Thinking Out Loud with Dean Jackson

Over dinner in Miami I got thinking about Richard Viguerie, the father of conservative fundraising and the guy largely credited with getting Reagan elected. In 1962 a new law made large political donors part of the public record, so he took six ladies into the records office and hand-wrote 12,000-plus names and addresses onto index cards.

That list was an asset nobody else had. He rented it out, kept gathering every donor from every campaign, and built an empire on being first in and the only one with that information. What struck me was the willingness to do the hard, unglamorous work almost no one else will do.

We've done our own version of this, hand-correlating the 2,100 lakefront homes in Winter Haven, the homes with mountain views in Paradise Valley, oceanfront condos in other markets. In a world where everyone's using the same algorithmic data, that qualitative information you have to work to gather is a real advantage. Don't be afraid to put in the effort.

Show notes: https://deanjackson.com/podcasts/tol/007-specialized-data/

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I still think about the Leptoprin infomercial that opened with when is a diet pill worth $153 a bottle. Everyone who'd already tried the $19 and $29 pills and given up perked right up, because finally here was one expensive enough to have the good stuff, and one that told them it was too powerful for vanity dieters.

Then I saw a knockoff, Leptopril, running the pharmaceutical generic play, and dug in. The same company owned all of them. Thyroid ATC for undiagnosed thyroid, Estrin D for menopausal women, each one speaking to a very specific reason someone believes they can't lose weight.

The lesson is about friction. If someone doesn't have that particular frustration, they're blind and deaf to the message, but name the exact thing that's stopping them and they perk up and think that's me. Get specific about why people are delaying, address it directly, and they line up for the help you can give them.

Show notes: https://deanjackson.com/podcasts/tol/005-when-is-a-diet-pill-worth-153/

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Gamal Aziz ran the MGM Grand, and his approach stuck with me for years. He broke the hotel into all its components, restaurants, entertainment, retail, and for each one asked how high is high, then counted the difference between that and current results as a loss.

They had a profitable $4 million restaurant, but he watched guests leave every night for celebrity restaurants elsewhere. In his mind they were losing $4 million a year, so he tore it out, partnered with Michael Mina, and did $11 million the first year. Same story with entertainment: a $28 million show became a Cirque du Soleil doing $120 million. Even $40 haircuts became $400 stylings.

He called it working backwards, and it's the opposite of chasing a 20% annual improvement. It's instant and radical. Go through your own components, ask how high is high, and treat the gap as money you're actively losing. That framing gets your attention in a way that a comfortable profit never will.

Show notes: https://deanjackson.com/podcasts/tol/006-working-backwards/

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This one came out of a discussion at the I Love Marketing meetup about naming products, and my view is simple: naming is everything. A name that telegraphs exactly what your product does beats a clever one every time. Dan Kennedy turned Formula 489 into Kills Weeds Dead, and suddenly it's obviously the right product on the shelf.

There's a photographer in London who skipped the generic commercial photographer label and built weshootbottles.com, nothing but beautiful shots of bottles. If you sell a product in a bottle, they head and shoulders beat every generalist. And when they want cans, they just spin up weshootcans.com. Same studio, same lights, new specialist.

Sometimes the product doesn't change at all. Excedrin Migraine and Excedrin Extra Strength are the identical pill, but the Migraine box sells for up to a 30% premium because it names exactly what someone's looking for. Any time you can narrow your focus to the person you most want, that's where the benefit lives.

Show notes: https://deanjackson.com/podcasts/tol/004-what-s-in-a-name/

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The day after I recorded the referral episode for Michael Bernoff, he demonstrated the whole thing at lunch without even realizing it. Somebody asked for a restaurant, mentioned they liked sushi, and Michael instantly thought of Sushi Roku, pulled out his phone, and set up the reservation with the double royal treatment himself.

That's the position we want to own in a client's mind. Sushi comes up, one place fires, and he didn't just recommend it, he handled everything so the other person gets treated like an insider. Michael becomes the guy with the guy.

This goes back to how we're wired. Adding value to the tribe raises your status, and we're built to keep the exchange even. So the real work is programming your clients to feel like insiders with your business, and giving them the trigger words so they know exactly when and how to send someone your way. We're not training salespeople, we're training givers.

Show notes: https://deanjackson.com/podcasts/tol/003-live-referral-field-report/

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I was sitting alone at Starbucks watching people talk, and it hit me that this is exactly where referrals happen. Every referral comes out of a conversation, and three things have to fire: they have to notice it's about what I do, think of me, and actually introduce me to the person.

For every call I get, there are probably five more conversations where someone thought of me but never told me about it. So the goal isn't to remind clients to talk about me, it's to instruct them on what to do the moment they hear the right conversation.

That's why we send the world's most interesting postcard every month, with a little post-it note on the back: just a quick note in case you hear someone talking about buying their first home, give me a call and I'll get you a copy of our book to give them. We're presencing the conversation before it happens.

Show notes: https://deanjackson.com/podcasts/tol/002-secret-psychology-of-referrals/

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This is where it all starts, the first episode of Thinking Out Loud, recorded live from Genius Network.

Show notes: https://deanjackson.com/podcasts/tol/001-thinking-out-loud-episode-one/

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