the tone. Part 3: The ToneWe looked at photos and we looked at detail, but what is tone? This part we cannot control. I don’t know what it is, but when people speak like right now I am speaking to you, what kind of feeling do you get from me? That’s the kind of question that cannot be answered. You feel this at a diaphragm level like the elephants feel … You feel their energy at a diaphragm level. You can’t hear it. You don’t know what it is but you feel there’s something happening. The tone comes from clients as they answer your testimonials. The testimonial tone is not something that you can control, but you need to know that when you appeal to those first two elements where you put the right photo and you ask the right questions and you get the right clients in, you will definitely start to get a tone that is consistent. The tone you find with most Psychotactics lines is one of warmth and helpfulness, and it’s right through the website. You can look at all the products and all the services, and the membership site, and the workshops, and the courses, and it’s there. It’s warm, it’s friendly, it’s helpful. Where did that tone come from? The tone came from us, and the tone can come from you. We tell people to be kind, be helpful, or be gone. When that message goes out on a consistent basis like it is right now on this podcast, then the people that are interested in being kind and being helpful, they join our courses, they come to our workshops, they deal with us. The rest of them just go away. They go to other sites where probably they’re promised riches or quick results or whatever. It becomes a filtration process. You wouldn’t think of testimonials doing such a fabulous job, and that’s what they do. When you get those testimonials, you get that warm helpful tone in it as well. You can’t control it, except to send out that message on a regular basis. Let’s just summarize what we’ve learned today. SummaryWe looked at three elements. The first was the photo. We found that the moment we put in photos that don’t appeal to us, rather photos of clients that have given us trouble, we’re going to get clients that are going to give us a lot of trouble in the future. You want to pick photos of clients that you like, clients that have worked with you and are enjoyable to work with and pay on time. You will start to see that mirror effect almost immediately. The second thing is one of detail. When you ask those six questions that you get in The Brain Audit, you will get that detail. In that detail people will talk about warmth, the friendliness or fun. Someone else reading that information also gets that feeling, that user experience. Finally, it’s a factor of tone, but how do you get that tone? You get that tone by first sending out a message that we’re kind, friendly, helpful, whatever message you want to send out. Then you get that same feedback. It comes through in the testimonial. It’s not something that you can control except to send it out in the first place. Now, every product or service is not going to have testimonials right at the start. We’ve been in business since 2002 at Psychotactics, and yet when we bring out a new product or a new service we don’t have testimonials for that product or service. You’re always the new kid on the block no matter how long you’ve been around. The trick to getting those testimonials is to ask people that you like. Now you can’t always control this when you’re just starting out, but find people that you like. Don’t go for people that you don’t like. Even if you’re looking through forums or Facebook or Twitter, any place, look for people that you already like because that will have the mirror effect, that will have that elephant-like low intensity rumble that other people get. Yes, it’s always going to be trouble finding testimonials, but this is how you go about it. Then once you’ve got it up and running, you’re going to get testimonials from people who bought your product, and then you don’t have any trouble anymore. When we first started out, it was very hard for us to get testimonials for The Brain Audit, which was our first book. Then we got over 100 testimonials, and then 200 and 300 and 400. At one point we had 800. Today there are over a thousand testimonials. The same applies for all the other books and the products. It’s just a system that you have to keep following, and you get more and more testimonials. If you would like to learn more about testimonials you can go to www.psychotactics.com/testimonial. There is a book there, The Secret Life of Testimonials. It shows you a world of testimonials that you didn’t know existed. It’s not a very expensive book but it changes the way you respond to things and the way your clients respond to you. At the end of the day, all of us want is to do our work well, to get great clients that respect us and trust us and work with us, and to be able to take the break and go on our three month vacation. Really, getting the clients is the critical part. If you go to psychotactics.com/testimonial you can read up and you can decide for yourself whether you want the book. I think you’ll like it a lot, so go there and check it out for yourself. On another front, I’m still working on the stock cartoons. They’re turning out to be a lot of fun. I listen to a lot of music and podcasts, and we’re turning out these very elaborate cartoons that you’re going to love to put in your blog posts, your website, your books, pretty much everywhere. It’s going to be a lot of fun, so get on the Psychotactics list if you haven’t got there, because when I announce this I promise you there will be a bit of a stampede. These cartoons are absolutely stunning. I might even give quite a few away. Get on the Psychotactics list. Yes, also, psychotactics.com/magic. That’s where you get information about the podcast so that you can keep on top of them, but you also get some bonuses from time to time. Either psychotactics.com where you have to subscribe. If you’re already already subscribed, go towww.psychotactics.com/magic. That’s pretty much it. I’m on Twitter @Sean D’Souza. Send me your questions there, or at sean@psychotactics.com. Yes, also on Facebook at Sean D’Souza. Bye for now. Still listening? One of the best testimonials that you can ever get is the unasked-for testimonial. We were at this workshop in Washington D.C. when one of our clients stood up. We didn’t ask him to stand up and give a testimonial, but he stood up and he started talking about the cartooning course that he had done with us. Then he went out and he got his books and he showed the cartoons that he had done. He showed it to the entire audience. Then some of the group had also done the cartooning course with him, and one of the terms in the cartooning course is “circly circles,” which of course, circly doesn’t exist as a word, but it’s part of the cartooning course. You learn it and you say it. Suddenly there was this kind of little rumble going through the room and people were interested in the cartooning course. You can see this at psychotactics.com/davinci, because we were recording at that point in time so it’s on video. You can feel the enthusiasm. You can see what is happening there. You can see the person themselves, the tone. It’s just amazing, that detail. There you go, a little snippet from the Psychotactics archives. You can also listen to or read this episode: How To Build A Cult-Like Following By Using An Adjective In Your Branding
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Mon, 6 July 2015
Is it really easy to build a cult-like following for your brand? Yes, but the core of that branding lies in the "adjective". Yes, that very same grammar lesson you had at school. When you look at the biggest and most well-defined brands in history, you find they are defined by a single word. Let's take Volvo, for example. The word "safety" came to mind, didn't it? That's the power of the adjective. Let's learn more in this episode of the Three-Month Vacation Details To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/48 Email me at sean@psychotactics.com Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic -------------------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: What is the adjective and how one little adjective can define your business? Right click here and save-as to download this episode to your computer. -------------------- |
Wed, 1 July 2015
Imagine you got on stage and you had an eager audience ready to buy. Of course there are a few obstacles. The first obstacle is that you have just an hour to convince the audience to buy. The second is you're not the only one selling products?there are others. The third obstacle is that a good chunk of the audience doesn't know you that well and aren't on your list. So three big problems to deal with. Now you may never have the desire to get on stage, but the issues are similar when you're selling a product or service. You have very little time to convince a prospect. You're battling it out with others selling similar products and services. And you're a bit of a stranger to the audience. / / So how do you overcome these issues, and win? Notes: To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/47 Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: The Art Of Preparation And The Importance Of Pre-Sell Useful Resources and Links Black Belt Presentations: When you make a presentation, wouldn’t it be amazing to completely control the room—without turning anyone off? The TranscriptThis is the Three Month Vacation. I’m Sean D’Souza.I was speaking at a conference in Chicago to about 200 to 300 people. I had just finished my speech and I met this guy in the corridor. He was rushing. I asked him, “Why are you in such a hurry?” He says, “I have to go upstairs and get my credit card.” I said, “Why do you have to get your credit card from upstairs? Why don’t you have it in your pocket?” This is the story of how we sold $20,000 worth of product at a conference. This is digital product. This is not physical product. This was The Brain Audit and the membership to 5000bc. I was asked this question by Alison Beere from Cape Town, South Africa, and you want to know the answer. You probably think that the answer lay in the speech. There might have been some triggers in the speech. There might have been some information that caused them to act. Sure, there would have been some urgency, but what was it that caused all these people to buy? What caused them to trust me after speaking to them for just over an hour? Why did we manage to sell more than all the other speakers on that day? These are the questions that we need to answer, and not because you want to go out there and sell 20,000. Of course you want to do it, but you have to understand that sales is not a one-time hit. That’s what it looks like. If I put this on a sales page, that’s exactly what it looks like. It looks like a one-time hit. It looks like I went there, made the speech, and they bought everything. As we’re about to find out in this podcast, it is a matter of preparation. Whether you’re selling a very small item off your website, a course, or in our case, this $20,000 day that we had, it all involves preparation. What are the steps that you have to get all of these ducks lined up in a row? How do you make things work for you? Let’s find out But wait, wait, wait. Let’s not go into how we did that just yet. Because we have to go back in time to 2003 when I was in Sydney, and I bombed in a big way. I sold very little, just enough to cover the cost of the airfare. What was the difference between the two events? Why was that guy so eager to get his credit card? Okay, enough teasing. Let’s go into the main section of today’s podcast and let’s cover the three points. What are the three points that we’re going to cover? The first is the preparation. The second is the document before the event. The third is the very tight deadline. Let’s start off with the first one, which is the preparation. Part 1: PreparationIf you had been a subscriber of Psychotactics you would have run into a statement that almost sounds like hype. That is that we sell out our courses maybe within half an hour, sometimes 20 minutes. Now these aren’t just $20 courses. These are courses that go up to $2,000, $3,000, and yet they fill up in 20 to 30 minutes. We do with this without any joint ventures, without any affiliates, without any publicity, without any advertising. It’s done with a very small group of people, and yet time after time, all the way since 2006, the courses have been consistently filling up. Not that it doesn’t make me nervous every time I launch a course. I still think somehow this time it will be jinxed, but it just keeps going. What’s really happening? The first thing is the prep work. It’s what I call presell. When I went to this event in Chicago it was completely different from the event in Sydney. When I went to Sydney, I had great slides, I had a great presentation, and I give that presentation. I did exactly the same thing in Chicago. What a big difference. The difference was the preparation. Before we went to the event in Chicago we had done some prep work, some ground work. Before the event, Ken McCarthy, who was hosting the event, he had done some interviews. What did I do in those interviews? The first thing I made sure was that I was empowering people. When we did the interviews, instead of answering a question, I gave away almost the complete system. When you give away a system, what you do is you empower people. You don’t cover a lot of points. You cover just a few points. I cover three points as you know. There are steps. You do this and you do that and you do the third thing, and you get to an end point. When we did those interviews, people were listening at the other end. Now frankly, I don’t know what the other interviews were all about. Ken was interviewing a lot of folk, but I made sure that when someone finished my interview they had a task so simple that they could apply it. You see this in the free headline report that we give away, or you see this in the books that we write. You see this empowerment factor, and it’s very critical. Because there are several other speakers and they’re all going to make their pitch. You somehow have to stand out from it. How do you stand out? You start right at the beginning. You start before the event. A lot of people don’t realize this. They don’t realize that people buy long before they pay. I’ll say that again. People buy long before they pay. What we were doing is getting them into the buying process. We were giving them information that was empowering that they could take right after the call and use it. Immediately, instead of just being another interview, instead of just being another speaker, now we were getting them to buy into our system, into our method, into whatever we were offering them. We hadn’t got on stage yet and people already buying into us. Then you’d think that was enough. That if you just gave away that information, which is a system, a small system but a system nonetheless, that would be enough. But we gave away further goodies. We gave away information that we could easily sell. Of course people go through it. Not everyone goes through it but enough people go through it. Now we’re working on a second level where people are buying through us. What is really happening here is when people encounter you for the first time, you’re a stranger. When you go back to 2009, there were already a whole bunch of experts in the marketing field. Now when you look around you, it has increased exponentially, whatever your field is. When you get that opportunity you have to take that opportunity with both hands. You have to create something that’s empowering, create something that’s a system, create something that your audience can immediately use. Then on top of that you give away further goodies. Again, the goodies are empowering. They’re short, they’re powerful, they get the point across and they now create this connection with this audience that didn’t know you at all, and you haven’t even stepped on stage. Now this podcast is about what we did on stage, but it applies to pretty much anything. We’re going to have some cartoon stock, which means that you can use these cartoons anywhere. How do I go about that? I have to empower you. How do I empower you with cartons? Because I’m not teaching you to draw cartoons. I’m actually selling you the cartoon. I empower you by giving away a cartoon. When I give away a cartoon, now you’ve got something. You don’t know me but now you’ve got something, and something that is extremely good. Now the connection has been made. You’re not going to buy all of those cartoons, not 100, or 200, or whatever you offer in the end. You get just one, but that one is so good that it empowers you. It’s isolated, it’s small, it gets your attention. That’s the first point: that you have to do the prep work well in advance; four, six, eight weeks in advance. Some people do it a year in advance. You might not have the time. You might have very little patience, but you’ve got to start off with the prep work because people buy long before they pay. This takes us to the second part, which is the document before the event. Part 2: The Document Before The EventWhat is the document before the event? When you go to any event, what you get is a badge. Then you get some kind of bag with lots of goodies in it. Then you take that to your hotel room, and you might look through some of it, but most of it gets tossed in the corner because you’re more focused on the event. You’re more focused on what you have to learn. What if you get something that is not connected to the bag, not connected to that registration process? Now that’s what we did at that Chicago event. We were speaking on the second day of the event. On day one we got the organizers to announce that everyone who was coming to my presentation would need to read about six or eight pages of stuff. This was just photocopied and given to everyone. Now when you go to an event you obviously want to get the best out of it. You’re not considering that bag and the badges and all the goodies. You’re now focused on those six to eight pages. Again, those six to eight pages were directly linked to what I was going to speak about. Now this may sound really odd. If you’re going to give away the information that you’re already going to present, won’t they get bored? Won’t your whole presentation fall flat? As it turns out, the answer is no. First, let’s backtrack a little bit. Those six to eight pages, they had information on pricing and how to increase your prices without losing customers. In those six to eight pages, what you’re trying to create is a report. You want to go back to episode number 46 and see how you create a great report. That report was something that hit you between the eyes. It was still about the presentation I was about to make, but it was now getting the customer completely absorbed. Now they had been through two or three levels. First it was the interview, then the goodies. Then we give them this third thing, which was wow, I never thought of it this way. Now they are primed to listen to you. They read those six to eight pages and some of them are reading it just before they enter the auditorium, but they’re reading it. All of them are reading it. That sets you up nicely for when you get up on stage. The people, the customers, they’re buying before they pay. You are setting up all these little bits of information that are empowering them, so that even if they buy nothing from you, they will buy in the future. Can you take that risk? No, you shouldn’t take that risk. That takes us to the third part, which is the whole factor of urgency. Part 3: The Whole Factor of UrgencyThat’s part three: the tight deadline. I had finished my speech and I had stepped out in the corridor. That’s when I ran into the guy, the guy who was running upstairs to get his credit card. Why had he kept his credit card upstairs? You know the answer. He knew that he would get swayed by some of the speakers. He knew that he would buy something that he didn’t need. Yet, when we gave that presentation, he found it so useful that he decided he was going to buy, so he was running up to his hotel room to get his credit card. He said, “Hang on, I have to get the credit card and I can’t speak to you right now.” What did I do before that that caused him to get his credit card? I was on the podium and my wife Renuka was at the end of the room. We didn’t have anybody else. It was just the two of us. You have to have someone else at the back of the room. Even one person handling 300 orders, not a problem. I said to the audience, “Here’s the thing. This is a great offer. It’s not a discount. You’re getting this great bonus.” We gave them some really good bonuses. “When Renuka leaves the room, it’s over. You don’t get any of the bonuses. You don’t get anything that we’ve offered in the room.” Some people think it’s a bluff. Who’s going to turn down money? Yet, when we leave the room, that’s it. That guy was running up to his room to get his credit card so he could stop Renuka before she left the room. Now it does take some time to go through 200 or 300 orders, so she was in that room for at least 20 minutes, but we had prepared everything. There were sheets with details. Back then they had to write out their credit card details on a sheet of paper and sign it and give it in. All of that ground work, all of that prep work was in place. The sheets were on their seats before they sat down. Again, they were going through another step. Eventually what they had to do was just fill in the form, step up to Renuka, give her the sheet, and it was done. Then we left the room. Then someone came up to me and said, “Are you Sean D’Souza?” I said yes. He had been to another presentation, and he said, “I want to buy what you just sold.” I said, “You don’t even know what I was selling.” He said, “Yes yes, I know, but my friend told me just buy whatever he’s selling.” You know how the deal was. The deal was that once we left the room, the offer didn’t exist. You would think it’s a bluff, and it’s never a bluff. You should always have this. It’s a tight deadline. When this happens, it doesn’t exist anymore. The offer doesn’t exist anymore. That creates an urgency that you will not find otherwise. You see this urgency on Christmas day for instance. People will not buy on the 28th of December. They have to buy everything before Christmas day. There is an urgency. You have to use the same concept of urgency. Once people leave the room, who knows what happens. Some people run into other people, they change their minds. Yes, there is pressure. You might not like this pressure. As a person selling something you’re always a little unsure of this pressure, but this is how we buy everything. We don’t fix the roof because we want to fix the roof. We fix the roof because there is pressure. It’s leaking. We don’t buy a new phone because we need it desperately. We do it because there is external pressure, maybe social pressure. You may not admit to it, but the pressure exists. This is what Apple does as well. They create that momentum towards that event, and this is what you’ve got to do as well. It’s not easy. It’s not easy to be a speaker there, to do all these steps and then finally to go through this sales process. Because what I used to do and what I did in Sydney was I didn’t really think through the last bit, which was the sales process. You have to be extremely calm and very enthusiastic when you’re selling your products or services. You get very nervous. You speed through it. You miss points. I had everything on slides so I didn’t miss anything. That is the way you go through the whole process. SummaryTo summarize what we’ve just covered, we did three steps. The first was we did all the prep work. I did the interviews. We gave the goodies. We had the sheets on the seats. We had everything in place. That was the first hit, because we know that people buy long before they pay. The second thing was that you need to have one little trigger before the event. We had this six to eight page document that people were reading, and they were reading just before they got into the event as well. Finally, there was a tight deadline. That deadline is sacred. You can’t say I’m going to change my mind. Hey, we’ll take your credit card. No. That’s what we do for all our courses as well, for all our products as well. I said this in another podcast. Who’s going to know if three or four extra people sign up for a course? Who’s going to ask you? Those three or four extra people would be another $12,000 in the bank, but we say no. There is a tight deadline. You meet the deadline, you get in the course. It’s first come, first serve. At the event, it wasn’t first come, first serve, but it was pretty close. It was 20 minutes. She leaves the room, you’re toast. This brings us to the end of the podcast and the one thing that you can do today. I think the one thing that you can do today is plan. What are the steps before the event? What are you going to give away before the event? What are the things and the goodies, and what are the little bits that you have to prepare? When people get on stage, when speakers get on stage, there are so many things that they have to do before the event and they never do. They just stand up and speak and they think everything is going to be all right. It’s never all right. You have to do all the little bits in advance. That’s what makes for a great event. I would say sit down and draw a line from left to right. Then put in all the little bits that you have to do. Because when you get on stage, that is like the middle of whole sequence. Then finally, you have to still sell, which is the end of your sequence. You have to be very careful about that as well. Prepare, prepare, prepare. Now, there is a book on this at Psychotactics. I wrote a book shortly after I came back because people wanted to know not just about this event and how we sold $20,000 worth of stuff, but also what goes into the slides. How do you control the slides? Because the slides also create this enigma factor. It creates this factor where people say wow, this is so well designed. It’s so well structured. You’ve got to have the structure for the slides. You also have to have great visual appeal. You have to have control of how the slides look, how the presentation rolls out, and finally how you control the audience. All of this is in the Black Belt Presentation Series. If you’re really interested in how to create a great presentation, then that becomes very critical. These elements that we talked about, these help to create that $20,000 moment, but all of the stuff in the book, that helps you understand all the other elements that you have to do. It’s a lot of work. No one said that this was easy. This podcast is not about easy and outsourcing and all that stuff. It’s about doing the hard work and getting the rewards. That’s what takes you to a three month vacation. When people say, “I can’t get to a three month vacation,” it’s because they don’t have the time, the money, and the resources. You have to put in the time and the resources, and yes, some money before you can get to that three month vacation. You have to start somewhere and put in the work. That’s how you get the results. Now for some presell. We are having the headline course and the headline trainer course, and for the first time ever the headline trainer course. I don’t know when you’ll get to this podcast, but if you get to it on time, then get to psychotactics.com and look for headline course or headline trainer course. The courses fill up very quickly. You want to move quickly. I mean really, really quickly. We’re also going to have the first 50 words course at the end of the year. That’s in November somewhere, so you can prepare yourself for that. This is about writing the first 50 words of, say, a podcast or an article. This is where we slog the most, struggle the most. The entire course is about the first 50 words. We probably have The Brain Audit trainer program around that time as well. That’s more expensive. It’s about $10,000. It’s more detailed. It goes over six months. We’ll go into more detail in the future, but for now it’s just the headline course, the headline trainer course. I’ll also be bringing out those cartoons that I talked about in this podcast. Expect to see some of that soon. A lot of stuff happening, a lot of stuff happening. If you want to ask me more questions, email me at sean@psychotactics.com, also at Twitter @Sean D’Souza, and yes, on Facebook at Sean D’Souza. Yes, we give away goodies, as you know. If you want to be on the goodies list, you go to psychotactics.com/magic. That’s www.psychotactics.com/magic. You will get those goodies from time to time. That’s it from Psychotactics and the Three Month Vacation. Still listening? I’m giving you this advice, but recently what we’re in Denver and there were about 400 or 500 people in the audience. How many subscribers did we get? 20. Why did we get 20? We got 20 because we didn’t follow the advice that I’ve just given you. We didn’t do as much prep work. We didn’t have the sheet before the event. Of course there was no tight deadline. We goofed up, too. You can do it too if you don’t take your own advice or don’t listen to this advice. Then failure is always around the corner. That’s a little snippet from the archives at psychotactics.com. Bye for now. You can also listen to or read this episode: Why Identity Helps You Surge Ahead In Work (And Life): Episode 46 |
The Three Month Vacation Podcast
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