John Carlton Call Part 2 of 4

John: First in the men’s room down the hall, it was just hilar­i­ous. I folded up my, I closed up my brief­case and I thought well, we’re not going to get any­thing done today and Albert, you know, bless his soul, stood up, pushed the sec­re­taries gen­tly out and closed the door, and sat back down and said let’s get to it, and I real­ized, that’s oper­a­tion money suck.

If you are the guy who brings in the money into your busi­ness, then that’s your most impor­tant job. That’s your sec­ond most impor­tant job, your third most impor­tant job and on down the line.

If you’re the guy who brings in the dough, that’s what you’ve got to be doing. Every hour you spend fix­ing the copier or being on the phone talk­ing to the post office about some postage prob­lem, that’s an hour that robs you twice. That hour is gone and you haven’t spent an hour of bring­ing in money.

If you’re the guy, and espe­cially for small busi­nesses, if you’re the writer or the guy who’s doing the mar­ket­ing or all of this, the only thing that should be impor­tant to you is to stay focused on oper­a­tion money suck, bring­ing the money in. It seems sim­ple when you hear it, but it’s really, it’s the crux of busi­ness and it’s where a lot of peo­ple go wrong — they get caught up in all the flot­sam and jet­sam of busi­ness life.

You know, my office looks like a bomb went off in here. I’ve got stacks of stuff that has been there for a year. There’s dust set­tling. I just — I don’t let the maids in. I don’t let hardly any­body else in here. This is my work space, and I like clut­ter because I like the dis­cov­ery of see­ing “hey, what’s in that pile over there.”

But I’m always — I don’t waste a lot of time try­ing to keep my desk clean, you know, it’s not impor­tant to me. In fact, it gets pushed back far­ther every day because there’s always — espe­cially in my life — there’s always some­thing I can do to — that involves oper­a­tion money suck as opposed to just dust­ing off my, you know, my desk.

Michel: Well **** mar­keters are not immune to this because a lot of peo­ple who — espe­cially the peo­ple who com­plain a lot are the peo­ple who, they like to browse forums and posts, and read forums and read email and down­load email and email their friends and -

John: Michael, let’s be hon­est, the web is like junk. It’s like heroin. There is so much to be done, you kind of scratch the sur­face if you — and then you can go a lit­tle deeper and God for­bid you dis­cov­ery pornog­ra­phy or some­thing. It’s just — you know guys are gam­bling, it’s hor­ri­ble for peo­ple who have gam­bling addic­tions, they just — you know, I guess peo­ple pass out from hunger. They just won’t leave the com­puter console.

So as a species, we don’t know yet how to deal with what this — what the web has wrought in our lives. But we’re learn­ing as we go along. And one of the things you have to learn is if you want to be a top busi­ness man, or hell, not even the top, if you want to make it in busi­ness on any level at all, you have to exert a lit­tle bit of discipline.

And this is, there’s a com­mon story in Hol­ly­wood about the — it usu­ally takes place in the front lines of World War II or World War I or the Civil War or some­thing. What hap­pens is that a guy is a pri­vate and he’s bitch­ing and moan­ing about the sergeants and the lieu­tenants and stuff because they’re always telling him to do stuff and the pri­vates all get together and they think that they know bet­ter than the guys who are run­ning the war, and then what hap­pens is some­body gets shot or some­thing and sud­denly one pri­vate is plucked out of the crowd and sud­denly he’s put in a posi­tion of authority.

And the story — the crux of the story is that, that splash of cold water in your face when you’re no longer one of the guys, you’re now the guy mak­ing the deci­sions and you’re respon­si­ble for the bot­tom line.

Michel: Right.

John: When you do your busi­ness, a lot of peo­ple don’t under­stand this. A lot of peo­ple don’t under­stand the respon­si­bil­ity and the con­cept and the whole idea of con­se­quences, you know, that if you decide to not work today, there will be con­se­quences tomor­row. If you decide to work today and do A, B and C, there will be con­se­quences maybe later that evening.

And, you know, you can’t not take respon­si­bil­ity for every­thing you do and be, you know, in com­mand of your busi­ness. And this doesn’t mat­ter what part of the busi­ness you’re in either. You’ve got to be respon­si­ble for it. This is a huge shock to most people.

Michel: Oh yeah, and thing is espe­cially with what we were talk­ing about — the hook. Um, the inter­net, I’d say of course the inter­net is just a medium. But peo­ple don’t under­stand that when­ever you’re sell­ing your prod­uct, your wid­get and you’ve got a long copy sales let­ter, if you don’t hit them in the face with your head­line right up front, they’re prob­a­bly down­load­ing a gazil­lion emails and one side, they’ve got about two or three or four or five browser win­dows prob­a­bly opened up, they’re check­ing Google here, they’re doing a whole bunch of stuff and just as much as you need to sort of focus on oper­a­tion money suck, you also have to focus on the hook that will grab those peo­ple into your copy.

John: That’s absolutely right, and you know, that gets back to sales­man­ship, the seam of what we were talk­ing about. Most peo­ple write from their heels, and the rea­son — and when I say write from heels, it’s like you’re say­ing I got this would you please just maybe take a look at this.

You’re not doing any­thing else, you know, if you’re busy, I’ll come back later. You’ve got one foot out the door already. You can’t do that, you gotta be bold, you’ve gotta be that per­son that stands up and says “hey, I’ve got some­thing you want. Here it is, here’s how to get it, blah, blah blah.” And this gets back to sales­man­ship. This gets back to mak­ing that bold state­ment and get­ting back to that respon­si­bil­ity thing.

When you are respon­si­ble for mak­ing the sale, whether you’re just the writer or whether you’re the mar­keter, whether you’re the guy who’s run­ning the busi­ness or whether you’re all three, which I have a sneak­ing sus­pi­cion that most peo­ple online are, then that’s your respon­si­bil­ity — is to stand up and make the damn sale. You have to ask for action.

I think I talked about the six stages of a basic sales pitch. Um, I’ll rat­tle those off so I make sure I cover every­thing I do. You know, I say this over and over again to peo­ple, it’s sim­ple, it kind of flies right pass. But lis­ten to this, this is like the most sim­ple check­list you’re ever going to have.

When you’re think­ing about how you’re going to write your let­ter, here’s how you do it. You say, here’s what I’ve got. Here’s what it can do for you. Here’s why I’m the go-​​to guy that you should be deal­ing with. Here’s the story of the whole thing. Here are the details. Here’s how you can get it. It’s so sim­ple. It’s so straight­for­ward, it’s pretty much how most world class sales pitches operate.

Then, you start fig­ur­ing out, once you can just get that idea down, answer those par­tic­u­lar — well they’re not ques­tions — fill in those blanks, then you go back and fig­ure out — then you put your­self into the head of the per­son you’re talk­ing to. You fig­ure out where their pas­sion­ate sweet spot is, then it’s a lot eas­ier to fig­ure out what the hook is to get them into that, because you start think­ing about the ben­e­fits that you’re going to get.

You know, and then the USP comes about from the jux­ta­po­si­tion of your — of the ben­e­fits of your prod­uct and what the guy needs, how that fits together. That’s your unique sales posi­tion. And then you estab­lish your cred­i­bil­ity, then you get to boas and you start teas­ing and ril­ing them up and then you offer to relieve the dis­com­fort you cre­ated with the best offer you can come up with. And really it doesn’t get any more com­plex than that.

Michel: That’s per­fect. That’s actu­ally well said. I was -

John: I get paid for that Michel.

Michel: I was once asked you know what are the five ques­tions you should answer with your copy. I was at a sem­i­nar somewhere -

John: Uh huh -

Michel: And my friend, Peter Stone, who’s actu­ally the pro­ducer of this call, he was there, and the ques­tion was, what are the five ques­tions? And I said, why? And the per­son said, well, can you elab­o­rate. I said, why me, why you, why this name, why this prod­uct, why now and why at this price.

John: I like that.

Michel: You mean, why me and why should you lis­ten to me? Because the worse thing and you said this John in your newslet­ter so much, is the worse enemy of the copy­righter is the reader that says so what.

John: Right

Michel: Then why you mean­ing why do I, why you, Mr. Prospect, should read this. Why is this impor­tant to you and there is a qual­i­fi­ca­tion process just as much as you would do in sell­ing when you’re knock­ing on doors sell­ing ency­clo­pe­dias as much as you do in copywriting.

Then why this mean­ing why this prod­uct, why is it so mean­ing­ful to you? Why now using scarcity and like you were talk­ing about how to get them into a lather where they can’t say no, and then why at this price — the value build up and the bul­lets and all of those things that go into the sale.

John: That’s right. You know, um, that also reminds me, the biggest blun­der that rook­ies make, you know when I was lis­ten­ing to you talk just now — it’s some­thing — the biggest mis­take that folks make is that they bore peo­ple, you know, they just write bor­ing copy and they just — you know, if you don’t have any, you have to look into your own pas­sion­ate sweet spot too, but the one prob­lem that peo­ple make when they aren’t nat­ural sales­men and they think they’ve woken their sales­man up but they really haven’t is they try to bully the reader into buy­ing, and that’s not salesmanship.

Sales­man­ship is about per­sua­sion, um, it’s not over the top stuff, and peo­ple get really con­fused, and I have to clar­ify that with peo­ple all the time because they look at my copy and think, wow that’s really ball to the wall and I have to think really aggres­sive and just knock them over. That’s not it at all.

That’s, it’s what I’m doing is uh, very care­ful per­sua­sion and I’m stay­ing in the emo­tional sweet spot of the per­son I’m writ­ing to. I said emo­tional sweet spot that time, a pas­sion and emo­tion, that irra­tional side of that per­son because almost all pur­chas­ing deci­sions are made irrationally.

We have, Mark Twain said there are two rea­sons why a man buys any­thing, the rea­son he’ll tell you he bought it and then there’s the real rea­son. That’s very impor­tant to under­stand when you’re sell­ing stuff because the real rea­son that peo­ple want it often isn’t even known to them.

But the act of get­ting some­one to open their wal­let and giv­ing you money is the hard­est thing to do in busi­ness, and yet that’s the begin­ning and end of a suc­cess­ful business.

Michel: Gosh, it just hit me that some­thing that you taught in the past, and I’m sure you teach it now still that I men­tioned on the call with Gary Hal­bert and this is the prob­lem I get a lot when I cri­tique copy is that a small busi­ness, a small com­pany, some­times a one man oper­a­tion, will want to write copy like Wal-​​Mart and Microsoft with this third per­son in high­fal­lutin’ cor­po­rate speak and I men­tioned on the call before this that I think the best kind of copy is just the guy you meet at the bar, you sit down and you “God, I got to tell you about this thing” and you know, blah blah blah.

That is, you know, like the just you and me talk­ing kind of thing that you talk about a lot.

John: Right, the best kind of writ­ing that’s done is I call it just you and me. I think there’s an offi­cial term back in the ’20’s I and thou copy. But basi­cally, what it is, um, write like you would talk if you could edit how you, what you’ve said after you have spoken.

So, of course, I like to take it down to like being in a bar where you just over­hear some­body men­tion some­thing to some­body else and what he meant the prob­lem that he com­plains about is exactly what your prod­uct solves. What would you say to the guy, how would you intro­duce your­self? Would you say, you know 95 per­cent of peo­ple, you know, with hem­or­rhoids, you know find — you know you don’t do this kind of stuff. You’re talk­ing to another human being.

A lot of peo­ple make the mis­take when they’re writ­ing on the web or they’re writ­ing a let­ter, you know they think they’re writ­ing to this large audi­ence — they’re not. It’s just you and the reader. Now there’s a lot of read­ers out there but each time, it’s one reader. It’s you and one per­son. It’s just the two of you.

So it’s just you and me sit­ting down and talk­ing about a shared pas­sion. And that’s you know, just under­stand­ing that, get­ting that down and you know, what’s funny is I was just inter­view­ing some­body for an ad and he has these really blas‚ corporate-​​sounding ads and I asked him, I had a list of ques­tions to ask him, but I never got to ques­tion No. 2 because ques­tion No. 1 was, you know if you were sit­ting down at a bar and I sat down next to you and you heard me say, hey I have this prob­lem, and I didn’t even fin­ish my ques­tion, he said here’s what I’d tell you.

He went on for 30 min­utes. And it was the most bril­liant stuff that I had ever heard. He, it was a great sales pitch, it was full of per­sua­sion, it was full of emo­tional lit­tle check things that made the hair on the back of my head stand up because he was hit­ting me smack between my eyes.

It was like, you know, how do you, do you have enough money, is money going to be a prob­lem? Are you, how does it feel to be 48 or some­thing and not have enough money to be able to spend 100 bucks for some­thing you really want.

Michel: Um hm -

John: And I said, have you ever just recorded this and tran­scribed it and sent it out, and he says well no, nobody wants to hear this stuff. It’s what every­body wants to hear and that’s the stuff that works really well. It gets around to what I call the voice and when read­ing is the pas­sive behavior.

Be very, very aware of that. It’s not an active behav­ior on the reader’s part. When you hook some­body and bring them in, you want a voice that is going to join the con­ver­sa­tion already in their head, so you want to be a voice, not some printed mat­ter down there. You want to be a voice on the page because uncon­sciously, he’s going to be absorb­ing what you’re saying.

How­ever, you are not let­ting him stay uncon­scious in this. You are not let­ting him stay sub­mis­sive in this. You are build­ing enough ten­sion in him by teas­ing the Beje­sus out of him so that when it gets down to the offer, if he puts your let­ter aside or goes off of your web­site or put your DVD aside or what­ever, he’ll wake up in the mid­dle of the night and just go God­dammit and he’ll get up and he’ll have to dial because he’ll know the answers to the s tuff you teased him about or he’ll have to have that prod­uct to see if it’s real.

Michel: Um hm

John: That’s the goal of the whole thing. And you can’t do that meekly. That’s why I write a lit­tle bit aggres­sively. You know, I don’t bully. I don’t go over the top. I go just under the top, I get atten­tion and I want to always aim towards ril­ing them up on the inside because you don’t want them to be comfortable.

You want them to be very uncom­fort­able read­ing this ad because you are — it’s kind of like that Roberta Flack song, you know, telling my story, what the hell is that called -

Michel: Killing me Softly?

John: Yeah, killing me softly. Killing me softly, that’s the whole idea. This per­son goes to lis­ten to some­body sing and they think they’re singing about them, and it’s to the point that they think peo­ple are look­ing at them in the room. That’s what you want.

You want to get so deep into the psy­che of the per­son you’re writ­ing to. Now what does that mean you have to do? Part of your sales detection.

Okay, peo­ple under­stand the idea of doing sales detec­tor work on the prod­uct. Guess what? You have to do it on your cus­tomer too — on your prospect or what­ever. You have to under­stand that guy as well as you under­stand any­body else in your life. What moves them? What makes them tick? What makes them happy? What makes them sad?

Michel: Um hm

John: And espe­cially, what makes them whip out the wal­let and buy stuff. It is often not what you think it is. Com­mon sense doesn’t exist. If peo­ple relied on com­mon sense to become wealthy, then every­one you know who thinks they have com­mon sense would be wealthy. Are they?

Michel: Right, right. It’s like the thing in sales­man­ship in sales train­ing where they say that wimpy sales­peo­ple have suc­ceed­ing kids.

John: That’s funny. I like that. Wimpy sales­peo­ple. You know, you don’t have to be the big — I’ve said this before 100 times you don’t have to be the big hand­some guy who comes in and bowls every­body over with his charisma and stuff.

You can be the schlepy lit­tle mutt, and often that’s the guy who’s the best sales­man. Dave Thomas of Wendy’s was the great­est exam­ple. I wrote about that in my last newslet­ter. He was so bor­ing and so dull and so doughy and so noth­ing that the ad agency hated him because they couldn’t win any awards when they had him.

Michel: Right

John: Every time they took him out, sales would plum­met. Now they had to put him back in. Now they’re putting him in posthu­mously because he’s dead.

Michel: Right.

John: I mean, they need the guy’s mojo, so you don’t have to be some­thing that you’re uncom­fort­able with. Guess what? When you share a pas­sion with an audi­ence, what you’re com­fort­able with is what they’re com­fort­able with.

Michel: Very often when I write copy, I have a ques­tion­naire, but that always is the — like you were men­tion­ing about the one rea­son and then there’s the real rea­son. And I always get all that stuff that’s really not what I want.

So what I do is I — using the power of tech­nol­ogy — you were talk­ing about tech­nol­ogy ear­lier, is I would three-​​way the call with a tran­scrip­tion ser­vice and I just — you know — I just ask prob­a­bly a few ques­tions to let them talk a lit­tle bit about their copy — about their prod­uct, but they’ll always say a few things about oh yeah, we’ve been in busi­ness since 1985 — what­ever, blah, blah blah, but then they get to tell me some lit­tle sto­ries, you know, oh yeah, that’s inter­est­ing, tell me more about that. And then they just go off into this big pas­sion­ate blob, you know, and I let them spill all their guts -

John: Right

Michel: And then I record that, and I get this tran­scribed, and half of my copy is writ­ten right there.

John: Yeah. That’s absolutely true, because you tapped into the pas­sion­ate sweet thought — you tapped into that con­ver­sa­tion already going on in their heads.

Michel: Exactly. Well, this is some­thing that ties into the next point I wanted to bring up. and it’s a point that we’ve cov­ered in a pre­vi­ous call, but it’s some­thing that I keep get­ting all the time any­way, and I thought that you would be the per­fect per­son to ask is this issue of writer’s block.

John: Oh yeah.

Michel: What do you think would be some of the tools and tac­tics that peo­ple can use in order to either avoid or remove writer’s block?

John: Yeah, I’m sorry, my mind just went blank while you were talk­ing to me -

Michel: You have speaker’s block.

John: Yeah, I have speaker’s block. You know, so many peo­ple that I work with who want to be writ­ers, here is the most com­mon prob­lem, and this is more com­mon in like the novel side — peo­ple try­ing to write lit­er­a­ture than it is, well, it’s prob­a­bly the same. Most peo­ple think they want to be a writer, but the truth is they don’t want to be a writer. They want to have already writ­ten some­thing and be enjoy­ing the rewards of their labor.

When you become a writer, you really have to learn to either love or hate, but at least feel strongly about the whole process. And this is where oper­a­tion money suck comes in because some­times peo­ple sit down and they go, you know it’s like they’re star­ing down the blank screen, you used to be star­ing down the blank page, but now everybody’s work­ing on com­put­ers, so you’re star­ing at a blank screen essentially.

You know, you got that square there — it’s on the Microsoft win­dow and how do you write the first word? How do you get the stuff down? Um, as Howard men­tioned in the last call, there are tricks like just sit­ting down and writ­ing down the bul­lets of every­thing, and the bul­lets mean, basi­cally you say, you know let’s just do a future ben­e­fit thing, and what that does is that gets you writ­ing, that gets you started. What’s easy to do or should be easy to do is the fea­ture ben­e­fit thing. Just write it down.

Now, we should all know what the fea­ture ben­e­fit is. I’ll explain it in a minute, but basi­cally, if you don’t know it, then you don’t have enough research to write any­way, so you shouldn’t be sit­ting down star­ing at the blank screen.

You should be on the horn talk­ing to some­body or you should be read­ing some­thing or doing some­thing, you know hit­ting the streets, to find out what the fea­tures and ben­e­fits are of the thing you’re try­ing to sell.

A fea­ture is the phys­i­cal prop­erty of the thing of, you know, how big it is, how much of it there is, what it looks like, the color, things like that. The ben­e­fit is what the fea­ture does for the per­son using it. And this gets back to one of the biggest mis­takes that rook­ies make when they try to sell. They con­fuse their prod­uct with their product.

Guess what? If you’re sell­ing a five-​​CD, 15-​​DVD, 4 man­ual, you know, per­sonal teach­ing course or some­thing like that, that ain’t your prod­uct. That is merely the vehi­cle with which you have decided to deliver the won­der­ful stuff that you have, the infor­ma­tion that you have. Your prod­uct is what all of those things do for the person.

So your prod­uct really is what you are deliv­er­ing, and in a lot of cases, it’s a bet­ter life, money, it’s respect, it’s bet­ter posi­tion in your mar­ket — what­ever. But what you offer is the ben­e­fit to the per­son, not the phys­i­cal aspects of it.

So by sit­ting down, star­ing at the blank screen, you should be able to sit down and say let’s map this sucker out. What are the phys­i­cal para­me­ters of the thing I’m try­ing to sell. That would be the fea­tures. Then you list all of those. Hope­fully, you have a lot of them.

Michel: Maybe you have six -

John: Maybe you have a dozen, maybe you have 500. It doesn’t mat­ter. Just exhaus­tively write all of those down. Well, it goes really fast, it looks really cool. It’s, you know, it comes in six dif­fer­ent col­ors, it comes in eight dif­fer­ent shapes, blah, blah, blah. What­ever. Um, you get it in CD or cassette.

Then go back to each of those and assign each of those a ben­e­fit. This is the sim­plest thing to do and this will start to kick in your inner sales­man who for most of us is fast asleep and has been asleep your entire life.

You know what’s inter­est­ing about sales­man­ship, Michel, is that most peo­ple sit down and try to be the sales­man in their busi­ness, and that’s where you are if you’re doing the writ­ing — you’re the top sales­man. They try to do it, and they don’t even have the chops to be able to con­vince a friend to go see a movie that the friend would enjoy.

Michel: Exactly -

John: You know, what’s the first thing most peo­ple do when they — if I tell peo­ple, go sell, go see a movie, now go sell some­body on see­ing that movie. Now what’s the first thing they try to do? Hey, you really got to go see this movie, you will really like it, blah, blah, blah and they do this. What does that do — almost all the time, that sets up resis­tance to the per­son hear­ing it.

They think, yeah, well, I’ll make up my own mind about this. Then they wind up not see­ing it, you know, they wind up not doing it. If they hear it from a third party or some­thing, it’s their own discovery.

This gets back to the fact of bring­ing in third party endorse­ments, you know with tes­ti­mo­ni­als and things. You know, if you can’t do basic sales­man­ship in your life, you’re not going to do it to a stranger when you’re ask­ing them for money.

If you can’t get, you know, some­body who loves you to do a sim­ple task for you, you’re not going to get a stranger to pull out 100 bucks and send it over for some­thing he can’t see, feel, hold, or taste.

So, by get­ting the fea­tures down of the thing and get­ting to the ben­e­fits, what you’re doing is map­ping out the entire psy­cho­log­i­cal pro­file of the prod­uct which is, you know, and espe­cially the ben­e­fits. That’s going to be the most impor­tant part. What does the thing do for the per­son using it?

And that means you gotta get into the mind of the user, you got to be the user your­self, you got to under­stand all of the ways that peo­ple get ben­e­fit out of this thing. And really, so when you sit down to write, maybe you’re still star­ing at the blank screen, so what you do is, you know, I work off of notes, any­way, I like these lit­tle 5x7 notepads.

I’ve got stacks of them all over the office because they con­tain about one thought. Enough writ­ing for one thought. And I like to get all of those thoughts down.

Think about what the USP is or what is the unique sales posi­tion. And then, you know, write down who is the com­pe­ti­tion? What are they doing? What are they offer­ing? What are their ben­e­fits? You know how you find that out? Hey, you go to the web­site or you get on their list, or you go look at their ads and you find out what they’re doing and then you write down all of that stuff, and then you get that and you say where’s the niche in here, and all of this — it sounds like work, but it should be fun because if you’re doing it for your own busi­ness, guess what you’re doing?

You’re doing oper­a­tion money suck. You’re build­ing the foun­da­tion for wealth beyond your wildest dreams. If you’re doing it for a client, then you should also be doing it, you should also be focused on the wealth that’s going to come in because when you get to be a good writer, you should be tied into a piece of the action anyway.

Michel: John, this is some­thing that I learned from you that I usu­ally say to my clients is this thing that you talked about, I heard you say this at the sem­i­nar one time is a really good way to dig deeper into ben­e­fits is to always, when you men­tion a ben­e­fit or what you think a ben­e­fit is, is you end up ask­ing this one ques­tion at the end is what this means to you Mr. Prospect is this?

John: Right.

Michel: And, this is the way I explain it and you tell me, John, if I got this right, what I usu­ally tell my clients is, some­times when peo­ple say what a ben­e­fit is, I usu­ally tell them it’s not a ben­e­fit, it’s an advan­tage. There’s the dif­fer­ence between fea­tures, advan­tages and benefits.

What I mean is this: a fea­ture is what a prod­uct has, an advan­tage is what it does, but a ben­e­fit, a real true ben­e­fit is what that fea­ture means to the prospect, and here’s a great exam­ple. I’ll tell you a story. This lady comes up to me and she had a web­site sell­ing this cream, facial cream and she called it like, micro­der­mabra­sion which is a cream that helps to reduce wrinkles.

John: Right

Michel: She had on her web­site these fea­tures. She had, it reduces wrin­kles, it comes in an easy to use home care kit, it’s pH bal­anced and all that stuff, and I told her those are just features.

Then I said, take a 3x5 card, cre­ate three columns, put your fea­tures under one col­umn, now in the sec­ond col­umn, I want you to tell me what you think are ben­e­fits and she wrote down like because it reduces wrin­kles, it makes you look younger and because it comes in a home care kit, it’s easy to use at home, and the third one is it’s pH bal­anced, so it’s gen­tle on your skin, so I said okay, those really are advan­tages, and I used your tech­nique about so what this means to you.

And I said in the third col­umn, what’s the ulti­mate end result, the ulti­mate ben­e­fit that peo­ple can pull from it?

Okay, well, she says well, if it makes you look younger, then it means you’ll be more attrac­tive, you’ll get that pro­mo­tion at work, you’ll feel more con­fi­dent, nobody will guess your age, you’ll fall in love all over again or you’ll be able to attract that per­son that you’ve been eye­ing on.

The sec­ond one was that since it’s easy to use at home, you don’t have to be embar­rassed by going to a doctor’s office, you don’t have to waste time, you know, it’s like a face lift in a jar in the com­fort and pri­vacy of your own home, and the third one was it’s gen­tle on your skin. She said well, there are no risks, no pain, no heal­ing peri­ods like those harsh chem­i­cal peels like peo­ple usu­ally get, or surgery. I said, aha! Those are ben­e­fits. Am I on the right track?

John: Absolutely. Um, what was I going to say? I was think­ing about the facelift in a jar thing. The whole thing, often what you will find when they start talk­ing about ben­e­fits is, and likely you broke it down, because a lot of peo­ple that read a book on copy­writ­ing come away with weak ben­e­fits and you call them advan­tages, and I like that.

It should be set apart like that because the real ben­e­fits dig really deep. They touch on the emo­tional and pas­sion­ate sweet spot of the per­son using it.

Michel: Yeah, the ben­e­fit within the benefit.

John: Par­don me?

Michel: What you teach, the ben­e­fit within the benefit.

John: Right. And so when you’re think­ing about that, you’ll often be aston­ished at some of the ben­e­fits that come about. Like you men­tioned, not hav­ing to go into a doctor’s office.

Now I don’t know, but from my expe­ri­ence, I would bet that that’s huge. But I would want to find out. I wouldn’t guess because I don’t use that kind of prod­uct, I don’t need to, you know, I think it’s mostly a female, or a prod­uct that women use.

So if I’m not sure about that, I will dou­ble check, and I’ll try to find out. If you have some­body that under­stands it like this woman — it sounds like this woman did. She prob­a­bly also got into it because she was using the prod­uct or needed the prod­uct or was frus­trated because this prod­uct didn’t exist so she cre­ated one.

When you start doing that, often, she will be aston­ished too at what some of the ben­e­fits that she comes up with like that thing about you won’t have to go into the doctor’s office, so peo­ple will be unable to guess your age. I know that when peo­ple get older, one of the things that they really get happy about is when some­body seri­ously under­es­ti­mates how old they are.

Michel: Right

John: It makes them beam. So that’s some­thing. You know, one of the big, I talk like 30 moti­va­tions too. Never under­es­ti­mate — now I was going to talk about this — the whole jun­gle thing. You know, one of the prob­lems that peo­ple have when they write is they have an unre­al­is­tic idea of who their audi­ence is.

Michel: Um hm

John: Peo­ple — it’s okay when you become a true sales­man, your life is going to be dif­fer­ent for­ever. You are never going to be able to look at any­body else the same because you’re going to have to get into the psy­chol­ogy of people.

When you do, when you under­stand what the basic things that move peo­ple are, you’re going to find out that most peo­ple get moti­vated by greed, by lust, by the desire to have some­thing to lord over some­body, one of the great­est advan­tages I’ve ever found that I try to work in a lot is your neigh­bors and your bud­dies are going to hate you…

About the Author

Last 5 Posts By Michel Fortin

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• Superior Value Equals Superior Sales

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