506 – New and novel ways to sell: Tom talks Ask Me a Selling Question

Episode 506 – Ask Me A Selling Question
[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode five hundred and six of Screw the Commute podcast. Doing kind of the same thing, but a little bit different thing. So, I've been doing a lot of ask me a questions because I got so darn many questions coming in all the time. But this one is going to be asked me a selling question. So if you really get serious about any of the topics I cover in this episode, it's going to mean at least an extra million dollars over your career. I mean, that's like on the low end, if you got serious about what I'm going to talk about today. Every item that I put on here has made at least a million dollars, but most of them have made many, many millions of dollars. So these aren't things that are just out of a book. These are things I've been doing for years and years and years, and it still worked today. And I hope you didn't miss episode five oh, five, which was asked me a question again, and I talked about shared hosting. Moving off a GoDaddy, Google, changing your page titles, which I did a whole episode on page titles and how important they are running masterminds Clickbank and JVZoo as affiliate places, tracking offline sales and hiring influencers.

[00:01:41] So that's a great episode too, episode 505. Anytime you want to get to a back episode, you put Screwthecommute.com slash and then the episode number that was 505. Now, how would you like me to send you big affiliate cheques or PayPal or whatever else you want to get the money? I don't really care. Email me at Tom and screw the community. Com And I'll give you details on how you can be in my referral program. And I've been doing this for many, many years, sending money to people that that send me business and you never get any returns or bitched at because of referring me because I take care of my customers. That's the way I roll and my reputation. So. So feel free to get in that program and you can make some good, good money doing it. I mean, some of the referrals are up to $5000 or more. Okay, so so this is pretty serious stuff. All right. Make sure you pick up a copy of my automation e-book. I've been hammering this for five hundred episodes. You need to do this. You need to work faster using these cheap and free, inexpensive tools already on your computer, or inexpensive programs that automate all kinds of stuff for you. The benefits are enormous.

[00:02:59] The time, savings and the speed to take care of customers makes them spend more money, and you can get money out of people that never spend any money because you get back to them faster than your competitors say. So download that at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And while you're at it, pick up a copy of our podcast app at screwthecommute.com/app where you can put us on your cell phone and tablet and take us with you on the road. All right, we're still doing our pilot program to help persons with disabilities in my school. Love to have your help. It'll be something you can be really proud of. We're really changing these people's lives for the better. Where we're going to put five people through my school, get them either hired or starting their own business or both. And then I've been taking a grant writing course, or I did take a grant grant writing course so I can roll it out really big to foundations and corporations to put a lot of money into the program to really help a lot of people. So I need your help on this. If you could check out the deal at IMTCVA.org/disabilities, then click on the Go Fund Me campaign and contribute anything you can. And if you're really flush in cash, you could you could sponsor a whole person, get in touch with me about that, or at least share the thing for me so we can really help these people.

[00:04:33] You'll see updates there. Video updates by two of the people are blind, and they did these wonderful videos telling what this means to them. And boy, it's really inspirational and heart touching, so something you can really be proud of. So check it out, IMTCVA.org/disabilities.

[00:04:55] All right, let's get to the main event. This is ask me a selling question. And so the first question I've collected these and lumped them into this one episode. Tips on selling on a webinar. Well, I've made a fortune selling on a webinar, and there's a lot of little nuances to it. In fact, you should listen and watch a lot of my webinars and take close notes just on the techniques used during the webinar. Not necessarily, you know, buying the product, which I don't know. I might accept your money if you did. I have to think about it. All right, I'm done thinking. But anyway, if you just if you go to Tom Antion webinars, there's quite a few of them there. The first one is about is not a selling webinar. It's telling you about how to not get scammed at seminars. But most of them are selling webinars, and I want you to really, you know, if you're really serious about making money with this, with webinars, you should watch them.

[00:05:53] But anyway, I'll give you a few tips here. One of the things we do is we tell people right up front that there's going to be an offer at the end. So we are already showing people we're transparent, we're doing this, we're going to give them great value, but there's going to be an offer if they'd like to go deeper. And so people appreciate that they, you know, most of them, you know, just sneak up on you and then at the end, they hammer you to the death to buy. So no, we don't do that. We're right up front and tell them there's an offer, and it's usually we call whatever the offer is as the sponsor of that webinar. So you can see that over and over again on my sales webinars. Then we make an incentive for them to stay to the end. Like, for instance, I. You say if you stay to the end, I'm going to give you a five super bonus tips and then maybe I give them 10. You know, I always go overboard given value. So that's it gets them to stay to the end. Also, I tell them, when I start the pitch for the product, I say, Look, yeah, I'm going to tell you about my product now.

[00:07:02] But. I'm going to continue training throughout the pitch, so they're like, Oh, OK, maybe there's more tips here I don't want to miss. So then they listen to the pitch, Wow. And I come through, I give them more tips as I'm going through. So then I make. I mean, before that, I've made an incentive for them to actually show up for the webinar so I might give a free e-book a twenty seven dollar value for everybody that shows up for five five minutes early and it won't be on the replay, you know, so that gets a higher show up, right? In fact, I wrote a whole book on how to get more people to show up for your webinars. And I don't have the link to it handy here. Maybe we'll find it and put it in the show notes for you. So that's important. Then you give great value so that even if they don't buy. They still got great value, and this is so important because the next time you promote a seminar, maybe they got paid that that day and they thought, Oh, I'm going to get on this because that guy really gave is good or that woman is really good. And so they get on. But this time they have the money and they buy something. See, so if you have the reputation of just giving a bunch of fluff and a big sales pitch, then they won't show up the next time.

[00:08:19] See? So that's an important part of this. Always give great value. Now there's two different angles you can use on a webinar. I'll give you an example. One is, let's say you've got 20 things to teach them. Well, you go deep on five of them, let's say. And then you tell them, hey, you know, because of time, we don't have time to go over the next 15, but all of that is included on my product, blah blah blah. All right. So you went really deep and taught them something, so they have great things that they can do because they were on that webinar and some of the people will say, Well, wow, that was great. I wonder what those other 15 are, and I need to know about them to see. So that's going deep on part of what you do and then letting them know there's way more. I'm going to give you an example of that where you can actually go watch one exactly like that. Then the other thing is, you don't go so deep, you might give a light version of all of those 20 things, let's say. But you don't go deep on any of them, and that's the angle that, oh, here's the whole breadth of what you need to know about, and here's a little bit on each one. So they get value out of it and they they it's just a different angle.

[00:09:40] Now the I'll tell you a little later. The one that I picked. You know, I want to go deep on my copywriting stuff, so I'll tell you about that later. Anyway, so there are some tips on selling now. One other thing that I do is I do a poll at the beginning where I want everybody to say no. So I ask a question like, do you know, twenty three ways to to upsell a product? And everybody says, No, we don't know all twenty three ways. And then I do after I promise them that I'm going to teach him at the end, I'll do a poll and I'll say, Hey, now, do you know twenty three ways this and everybody says yes. So that proves that I did what I promised, and then they hang around for my pitch. So, so you can see examples of this like crazy on every one of my sales webinars. Ok. Next section here is tips on selling with autoresponders, so if if you polled people that have been around a long time like me, like what are some of the most powerful things ever invented for online marketing? These sequential autoresponder would be at the top of everybody's list. One of the most powerful things we use it like crazy seeing in the beginning. In the old days, you could have one auto responder message go out so somebody request some information and your autoresponder sends it back to them one time.

[00:11:09] That's it. Done. But the sequential autoresponder came along and then the first message could come out. Go out and then the next one and the next one and the next one and the next one. And it just as long as you want to program the man I've had still to this day, I've had some run in for nearly 20 years, all right, with just minor adjustments on my public speaking stuff because it's more evergreen type topic, but I still have them on all kinds of stuff. I think I have over 400 sequences over the years I've built up where you're not going to go that crazy right off the bat. But if you did this for twenty seven years like me and you'll build up a lot of them and their guess what? They're out working for me while I'm here talking to you. Ok, that's the power of that. So how do you use them to sell? Well, one of the ways is you create an Ecourse and Ecourses where you break your material down into its component parts. I always like to use the the really obvious thing of tennis. Like the the major parts of tennis are serve. Forehand, backhand volley, you know, that kind of stuff. So each part of the course would be about one of the things one of those sections.

[00:12:27] So you have to break down what you do into its component parts and make an Ecourse out of it and then you load them up into your autoresponder. And now here's the mistake that when I first started teaching this, I forgot to tell people and and then I learned really quick that I messed up. I should have taught them that in each email is a link to something they can buy. Even though the Ecourse could have been free, you can have paid courses too. But if it's a free Ecourse, you don't wait till the last part of the course to give them something to buy. And it could be the same thing and each thing, or it could be a different product than the bottom of each one. But make sure you give them the value or the tip that you promise them, and then nobody's going to complain at the bottom. If you say, Hey, if you really like this topic, click here and check out our professional speaking system. You know, as long as you gave him the free tips that you promised, nobody is ever going to yell about that now if they signed up for an Ecourse, and all the thing was was a sales letter with no tips, then they're going to hate you. Never trust you again, and you'll never they'll never sign up for anything of yours again.

[00:13:41] So don't don't do that. So that's an Ecourse, and there's loads of details on that. I think I have an episode. Yeah, episode 205 goes deep into Ecourses. There's all kinds of video e courses and digest E courses and paid courses and all kinds of stuff. So that was episode 205 if you really like that idea. Ok, next thing with autoresponders is to follow up to a sale. So somebody has just purchased something from you and that triggers an auto responder, by the way. If you didn't know a broadcast email was something where you decide when you want to send it out and send it out, an autoresponder is always triggered by somebody else. And the trigger could be an opt in for a freebie or a sale, or the two major ones that you that trigger auto responders. So if somebody bought something you, you have created an autoresponder series that checks to make sure they got their product and gives them your customer service stuff. See, I want to make sure people get used to getting emails from me that help them that way when I go to sell them something. Yeah, they're more lenient. They just don't unsubscribe because all they get is sales letters say. So give them some tips. And then one of the best ways is to put a coupon code in one of their follow ups.

[00:15:09] It says, Hey, because you bought so-and-so, we got this discount on this other thing that's perfect to go along with so and so and so people love discounts and coupons and stuff like that for deals. So that's one of the major ways we sell as a follow up to a sale. Now, a follow up to an opt in, so in other words, they didn't spend any money, but they opted in to get one of your freebies and lead magnets, ethical bribes. You know what? All that stuff. Now, your lead magnet should include links to stuff they can buy, and the follow up series, just like after the sale, should give them some kind of sale or coupon code or thanks for subscribing, here's a coupon code good for so long. That's urgency. And so know all this stuff is running automatically while you're doing something else, if you would just take the time to set it up. Now we use kick start cart for over 20 years now. Have you know, I'm pretty sure one of the executives slipped and said I was the biggest reseller in the world because for that cart, because we give unlimited free one on one tutoring to teach you how to do all this stuff. If you have the cart, say so. Kickstartcart.com. You can get a 30 day free trial and it has all these things that are necessary to sell, and it's a third of the price of the nearest competitor that doesn't even have a lot of this stuff.

[00:16:40] Some of the competitors have more than this, a little bit more than this, but you have to have a team of geeks to operate it. I had one lady come to me. She she was spending $4000 a month for a part time person just to operate her shopping cart. That was three times more expensive than this one, right? So it's just crazy. All right. So that's selling with autoresponders. All right now, next is tips for upselling. That's we coined that. Do you want fries with that? And that's a major major revenue generator for most businesses, just adding on to what you've already decided to purchase. And that's what the deal is with upselling the person made a purchase decision. It's not offering them 10 things at once and picking from one of them. That just confuses people. It's they made a purchase decision and then once that decision is a done deal, that's when you offer them something else. And I mean, it's just an enormous amount of extra money for me. If you see me selling things, unless it's a big high ticket product where I don't want to nickel and dime them after they've spent a lot of money, 30 to 50 percent of the people go for the upsells, which I always include.

[00:17:58] And I'm going, I'm going to give you a kind of a formula on how to set up an upsell to make sure that you get that 30 to 50 percent. But there's two kinds of upsells. One is the point of purchase. That's what we're going to talk about today. And the after the sale upsell is just what I told you in the autoresponders. Say so. Let's talk about the point of purchase, and by the way, the full discussion on upselling is episode twenty to screw the Commuter. Twenty two and not the guy to tell you it can make you a fortune extra if you do this properly. Ok, so I like to use an example of, let's say somebody decided to buy a suit and they they allotted six hundred dollars to buy a suit. So they go down to today's man and they they they get, you know, pick a suit out and they're getting fitted for the suit. And and the salesperson says, Hey, you know, everybody that buys a suit this week gets two for one on shirts and ties. Well, 30 to 50 percent of the people will go for that upsell. Now let's break it down a little bit. All right. So their original purchase decision was based on six hundred dollars they had allotted to buy their suit. So. To guarantee that you get your 30 to 50 percent of people going for the upsell.

[00:19:23] It should be a related product, so shirts and ties are related to a suit. It should be a deal. So. Two, for one, is a deal. And it should be a cheaper priced product. So you've got six hundred dollars, is their original purchase idea. Shirts and ties are cheaper. They're related. And you gave them a deal. You'll get 30 to 50 percent of the people go for it, especially where most of us listening to this are probably going to be selling digital products. You know, physical product shirts and ties, you know, they have a cost of goods sold. So you get, you know, you make more money, but it's, you know, it's less of a profit margin with digital products. It's ninety seven percent profit. Say so. So do this with abandon. So. And we also have a special thing in the car called Upsell Express, which is what they call a one click upsell. So instead of a thank you page, when they purchase the product, they get another sales letter and all they have to do to add that to their. Their purchase is click yes or no. Do you want this? Yes, or and if they click yes, it's automatically added they don't have to put all their stuff in again, their credit card or PayPal or whatever they're paying with, say, and if they say no, then you can give them a thank you page for the original product or show them another sales page, depending on how aggressive you want to be.

[00:21:00] And if they're saying yes to all these upsells, keep going. So, you know, if somebody is all excited about you and your products, let them give them a chance to give you money, you know? So that's upselling. But episode twenty two, screwthecommute.com/22 gives goes in depth on upselling. Ok, the last one that's going to be pretty in-depth here for you is copywriting tips. And I got to tell you if you if you're new to this show, that's the most important skill in my forty four years of getting close to forty four, forty five years, almost forty four years of formal business and the really since I was 10 years old, writing flyers and stuff. So really, really one of the most important skills you'll ever have. And the thing is, you couldn't possibly pay for all the places that you need copy. It's everywhere. In short, ads, long ads, flyers, postcards, blog postings. See, once you learn these copywriting techniques, they kind of infiltrate all your writing so that you're writing an article. But there's embedded stuff in there that make people want to buy stuff without it being a sales letter. Say so. So really, really powerful stuff here. And if you don't learn this, you're going to be delayed significantly every time you need copy and you're going to pay a fortune for it.

[00:22:28] So it's just crazy not to take the time to get this skill. Now, I've got a free webinar with five critical copywriting tips from my course copywriting nine and one. And there'll be a link in the show notes to the webinar. And this webinar is, I mentioned this earlier is a perfect example of the angle that I'm going deep on five critical copywriting techniques, but I let you know there's twenty six more you need to know about. So make sure you watch that darn webinar. Like I said by itself, it will make you money more money, probably than any webinar you've ever been on. I'll go ahead and say that right now, and I also, you know, if it doesn't, I'm guaranteeing you. I will give you five times your investment in that free webinar. So, so so who's going to give you that kind of guarantee, right? Tom. Because I'm a giver, you know? So right now, I'm going to give you the light version of those five things. And I'm telling you, no matter where you learn it, you better darn well, learn these five and the other twenty six more. All right. So so the first one is called the zeigen principle. The Gornick was a Russian psychiatrists, psychologists, female bloomers her first name, and she uncovered the principle of the human mind that the human mind cannot stand unfulfilled curiosity.

[00:24:04] And this technique, I used hundreds. I mean, I won't say hundreds or thousands of times to make you want to click because your mind can't stand the fact that you don't know what I'm talking about. So, so an example would be one of my big ones was, Boy, did I get in trouble? That was the subject line to an email, and using this in the subject line gets you more open a higher open rate. And then inside, I might have said something I can't remember, like the one I did on Valentine's Day. So I said, Man, my back is killing me whenever I have to sleep on the couch because I screw up with my girlfriend. It's terrible, terrible, terrible. Click here to see. See what the stupid thing I did on Valentine's Day. So people are like first of all, they opened it like crazy because boy, did I get in trouble. I say, What a Tom do now. What? How do you get in trouble? And then inside, OK, they're picturing, you know, the old thing of a guy having to sleep on the couch when he messes up for his girlfriend, you know? And so but they don't know what I did exactly. So they had to click through to see what I did. What I did as a joke was that I was at Home Depot, and they have these enormous what what you would normally call a dustpan.

[00:25:36] You know, you hold the thing down the floor and sweep the broom, sweep the dust onto it, then throw it in a garbage, right? Well, they had these ones that are like five times as wide, enormous, these dust pans for contractors. So, oh, I got one. I put a bow on it and put a note in. Here's the help you with the housework I. So I mean, people got a big kick out of this, I forget what I was promoting or anything but, but but but that is the Gornick technique. You, you get the curiosity up and there's so many places we use this. And again, you'll see I go really deep on it in the the webinar. Ok, next thing is the reason why. See, people love a sale. But if you don't give them a reason why you're having a sale, your original price starts to look funky and like it's not credible. Example I use from the speaking industry is people say, Well, we like to have you come in and speak. You come highly recommend. Oh, great. And what's your fee? Well, it's $20000. Well, we only have fifteen hundred, I'll take it. That's an example of the twenty thousand wasn't credible because I immediately blew it off to take whatever I could get. I mean, that makes you look like a fool, basically in the eyes of meeting planner.

[00:27:04] But here's the thing. Let's say I said twenty thousand and they said, Oh, we only have one thousand five hundred, I'm sorry to bother you. I said, Well, wait a minute, let's talk about how many people you got. Well, there'd be three hundred and fifty entrepreneurs there. Aha, entrepreneurs target market for me. Well, I'll tell you what. This happens to me frequently if I'm able to sell my product at the back of the room then and also get the database of people so I can follow up. I'd be willing to do it for fifteen hundred. In fact, if I sell so much, I won't even charge you the fifteen hundred. All right. So so now they're thinking, Oh man, this is a this is reasonable. He can make his money from the people in the crowd doesn't have to charge us as much and we get this great speaker. See, but if I had to just, you know, gone from twenty thousand to fifteen hundred, I'll take it. All of a sudden they'd say, Oh man, he must not be as good as they're saying, why would he do that? You know, so. So that's the reason why you got to give people a reason why you're going to discount. Only exception to this is when the whole world is expecting a discount. And when would that be? Presidents Day, Fourth of July, you know, Black Friday.

[00:28:29] Or, you know, all these places that everybody's expecting big sales or you don't have to do the reason why, but other times you do OK. Next one is scare tactics. Now this sounds mean and rotten, and it can be mean and rotten. I mean, you can use these techniques for good or bad, but I always use them for good. And if I find somebody using them for bad, I usually go after them in my. I got a TV show in development called Scam Brigade. Check it out, ScamBrigade.com. But anyway, to me, a scare tactic is that I want the audience to know or the reader or whoever the listener or whatever to know that there's consequences to not knowing what I know or not having what I have. And one of the examples I saw is watching this infomercial and the entire commercial was people broken legs, crutches laying down in their front yard on top of their sidewalk, with a ladder laying on top of them. And and the whole thing was to promote this, this piece of aluminum. And it looked it looked like a giant candy cane. You know, it had a little hook at the top. Well, what it was, is that something you put on the end of your garden hose and you can stand on the ground and clean your gutters out. But the entire commercial was based on scaring you of the consequences of getting up on the ladder and trying to clean your gutters.

[00:29:55] All right, so think of it like that. It's the consequences. It's not mean it's the consequences of not having your product or not knowing what you know. That's a scare tactic. Ok, features in Bennett, like I said, all five of these I go deep into with all kinds of examples on the webinar. So the next one is features and benefits. Most people mess up and just put the features, and I've done it myself in the early days. The features of their product, but not the benefits to the person that gets the product. So basically a feature is what the product is. A benefit is what the product does for you. If you're going to mess up, mess up on the forget the features and just put the benefits. All right, but don't mess up, put both of them. So feature, let's say, might be for an e-book is let's say you're selling an e-book and it's immediately downloadable. So you say immediately downloadable e-book. Ok, so that's the feature, it's an e-book, but the benefit of that is you'll be reading and learning about your topic in five minutes or less. So feature downloadable e-book benefit. You'll be reading it really fast. With no shipping, you can throw in no shipping, no handling. You can carry it with you on your cell phone, tablet.

[00:31:24] Those are all benefits of it, see? So you must clearly define the features and benefits of your product. And if you can't do it, how do you expect other people to do it? So that's features and benefits. And on the webinar, I got a way that I was taught over 20 years ago that I use over and over and over again to to display the features and benefits in a certain way. And it's very easy for you to do. Doesn't take a lot of thought. You know, a lot of these things are very easy because when I think of fiction writers, their minds have to be like steel traps. They have to to characters and character development and plot. And it's, you know, I don't have that kind of mind, but simply putting together features and benefits and telling people about them, you don't even they don't even have to be in the same order. They could be in any order or it doesn't matter. So it's way easier if you just learn the techniques than any kind of, you know, creative writing. I am not saying that good sales letters can't be creative, I'm just saying that you can do this. I've only failed one time in twenty three years and the guy was virtually illiterate, right? So I don't even know how I let him in the program. So that's the features and benefits, and the next thing is a cost.

[00:32:46] There are two different kinds of cost comparisons. So cost comparison would be the first one I like is apples to oranges for the cost of a cup of Starbucks a day, you could be getting standing ovations around the world. All right. So they have nothing to do with each other, but they work like a charm. That's some of these things are just so beautifully illogical, but they work like crazy so people can relate to that. Oh man. For a couple of bucks a day, I could be getting standing ovations from my speaking engagements. Awesome. So that's apples to oranges, and the other one is comparing something expensive that's good to something cheap. That's better example. That would be for twenty thousand dollars a day plus per diem, plus an assistant plus travel. You can have Tom come in and do an internet seminar for your company, but for only five hundred and ninety nine dollars, you could license his his distance training and teach all your new hires and not be under pressure to learn it all in one day. Say so I'd rather sell hundreds of those five hundred and ninety nine things, then one $20000 thing now the 20, I'm happy to do the twenty thousand dollars thing. Not nowadays. I don't want to get on a plane nowadays, but anyway, I would do a good job and boom, boom, boom, they'd get value out of it.

[00:34:10] But the thing is is I'd rather sell hundreds of these five point ninety nine things and just sit on my fat butt in front of this microphone. Say so something expensive. That's good compared to something cheaper. That's better. All right. So that's your you got to watch that webinar. I'm telling you, folks, that this can mean millions and millions of dollars getting this copywriting skill under your belt and then applying it to your upselling. And all the other things we cover today can can change the course of your career, your life, your bank accounts, everything. So, so, so that's my story, and I'm sticking to it. Please check out the Go Fund Me campaign at IMTCVA.org/disabilities. Help out there. It's something you can really be proud of. I'm so proud of it, and they're already making progress. The one lady is completely blind and she's already within one month helping her husband, who's got a construction business on his website. And she's blind, right? So don't tell me you can't do this, but help us out and get them through the school. And we're going to use some of the money to hire people with disabilities to help run the program. And it's something that I'm really excited about. It's going to be a legacy thing to help these people forever. All right. IMTCVA.org/disabilities and I will catch you on the next episode. See you later.

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