Whenever you hear the story of products and services, it’s always a sugar-coated, goody gum drop story. You rarely get to hear the not-so-great side of things; the mistakes; the second-guessing. In this episode, you get to hear what’s happening behind the stage. How—and why—we started the article writing course; how we decided to go to the Netherlands and do a workshop; and how we launched several of our products without a sales page. 

If you like back-stories as much as I do, you’re going to love this episode.

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The  Transcript

“This transcript hasn’t been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we’ll be sure to fix them.”

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Hi. This is Sean D’Souza, and you’re listening to The Three-Month Vacation Podcast. This podcast isn’t some magic trick about how to work less. Instead, it’s about how to really enjoy the work that you do and to enjoy your vacation time.

Billy Joel: I dreamt the song. I dreamt the melody, not the words. I had a dream, and then I remember waking up in the middle of the night and going, “This is a great idea for a song,” and going back to sleep, and waking up, and not remembering what I dreamt and going, “What was that? I had a really good idea, a really good idea, and then I forgot.”

In a couple of weeks later, I’m in a business meeting talking to accountants or lawyers, some kind of boring stuff, and the dream reoccurs to me right at that moment because my mind drifted off from hearing numbers and legal jargon, and I just drifted off. Boom, it came right back into my head. I said, “I have to go. I have to go right now. I think I have an idea for a song,” so the accountants and lawyers were, “Go, go, go. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, go.”

I ran home, and I started playing the theme that had reoccurred. On my way home, I was thinking, “Okay. How am I going to remember this? Da, da, da, da. Da, da. Don’t be crazy. Don’t be stupid.” They’re called “[bail out lyrics 00:01:34],” but you have to use them to remember the notes, remember the theme you’re saying that you came up with. I got home, and I ended up writing it all in one sitting pretty much about … It took me maybe about … I don’t know, two or three hours to write the lyrics. I probably reshaped them a little bit in the studio, but yeah. I remember writing that very well. It was a dream that reoccurred, which happens a lot on me.

What you were listening to is the backstory of Billy Joel and The Stranger.

As I was listening to this on my walk yesterday, I thought, “This is a good idea. This is an idea where I can talk about the backstory of a product, a course, and a workshop.” I can bring it to life to let you know what’s the backstory instead of just hearing the success story. The reason why I thought it was so cool was my niece, Marsha, and I, we watched the series on BBC by David Attenborough, and the thought that gets us really excited is when they tell us the backstory, how they started, the trouble they run into, and I hope to bring some of that excitement into you all listening today by telling you the backstory about a course, a workshop, and a book series. Let’s start off with the first one, which is the course, and let’s deal with the article writing course.

Part 1: We’re going back to 2005. In 2005, there was no Article Writing Course.

In fact, there was no plan to have an article writing course. You see, in the year 2000, I was writing an article maybe a week. I would struggle over it for one or three days, and then eventually, get it corrected and edited, and then finally, it would get published. By 2003, I started up 5000bc. For some reason, I promised the members at that time that I would write five articles a week. Did they care that I wrote five articles a week? I don’t know, but that’s what I promised, so that’s what I did. Because I did that, I started to write every single day, and my article writing got quicker and better as the years ticked along.

By 2005, I was pretty sure that anyone could do what I did, which is sit down, work it a few years, and then you could write good articles. Did I think there was a demand for an article writing course? No, I didn’t think there was a demand for an article writing course. So then, why announce an article writing course? What we decided was that we’re going to take a chance. We’re going to put up a sales page, and we don’t really care if anybody signs up this year, but it would be like an advertisement for the next year. That was our goal, to have an advertisement for the coming year, and the article writing course filled up.

That was a big surprise, and if there’s one thing that is streaming through this entire backstory, it’s this factor of surprise. Now we have all the strategy at Psychotactics, but surprise seems to jump up at every point in time, so there we are. We have signed up all these people for the article writing course. There’s only one problem. The problem is there are no notes. The problem is there was no audio. What are we going to do? What I did was I conducted the entire course through teleconferences and forums. There were no notes, and there was no audio, and the clients knew it, but they were still keen to the course.

When you look at the article writing course, the sales page today, one of the testimonials, that really long, detailed testimonial, it’s from the very first course. It is from the course where we had none of the stuff ready, where we weren’t prepared mentally for it, but we knew what we were doing. Even back then, we knew what we were doing, and we went ahead. Surprise, surprise. It turned out fine. Since then, we’ve had courses in 2006, 2007, and then we got a little greedy.

We started to do several courses, so we did … In one year, we did two courses simultaneously, so 25 people in one course, 25 people in the other course. Then, later on the year, we did 25 people and another 25 people, so 100 people went through that article writing course in that year, and it killed me. It was too much to handle because I’m there all the time in the article writing course, and if you write and tweak your articles several times a day, then I will be back telling you what to do, how to do. It’s pretty hands-on, and I had to learn from that lesson.

I had to learn to space out the article writing course, so now, we have it just once a year, and sometimes, we don’t even have it for a few years like in 2013, we had the course, and then the next one was in 2015. If you want to take the jest of the backstory of the article writing course and put it into a nutshell, it is that we were surprised. We were surprised that it would turn out like it did. We were so surprised that we had to now deliver the course, and we didn’t have notes, but we did it our way anyway.

Finally, the fact that we overdid it, and then had to pull back, and these are the lessons that we had from the article writing course. It’s one of the most fascinating courses for me because there’s so much depth to writing. Writing is not just a factor of, “Hey, let me string these words together.” It is communication. Once you can write, you can speak. You can do a lot of other things based on the structure of writing. To me, the article writing course is like you can’t do without this course, and yet, back in 2005, I thought, “Who would need a course like that?”

I was wrong. Surprise, surprise.

Part 2: Psychotactics Netherlands Workshop

This takes us to our second surprise, and that is the workshop in Netherlands. Around the year 2011 I think, we decided to go to the Netherlands. Why did we decide to go to the Netherlands? For one, we started getting a lot of subscribers from the Netherlands, and we thought, “How are these subscribers coming in?” We went online, and we found that a lot of our products, especially the Brain Audit, and the website master class, and several other products were being pirated. Where were they being pirated the most? In the Netherlands.

We decided that there were so many customers that were buying products from the Netherlands, and there were so many people that were pirating from the Netherlands that somehow we need to go to the Netherlands, and so we decided to go to Amsterdam. Now, the good thing about the Amsterdam trip is that I’d already done the Brain Audit workshop in the US. I’d done the Brain Audit workshop in Auckland, New Zealand, and so I had the page ready. I just had to activate the page, and then send it out to the list.

Again, we weren’t expecting a thunderous response. What we did was we set up the page, we sent out the email, and we went for a morning walk. By the time we got back, 7 people have signed up, and that took us totally by surprise. We were expecting some people to show up from different parts of Europe, but 90% of the people that showed up were from the Netherlands itself, and this was a really good lesson, and this is the lesson that we’ve learned other companies use as well.

There is a rumour that Netflix follows the same strategy. They look at these sites where they’re streaming movies and series, and they see the series and the movies that are the most popular on the pirate sites, and they decide, “Okay, that’s what we’re going to put on Netflix.” Because it’s already popular, and that’s what it told us. It told us that the Brain Audit, and the website master class, and the copyrighting class, they were already popular, so there were people that were buying it, good clients, and there were the not so good clients who were pirating it.

Instead of getting mad at the not so good ones, we decided to work with the good ones, and we decided to have the Netherlands workshop. It went really well. Amsterdam, of course, is beautiful. It’s wonderful to walk around Amsterdam, so we had an outstanding workshop in the Netherlands, but it was a surprise. What this is teaching us is that we have all the strategy, but there will be a surprise, and this takes us to our third part, which is about a book series, which is the Black Belt Presentation Series.

Part 3: Black Belt Presentation Story

One of our favourite places in New Zealand is Nelson, and Nelson is on the northern tip of the South Island, and it’s got the Abel Tasman Park. It’s a wonderful place to go, but one of the reasons why we go there is food. We love our food, and there is this restaurant, which is sitting right on the edge of the bay, and it’s called the “Boat Shed.” Now, at the Boat Shed, you get this fabulous view, but you also get this fabulous food, and they have a regular a la carte menu and a trust-the-chef.

Trust-the-chef is as you’d expect, the chef decides what you’re going to eat tonight, and they put it in front of you. You have no idea what it’s going to be. Every time we go to Nelson, we go to the Boat Shed, and every time we go to the Boat Shed, we have a trust-the-chef, so what’s the business application of trust-the-chef? We got back to Auckland, and I wanted to write a book on presentations. I love presentations. I love to make presentations, and I love the structure of presentations.

When I looked at all the books out there, they weren’t covering it like the way I wanted to cover it, so I decided to write a series on presentations. In reality, there were 2 problems. The first is the books weren’t written, and the second is that there was no sales page. I didn’t have any time for the sales page, so what I did was I decided to use the Boat Shed’s philosophy of trust-the-chef.

I wrote an email. I said, “I’m writing a book series on presentations, and it’s going to cover 3 elements. The first is, how do you design your presentation so it looks absolutely stunning, absolutely yummy? How do you have 200, or 300, or 500 slides, and the client doesn’t even know? They think they’ve just been through 25 slides? How do you make every one of those slides work for you in a way that’s amazing?” That was the first part of the book or rather the first book.

The second part was the structure of the presentation. How do you get the presentation to flow from one end to the other, so it’s absolutely seamless, and then you have these summaries? Pretty much like you’re listening on this podcast. You have a structure, and what is that structure? That’s what the second book was all about. Finally, it was about the crowd, the audience. What do you do with the audience that enables you to get their attention, to keep their attention?

I felt that was very critical because you can have a great presentation, you can have great slides, but if you don’t know what to do with the crowd, how to get them to do what you want them to do, then you’re not going to get the results that you’re looking for. So, all of these dreams, all of these plans, but there’s no sales page, and we just send out email. We said, “The book costs about $200. If you would like to get a refund because you find it useless at the end of it all, we’ll be happy to do that, but here’s the trust-the-chef offer.” Only 200 people signed up, but do the math, 200 into 200 is $40,000.

Now, a lot of people talk about, “I sold to 400,000 people. I sold to 100,000. I sold to 50,000 people.” You don’t need to do that. You can sell to 15 people and be fine with it. Think about it, 200 into 15 is $3,000, $3,000. That’s good revenue for a book. We happened to sell to 200 people with that email, but the point was that it surprised us. It was surprising how clients were willing to trust you even though you had no information or very little information about those books.

Summary

This is the theme of today. When we summarise, we look that surprise becomes a strategyin its own way, that you want to surprise yourself, and that’s what happened with the article writing course, which we didn’t expect people to sign up. They’re still signing up 10 years later. We didn’t expect anyone in the Netherlands to sign up. It was just a random email, and people signed up. Finally, the trust-the-chef. That was the weirdest one of them all, and clients still bought into that. We’ve done several trust-the-chef offers ever since, and all of them have worked the same way.

This happens when you have respect for the client, when you act like a GPS system because that’s what the client really wants. They don’t really want more information, do they? They want you to be their GPS just like a GPS works. No matter whether you get to Rome, or Auckland, or Berlin, you switch on your phone, and your GPS is working, and it takes you to your destination, and that’s what clients want you to do. They want you to take them to their destination. They want you to be the guide. They want you to show them the sites, and that is why the article writing course worked, and that is why the presentation book series worked, and that is why the Netherlands workshop worked. It’s because clients expect us to care, protect, and guide them just like a guide does.

In that, there is no surprise.

What is the one thing that you can take away from today’s podcast?

The one thing that you can do is to surprise yourself, so we can believe in planning, and we plan every Friday. We’d go to the café, and we work on a plan, but one of the things that really works in our favour is this factor of surprise. Now, you have the backstory of the article writing course, and the Black Belt Presentation Series, and one of the workshops, which is the Amsterdam workshop.

Go and surprise yourself. You don’t know what you will get. That’s what life is all about, that’s what business is all about, and that’s what The Three-Month Vacation is all about. One of the things that’s not going to be a surprise is when you sign up to the article writing course. When you do that, you’re not going to sleep all of April, all of May, and all of June. The reason for that is we don’t want it to be surprise. We want you to be able to write and to write well, to have a skill and not to have more information.

The article writing course is starting in April. March 5th at 3:00pm Eastern, that’s when we open the doors. As you know, we have only a few seats. Everyone says we have limited seats. We put a number on those limited seats, not more than 25. If you would like to surprise yourself and figure out how good a writer you are, then join the article writing course. Later in the year, we’re going to have the cartooning course, and that’s at psychotactics.com/davinci, and you can learn how to be a cartoonist too.

Most people are surprised when they can write so well, when they can draw cartoons, when they can make great presentations. They think that somehow this skill has to be inborn, and it doesn’t have to be. There are no inborn skills. You can learn from a good teacher. You can learn from a good system. You can learn a lot from a good group, and that’s what the Psychotactics training is all about. It’s not about information. It’s about skills, so get yourself on a course this year, and you will surprise yourself.

That’s me, Sean D’Souza, saying bye for now, but wait a second. If you run into postcards anywhere while you’re walking, send me a postcard. I’ll send you a postcard back. To send a postcard, send it to PO Box 36461 Northcote, Auckland 0748. You can also find us on the website, on the “Contact Us” page. The address is there. Send a postcard, and bye for now.

Useful Resource

5000bc: There is a lot of information on the internet. You can read and learn from it. But in 5000bc the discussion is about you. About your specific problem. And how to go about your specific situation. And Sean is around answering all your questions. Find out more here—5000bc. (5000bc.com)

Risk doesn't just come in one flavour, yet The Brain Audit takes away a ton of that risk. In this second episode on risk, we take a forensic look at what happens when you release a new version of your product or service. Is it still the same product or service? Or is the risk magnified many times over? And how do you overcome such an unwarranted risk?

We also look at pre-sell and why it reduces, almost eliminates risk. Why pre-sell done right is like a soothing balm that doesn't seem to bother the client (or you) very much. This episode is loaded with the biggest reasons why clients don't buy, and why pre-sell works like magic. You'll love it, guaranteed (Ok, that was a joke). But really, you'll like it a lot!

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In ‘part 2 of this 2-part series’ Sean talks about

Part 1: What’s the link between risk and pre-sell
Part 2: How pre-sell works like magic
Part 3: The big reasons why clients don’t buy

Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.

Useful Resources

Read: How Pre-Sell Sold The Article Writing Course In Fewer than 24 Hours
Listen and read: How A 3-Step Pre-Sell Creates Product Irresistibility: Episode 69
5000bc: How to get reliable answers to your complex marketing problems

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If you’ve ever seen a Bollywood film (Hindi movies from India), you’ll notice there’s a lot of music and dancing.

And a film release in India is like movie releases anywhere in the world of cinema. Trailers, interviews with the actors, publicity and the hoopla. It’s all part of the strategy to ensure that the movie is a stunning success. While back in 1964, a movie would be release six to eight weeks before the film release. However, by the 1990s, the music was being released three months or more—before the official launch of the movie.

But what’s the link between risk and pre-release of the music?

Since most Hindi movies are musicals, the songs are the primary reason most people go to the cinema. If the songs are catchy—and become hits, the movie’s success is guaranteed.

When you look at it, an overwhelming number of Hindi movies have a similar plot. There’s a good guy, a bad guy, a romance between the hero and heroine—and lots of dancing and singing. There’s so little variation in scripts that the only risk for the moviegoer is—will I be entertained? When they listen to the songs in advance, the risk is removed. Pre-sell reigns supreme and the movie is a super hit!

So what is pre-sell?

Pre-sell doesn’t involve sales at all. In fact, it’s a systematic dispensation of information. A simple example of pre-sell would be a wedding being held next summer. At first, there’s no information at all. Then, one day the bride and groom-to-be announce they’re going to get married. And now we have a countdown of sorts. There are announcements along the way and events. What you’re getting is a drip feed of information that goes all the way to the wedding day itself. The reason you and everyone else shows up on the day—and at the event, is because of pre-sell.

When you pre-sell, there’s limited risk because the very act of pre-sell is drip, drip, drip

One of the biggest reasons why clients don’t buy is because they feel pressure. They feel they’re about to make a decision they could regret. And it’s more than likely their brains have been drummed with messages of “sleep on it, sleep on it, sleep on it”. In most cases, sleeping on anger may help a great deal. If you’re irritated and angry, it’s a jolly good idea to sleep on it. However, when buying a product, or service, the information rarely changes from one day to the next. What holds clients back, most of the time, is the fear of making a decision they’ll regret.

The run up to anything reduces this pressure

Take for instance the 2017 workshop in New Zealand. It’s in beautiful Queenstown—in the South Island. Now you may have heard of the beauty of New Zealand, but you go south, and it rocks. Queenstown is incredibly beautiful, has stunning views, and there’s one more thing you have to do when you’re in Queenstown. You need to take the road to Glenorchy. It doesn’t matter where you’ve been on the planet, and no matter how many amazing things you’ve seen—the road to Glenorchy is breathtaking.

What you just heard was a pitch for 2017

But it didn’t sound like a pitch, did it? And the reason it doesn’t sound quite that way is because approximately 363 odd days stand between now and the workshop. As the workshop is mentioned more often, you start to feel this urge to visit the last stop before Antarctica—yes, New Zealand. You think, well, it’s now or never. Sure it’s going to be a long trip. Sure it’s going to cost a small fortune, but it’s a workshop—and you think—well, I can write it off as a business expense.

What are the chances of me visiting New Zealand and finding a business reason to do so?

In your head, you’re selling the event to yourself. Now make no mistake. This place called Queenstown is no mirage. It doesn’t matter how many pictures and videos you see—it will still blow your socks off. And because of the distance between the event and your decision, you feel no risk, only great expectations.

Pre-sell is the best way to sell a product or service

At Psychotactics, we roll out a pre-sell for almost every product or service. There’s the pre-sell right before a course or product launch—like the one we’re doing right now for the Article Writing Course. But there’s also the long pre-sell. If you were on the Psychotactics list, you would have received a simple chart that gave you details about all our courses and products for the year. That too—it’s a pre-sell. And the moment a course finishes, alumni are encouraged to post their experiences of the course in our membership site at 5000bc.

The pre-sell for the next year’s course starts almost the second the previous one has finished.

What’s interesting to note is that no details are mentioned. No prices, no dates—it’s all pretty vague. So yes, you know about Queenstown, and you know about New Zealand. And you know there’s a workshop, but you don’t know the month or the name of the workshop or even how much it will cost.

And yet, notice how you want to find out more—even if you have no plans of getting to New Zealand

That’s what pre-sell does: It reduces risk like crazy simply because it’s way out there in future-land. It has this feeling of being risk-free and what it’s doing is creating a slow but steady percolation of information. No pressure, no hard-sell, but just this tiny little snippet of information coming your way.

It’s the way Hindi movies make their way to the launch date.

It’s how weddings attract a full house when a simple Sunday lunch can be a problem.
It’s how most of the products and services are sold by us at Psychotactics. It’s also the reason clients sign up so quickly. Once you’ve been given information in bits and pieces, you don’t need any more. The risk has left the building, and you’re ready to buy!

And that brings us to the end of this series on risk.

Let’s take a quick run around the block and do a little summary! Coming Soon.

Don’t forget to read this article—How Pre-Sell Sold The Article Writing Course In Fewer than 24 Hours.

http://www.psychotactics.com/pre-sell-article-course/

If you were to boil down marketing to a single word, it would be "risk". When a client is ready to buy they still hesitate. Even when there's a sense of urgency on their part, they still go through a series of steps before they come to a decision. What are those steps? Why do clients seem to back away at the last minute?

In this two-part series, we examine the "big boy"?risk. And we find out how it sits on its end of the see-saw and dominates the buying process. We then use The Brain Audit (yes, it's a book you should read) to remove those barriers that cause risk.

Find out for yourself how we get to the end point and do so much more than just risk-reversal!

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In ‘part 1 of this 2-part series’ Sean talks about

Part 1: Why Clients Don’t Buy (Understanding The Elements of Risk)
Part 2: Why The Risk Factor Changes With Every Version Of Your Product/Service
Part 3: How Pre-sell Dramatically Ramps Down Risk

Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.

Useful Resources

The Brain Audit: Why Customers Buy (And Why They Don’t)
5000bc: How to get reliable answers to your complex marketing problems
Read or listen to: How To Attract Truckloads of Clients

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Last month I decided to buy some software for sound editing.

And with that decision, I started a merry dance.
You know that dance, don’t you? It’s called the “should I, shouldn’t I” dance.

First, I spent an enormous amount of time reading up on what I was about to buy. Did it fit my needs? Was it just a duplication of the software I already had in place? Would it be easy enough to learn? Then, I delved deep into the testimonials. 20 minutes later, I was still reading—not quite sure what I was looking for, when every testimonial clearly seemed to signal the software was right for me. Almost an hour later, not entirely sure of my decision, I pressed the “buy now” button.

So what was the price of the software?

It was $350. And you think—“Ah, that makes sense You have to do a fair bit of research before plonking down that much money.” And you’d be right. When faced with a slightly risky decision, we have to make sure we do our due diligence, don’t we?

I spent another hour going through the very same process: The features, benefits, testimonials, comparison—all while assessing whether I needed the product. The only issue was this new product was priced at two dollars and ninety-nine cents!

So why spend the same amount of time and effort on a product that costs less than the price of a coffee?

Welcome to the tangled universe of risk, where logic seems to go into a blackhole. Where we spend as much time debating whether to go ahead with a decision, even if a product or service is offered free. We explore why risk isn’t always connected to money, or even the size of the transaction. And while it may seem that we behave unpredictably, our actions are remarkably consistent every time we have to make a decision. Worst of all, despite knowing it’s pointless spending hours debating whether a $2.99 purchase is worth it, we can’t help ourselves. We go through similar actions over and over again.

If we’re so hopeless when we’re aware of our actions, how can we predict the behaviour of our clients?

And how do we reduce or even eliminate risk? How do we get to the stage where the client doesn’t even read your sales page and buys your product completely on trust—even when it’s an expensive purchase? Let’s dig into this crazy universe of risk—shall we?

We’ll delve deep into three topics

– Why Clients Don’t Buy (Understanding The Elements of Risk)
– Why The Risk Factor Changes With Every Version Of Your Product/Service
– How Pre-sell Dramatically Ramps Down Risk

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Part 1: Why Clients Don’t Buy (Understanding The Elements of Risk)

Modern see-saws are kind of boring.

You don’t even need someone to sit on the other side. They have all these fancy spring mechanisms so that—in effect—you could see saw your way to your heart’s content. What the modern see-saw misses is the fun that came with understanding balance. As kids, the see-saw mechanism was quick to demonstrate how balance made an enormous difference. And when we decide to look at risk, we must first understand balance.

Now if you’ve read The Brain Audit, you’ll know that you need seven elements to take the client from “hmmm” to “yes, I want to buy your product or service”. The first three of those seven are the problem, solution and target profile. The next four are objections, testimonials, risk reversal and uniqueness. What we’re experiencing in The Brain Audit is a factor of balance. The first three elements of problem, solution and target profile balance out the next four elements. The first three elements are all about attraction—the next four are about risk.

Risk, as you can see, is the big boy on the see-saw

No matter how good you are at attracting a prospect, there’s an enormous risk factor always lurking on the sales playground. To understand how we need to reduce that risk, let’s examine each of those four elements, one at a time. On our list, we have objections, testimonials, risk-reversal and uniqueness. And of course, that list makes no sense at all, does it? Because we just saw risk-reversal as one of the elements in the list. If this topic is about risk, then isn’t risk-reversal supposed to take care of the risk? Interestingly, no. Risk-reversal is only a part of the whole “gang of four”.

Let’s start with the first of the four—objections

Objections are the harbinger of risk. They’re like vultures waiting to land and chomp off the sale. But just like vultures, the reputation of objections is misplaced. Every possible purchase has not one—but many objections. But even if we were to sidestep the sales process and just look at your life, you’d see that objections play a big role. If someone said to you: Come over on Sunday—notice, notice how your brain goes for a little spin. That’s because your brain is bringing up the objections—even if you you’re semi-keen to go over. Is it just a “come over” situation, you wonder. Or will there be lunch? Will you have to have lunch in advance. All these questions go circling madly in your brain. Should you make an excuse, and just stay home, you wonder? And the moment you do all of this wondering, you’ve entered the world of objections.

There are two big reasons why objections show up

The first—and most important reason objections are roused—is because necessary information is missing. As we noticed in the “come over to my place” situation, the complete lack of information drives the prospect crazy. Most objections arise directly from the fact that you’ve held back the most important information—the information needed to make the sale. Whether you’re buying a car or software for $2.99, the objections are what will hold the client back repeatedly.

And we may say, “I know this stuff. Objections are marketing 101”. And yet, time and time again, a client will come right to the point of buying the product or service—and then back away. In some cases, this is because the information is not available, but in today’s world, there’s also a pretty good chance that the client hasn’t seen the information. Because we’re all drowning in information, we start to skim—and miss out on certain points—points important to us. This builds up the risk tremendously—and more so for an expensive product or service.

At this point in time, the Article Writing Course is about $3000

$3000 is a fair bit of money, even when you’re absolutely sure of the results. There are a ton of objections that come up almost immediately.

– Will Sean be present at all times?
– Will there be specific assignments and will they be looked at daily?
– Will the group I’m in work out—after all, I don’t know any of them!
– Will there be specific guidelines for the course?

The answer to all of this is yes, yes and yes. And yes. The sales page must, in graphics and text—take apart the objections. And this brings us to a very important juncture. No matter what you say on your sales page, it’s just you saying stuff to sell your course. What an audience looks at, right after you’ve reduced their risk is the very next element—testimonials.

Testimonials are the opposite of objections

Yup, you heard right. Testimonials are not the wonderful things client write about your business. Instead, they have a clear and definite purpose. That purpose is to destroy the objections—and the risk—but from a third party point of view. Which is why you need first to list all the objections you receive—and continue to receive from clients. Once you get these objections, get your current clients to address the risk with their testimonials.

When you look at the Article Writing Course, for instance, we realise that it’s expensive. We realise there are courses that are $1000 or even $500. They may not be the competition for Psychotactics, but you have to know that first hand from a client who’s done the course. Someone who’s taken the journey. They need to tell you how the course has tiny increments; how it has groups that magically work together; that I—Sean am there all the time, almost never sleeping, always hovering, always moving you ahead.

But they also need to compare it with courses they’ve done before; experiences they’ve been through and found to be less than satisfactory. And to make sure this happens, we ask the alumni of every course as many as 17 questions. In return, we get a 1500 word answer. Notice what’s happening to you as you skim through the prospectus? You suddenly notice there are over 80 pages of testimonials.

You read maybe one or two, possibly even getting to three—but those walls of risk are coming down very quickly indeed. But why? Because the testimonial attacked the risk from three angles—first it took on the objection head on, it was a third-party experience, but most importantly, it wasn’t just a few lines. 1500 words mean a lot to a prospect. They paint a picture that 20-30 words could never do. And the risk factor starts to reduce considerably.

But we’re not done yet—because we’ve only dealt with the objections and testimonials.

Part 2: Why The Risk Factor Changes With Every Version Of Your Product/Service

It’s now time for the risk reversal

Seems odd, doesn’t it? Why have a risk-reversal when you’re already dealing with the objections? This is the question we had to ask ourselves as well when we ran into the concept of risk-reversal. Back in the early days of Psychotactics, we would sell home study versions of our courses and workshops. Back then in the good ol’ days, clients were more than happy to get a big box in the mail.

That box would contain a binder with a ton of notes and yes, CDs. As we continued to sell the product, we’d get a few returns now and then (every product gets returns). When we’d open the returned products, we were foxed at how immaculate the contents of the boxes happened to be. The CDs looked like they’d never been touched—or touched and wiped clean. The notes—not a smear or tear in place. The boxes looked almost identical to the condition they were shipped out. And that made us realise that risk-reversal is not the same as objections. Risk-reversal is the biggest fear the client has—a fear that must be addressed and put in bold, bright lights so it can’t be missed.

The risk wasn’t that clients wanted their money back

The risk was they were afraid to go through the package in detail as they feared they wouldn’t get their money back if the materials were soiled in any way. From that came the “The Lawn Mower Guarantee”. A guarantee that stated: If you don’t like the product, you’re free to take your lawn mower, run over the CDs and notes—then put them in the box and ship it back. The moment clients set their eyes on that guarantee; the sales went up exponentially.

When Zappos.com started selling shoes online, there were smirks

Who would buy shoes online? Sure, shoes were a $40 billion market, but shoes online? As you can see, Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com was voicing his objections. But his eventual partner, Nick Swinmurn, was prepared. “It’s a $40 billion market”, Swinmurn repeated, and the most interesting thing was that 5% of shoe sales was already being sold by mail order catalogs. But what was their risk-reversal? A money back guarantee, right? After all, shoes may not fit; they may not look as good as they do online—or you may just change your mind.

But no, that wasn’t the guarantee

The risk was that you’d have to figure out how to ship the shoes back. So Zappos put in a 365-day return policy with free shipping both ways. Free shipping both ways! That’s the biggest risk of all. And this is the part that most of us may not take the time to figure out. What is the client’s most significant risk? In some cases, it’s a simple money back guarantee, but in most cases, the clients will voice their biggest risk.

To find the real risk, you have to dig.

To find the biggest risk, you have to get clients to list all the possible risks and objections—and get the clients to pick their greatest risk.
And sometimes even that may not be enough. The packages that came back to us untouched told us a precise story—a story that the client might never have voiced. To get to a real risk-reversal and reduce that risk, you can’t just hope that a shiny money-back guarantee will work. You have to dig, and dig deep.

But nothing needs more digging than the last element—the uniqueness

We’ve covered objections, testimonials and risk-reversal, but all that does is set up a client to go to the competition. And that’s where uniqueness comes in. Once you’ve covered all the other elements, the client needs to know why they should buy from you and not from anyone else.

If we were to drag the Article Writing Course back into the picture, we’d notice that the competition may be offering courses at a far lower rate—and promising quicker results. After all the Article Writing Course takes 12 weeks—that’s three whole months. You have assignments, and these are checked daily. This means you have to run your business and do your assignments every single day.

This makes the course baby-tough

So what’s baby-tough. If you have a cat, you have to put out their food, their water, and that’s probably all you need in terms of work. A dog—now that would involve a walk, some play time—it’s a lot more work. A baby on the other hand—a newborn—that means you’re sleep deprived for quite a while. That is the uniqueness of the Article Writing Course. It’s baby-tough. It means you work extremely hard for the three months—and that hard work shows up as a skill on the other side.

Right before we had this uniqueness in place, it was a lot harder to sell the course

We tackled the objections, had reams of testimonials and the risk-reversal (not money-back, but that you’d only tackle tiny increments every day). Still, it was a lot harder to sell the course. The moment we added the uniqueness, the seats were filled in a day, then half a day and in some cases as little as 25 minutes.

A client wants to get the most unique product or service possible. To get anything but the best is hardly acceptable. The moment the Article Writing Course became baby-tough, the clients knew they were in for some real work. And real results. The other courses with their “easy” and “quick” results now became a liability.

In fact, uniqueness can stand alone—and clients may ignore the other elements of risk if the uniqueness is strong enough. When you think of Domino’s pizza delivering in “30 minutes or it’s free”, there could have been many other objections, zero testimonials, and well, we’ll accept the risk-reversal. But it’s the uniqueness of screamingly quick delivery that got the attention of the client. When you look at products and services that clients choose—even when they’re not the best in the market place, it’s usually because of the uniqueness.

And that’s because the uniqueness creates extreme clarity. When you’re faced with why you chose one computer over the next, why you chose one chartered accountant over the other—you don’t need muddiness. The more fuzzy the message, the less likely your audience is to pick you over the other. Working on your uniqueness is your top priority, and every product or service should have their uniqueness. The company may have one level of uniqueness, but every product or service needs to have their uniqueness as well.

When we think of risk, it’s easy to isolate ourselves to just the risk-reversal

There’s no doubt the risk-reversal is very important—once you find the real risk involved. Just like Zappos figured out the both-ways free shipping was more important, you too have to dig into the nuances of your product or service. The objections can’t be left out because they cause too much chaos in the mind of the client.

Even a simple Sunday outing without the proper information, becomes a matter of “should I, shouldn’t I?”. And testimonials are a science that’s worth delving into. Getting long, detailed answers turn your testimonials into an experience, not just some sugary, nice things your client is saying about your product or service.

But what’s the one thing you need to work on as quickly as possible?

It’s always the uniqueness. What makes your product or service unique? What makes it different from the competition? That’s the question clients want you to answer right away as it creates clarity. The client can justify to themselves and others in their world, why they bought the product or service.

In The Brain Audit, there are two distinct parts: the attraction factor—and the risk.
It’s like a see-saw—an old-fashioned see-saw. It’s fun when both sides are balanced—well, almost balanced!

Coming Next: Part 2—How Pre-sell Plays A Crucial Role In Risk-Reduction.

http://www.psychotactics.com/82

When Jim Collins wrote "Good To Great", he did talk a fair bit about the Hedgehog Principle. But what he stresses more on, is quite another concept called "Preserving the Core and Stimulating Progress". Why does this concept matter so much? And how do you combine the Hedgehog Principle with this concept? And where does the big, hairy, audacious goal fit in with everything? This episode shows you how to tie all the elements together in a neat little bundle.

Time to escalate that route to greatness, don't you think?

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In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1: Preserving the Core + Stimulating Progress
Part 2: The BHAG
Part 3: Your Action Plan To Greatness
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.
 

Useful Resources

5000bc: How to get reliable answers to your complex marketing problems
Why Happiness Eludes You: 3 Obstacles That We Need To Overcome
Find out: Do We Really Need To Start With Why?

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Preserve the Core AND Stimulate Progress

Recently a client called Rosa wrote to us with a request.

“I would have preferred to read the series on Dartboard Pricing in ePub,” she said. She made it clear it was a request, not a demand. Which brings up a whole new set of problems for us at Psychotactics. Most business books are designed with text in mind and may contain a few graphics. Our books aren’t designed that way at all. They have dozens of cartoons and under every cartoon is a caption. In The Brain Audit alone there are almost 100 cartoons and corresponding captions. In a PDF, this layout is easy-peasy. Create the book in InDesign and export it as a PDF and it maintains its design integrity. Try to do the same thing for an ePub and it’s like stepping in poo.

It’s a tedious, frustrating process to get all the graphics to align the way they should
The easier way is to just make a quick excuse, apologies and move on. After all, it isn’t like 90% of our audience is asking for an ePub. It’s just a stray request, isn’t it? It’s simple to ignore the request and get on with the important task of doing whatever it is we do. But that’s where the problem lies, doesn’t it? We’ve ignored the concept of progress. Almost all of us today read on a tablet or our phones. I know I do, my wife does, even my mother in law who ranted and raved about computers—she now loves her iPad. And PDFs work on tablet devices and phones, but they’re super clunky.

Sadly that’s not the only problem
Jim Collins talks about two elements: preserving the core and stimulating progress. And he goes to great lengths to stress the AND in between both of them. So all of us have to stand back and ask ourselves: What’s our core? The core of Psychotactics has been the factor of “consumption”. Any one can create attraction and conversion. It’s super-hard to get clients to consume what they’ve bought from you. Books, courses, workshops—we spend hours, days and weeks trying to figure out how to achieve a skill.

The cartoons, the captions in the book—they’re not just a design concept. They’re placed there as memory hooks; as a method of summary. They need to be exactly where they are in the books and courses. We could remove them and easily create an ePub like most ePubs, but that would fit in with our core. Collins says it has to be an AND. We have to preserve the core AND stimulate progress.

This principle is clearly frustrating and pulls in opposite directions.
When you’re starting out, you don’t have any legacy issues in place. You create a business the way you want to shape it. And the core and the progress moves along nicely. It’s when you “grow up” that you have to worry about how all the past has to fit in with the future. The longer you’ve been in business, the greater the past, and the more the past has to merge with an ever changing future.

Take Nokia for instance
You can almost hear the sound of the Nokia ring, can’t you? In the early 2000s, all of us would have at one point in time run into, or owned a Nokia. Nokia was no slouch in realm of being super-progresssive. They were into paper, then electricity and bounced from there to rubber, galoshes and finally were the most dominant phone manufacturer on the planet. In the early 1990’s they had a clear and accurate vision of the future. They saw the coming of the cell phone, dumped all their businesses and stuck with the cell phone. And then, just for good measure, they invented the first smart phone. That amazing device you take photos with, use to find your way around and yes, make phone calls—Nokia was on the ball way back in 1996. They even built a prototype of an Internet-enabled phone at the end of the 90’s.

And then they got stuck in a loop
They failed to see the link between their core—which was to make really simple phones—and the future. The future was software. The core of their legacy was hardware. They spent millions of dollars turning out failure after failure. They believed so much in their hardware that they just couldn’t figure out the software issues. And down they went, ring and all, finally selling their company to Microsoft.

To go from good to great we have to ask ourselves
What’s the core of our business. What do we stand for? What will we never change, never compromise on—and yet how will we step into the future when it presents itself to us. Most of us rarely have a problem with core values. Once we’ve spent enough time in our business, we know what we stand for, but what we fail to prepare ourselves for is the oncoming storm. We keep doing things the way we’ve always done.

The worst three words we repeat over and over, when faced with change is: I know that, I know that, I know that.

I thought I knew a lot about podcasts
After all I’d rode the early wave of podcasts when Apple first introduced them. And then in 2008/09 we decided to pull the plug on the podcast. When clients—and one client in particular—kept asking me to create a podcast, I’d ignore the comment. As far as I was concerned, podcasts were a thing of the past. I wasn’t ready to listen and the years ticked away while we busied ourselves with the core of what we’d always done.

Today, the “Three Month Vacation” podcast is one of the biggest joys in my day
I love writing, I love presentations, but it’s the podcast that connects me to a medium I love. And in turn the podcast connects us to our clients in ways that not possible on paper, or through books. The podcast is the closest we come to an offline workshop. But I wasn’t interested in the “future”. As far as I was concerned, podcasts were the distant past. And today we know those thoughts, that strategy was wrong. We see the enormous number of clients who find the podcast, then sign up to the newsletter. At our offline workshops over 50% of the audience listens religiously to the podcast. The podcast fit in so nicely with our core. And was the medium of the future.

Even so, it’s not possible to chase every rainbow
Technology moves ahead at a blinding pace. You can’t play with every new phenomenon. Which is why we have to go back to the Hedgehog principle. What can you be the best in the world in? What are you deeply passionate about? What drives your economic engine? In the subset of podcasting, we achieve all three.

And this is what you’ll have to do as well. Find your core AND stimulate progress, with your eye always on the passion. The passion is what drives your business today and will continue to do so in the future. If you don’t wake up crazy with happiness, then you’re not headed towards greatness. It’s the reason I moved on from cartooning back in the early 2000s. I wasn’t waking up happy as a lark—and so I had to find something else.

Which, interestingly, takes us to our third element: The hairy, audacious goal—oh, it’s big too. That makes it the BHAG (pronounced: bee-hag).

The BHAG

Until the moment Greig Bebner set to work on his kitchen table with a glue gun and some kite material, the basic design of the modern umbrella hadn’t changed since 1928. They come in all sorts of colours, shapes and fancy gizmos, but the core elements of the umbrella are the same—and they don’t work. The moment a gust of wind comes along, you hear cursing, then more cursing and finally the umbrella being thrown on the pavement.

So Greg set about on a big, hairy, audacious goal—a BHAG.

He wanted an umbrella that would stand up to the crazy wind and rain on One Tree Hill.
Now if you’ve ever visited Auckland, New Zealand, you’re likely to have your hair tossed around wildly on a windy One Tree Hill day. It’s certainly no place to open an umbrella. Then to push that BHAG even further, he tested the Blunt at Force 12 (117 km/h) which is the maximum setting of the test wind tunnel. The umbrella stood up to the punishment with ease.

But why did the umbrella work so flawlessly?
It starts with the BHAG. It’s almost a Star Trek kind of goal—to go where no man gone before. It’s not a namby-pamby set of goals. It’s one overarching factor that scares the heebie-jeebies out of you as a business owner.
A windy day on One Tree Hill in the middle of a storm. That’s a good testing ground for an umbrella.

Sometimes this goal is restricted to your product, sometimes it’s a lot bigger.
Like Akio Morita, the co-founder and former chairman of Sony Corporation. He was working on a revolutionary product called the Walkman. Until the Walkman was introduced on July 1, 1979. Until the Walkman showed up, portable music players were non-existent. Even though the Walkman stuttered with disappointing sales in the first month, it went on to sell over 400 million units.

But Morita’s goal wasn’t just to sell a ton of Walkmans
His goal was a lot loftier. Before Sony introduced a ton of extremely sophisticated equipment, Japan was considered to be a backward country. It was associated with paper parasols and shoddy imitations. Akio Morita wanted to turn that perception around so that “Made in Japan” commanded respect and was associated with high quality. And he succeeded, with Sony at the forefront of his BHAG. In 2014, A Harris poll showed Sony was the No. 1 brand name among American consumers, ahead of American companies like General Electric and Coca-Cola.

At Psychotactics, we have a BHAG too
The goal is to get rid of information for information sake and replace it with skill, instead. We’re drowning in information, and yet every book, every course brings even more information to the table. But is that what we really want? Or do we want the skill instead. We want to write articles, create sales pages, be able to sell at higher prices. We want to learn to cook, draw, paint or acquire skills that make us look, feel and be smarter. A BHAG has to be hairy, audacious, and bigger than anyone thinks possible.

Starbucks had a BHAG too
It was to open up a new Starbucks cafe every single day of the year. But soon enough, Starbucks was running into trouble. Can you see why? It’s big, hairy and audacious to open up a Starbucks every single day, but does it inspire any passion? Does it feel like you’re somehow changing the world you live in, let alone the world around you?

The BHAG wasn’t to make Sony the star, but instead to make Japan and Japanese products top-notch once again.

Every business should have a BHAG.
Something that sits there in the corner challenging you to become better—not necessarily bigger—than you are. To create a Ferris Wheel or an Eiffel Tower. To create artworks of enduring magnificence as Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt did. And the way to create that BHAG is to scare yourself. To know that everyone says there are things you’re not supposed to achieve. That these things are impossible.

And yet, you do it, because it’s the most inspiring thing to do!
Combined with the Hedgehog principle, preserving the core and stimulating progress, you have a system in place that can take your business from good to great. And even as you embark on this journey, you know that you will forever be on the road to making things better, not necessarily bigger, but always better.

Better—it’s a great place to be!

Action Plan: What is the one thing you can do today?

Check back tomorrow. Sean is still writing it.