How to Make a Compelling Offer: Stop Selling Features Nobody Asked About

Understand, I didn't understand what it took to make a compelling offer, and then I started to understand. And I think we're gonna bring up, you know, Tony wanted to talk about this a little bit because he's one of the... now you've been, Tony, I don't know if you can pop right up here, man, but I mean you're one of the guys, man, who has been making videos. It doesn't matter, give Tony Rush a hand, guys. It doesn't matter, Tony's one of the guys, and I can remember a video for a company one time that I watched, and you know, I was immediately just hypnotized by that webinar. Yes. So one thing that I can point out, and I don't know if you want to, Tony, I don't know if you want to talk about this a little bit with the upside-down webinar concept that you came up with, but I saw that video, I was, I was real good. Okay, so one of the things that I noticed about that, and it was a little bit along with what I was talking about before and what Dave mentioned earlier, which was when the whole crowd is doing one thing, what you go and do the other thing if you want to stand out. And so what I remember about that particular company was that everybody was slamming the boring ass company video that never sold anything, and it was like, get more eyes on the video, and it just didn't sell anything, right, because they didn't understand how to make a compelling offer. And then you came out with this thing, and I don't know if you just repeated that company after company after company, but I saw it with one particular company, and it was so compelling, man, that I actually signed up and used that video, and that video only. Yeah, it was just, it was that good. So anyways, take it away, brother.

Yeah, we're gonna sit down for the next two hours just, you know, seriously about a compelling offer, man. I mean, you know, we've talked about getting traffic, we've talked about getting leads. Okay, what I want you to talk about is, you know, what you did from transitioning over from doing the same thing that everybody else was doing that didn't work, to understanding how to make a compelling offer, whether it be through a video, whether it be through an email, whether it be through a conference call, how to make a compelling offer and what makes people tick, and just your thoughts on that. Right, stay on channel if you're new on my YouTube channel to make a compelling offer, all the views and the information that I need to be, an athlete website or even an online, visit us, thanks. Stand out. Just be different. I think I've still got a piece of ham in my tooth. Can anybody see that? That's fine.

I thought that was your tooth. We were actually having a conversation about this just outside. Where's Grant? Where's Grant? We were just having a conversation about this.

Everybody in here familiar with the, I don't want to go into this in detail, but everybody's familiar with the concept of features versus benefits? Raise your hand if you don't know what I'm talking about. Features versus benefits. Okay, well, I'll touch on it. So the idea is that people don't buy features, they buy benefits.

A feature is like, I'm in a company that has been in business for seven years. Yawn. Right, nobody cares. Nobody cares how long your company's been in business. Nobody cares what the headquarters look like.

This is why corporate websites suck so bad. Have you guys ever been to the company website, and it's got this really pretty picture of the home office, and then they always show those big air handlers on the top of the warehouse, and they're saying, you know, we've got this machine that will bottle, you know, 17 bottles of vitamins every three seconds, and you're sitting there, and you're in a coma, you know. Those are features. Benefits are what the product, opportunity, or service will do for you. So anyway, when I got this, I realized, and this was several years ago, but I just realized, God, no wonder I can't sign anybody up.

I am just inundating people with features. I'm talking about how our company's debt-free, the company's been in business for eight years, the company's in 64 different countries, a bunch of stuff that nobody cares about. So when I started marketing on, here's what the opportunity will do for you, you know. Let me give you one example real quick, too. Like, so airlines, if they want to sell you tickets to Hawaii, they don't show you a picture of the airplane.

You know, they don't show you, well, it seats, you know, 700 people or 400 people. They don't say, well, it's got tires that are this big. You know, they show you pictures of white sand, and luaus, and hula girls, right? Because that's what people want. That's what they want to go to Hawaii for.

They don't really care about the features. So anyway, when I got this, it totally changed everything. But what Grant and I were talking about a few minutes ago is how to sort of take ownership of that process yourself instead of only relying on the materials that you're given. Now, we are really fortunate here because we've got bad asses. We've got bad asses that write some killer ad copy.

You know, like Sharpe and Wood will write something up. And you can just, a lot of times, I really do just copy and paste what you guys write, and just, you know, change it around. I like when you put your, I like when you make up a title for yourself, too. It's like David Wood, the Guru Slayer. Because then I just change that, and I become Tony Rush, the Guru Slayer, right?

But what was the one you did the other day, the Commissioned Magician? Oh, that's gangster, isn't it? But anyway, so we've got the benefit of having a lot of really good benefit-driven ad copy here, but one of the things that Grant and I were just talking about out in the lobby was how to create personality-driven, compelling communication to your list. Sophia was touching on this a few minutes ago. You remember when she said, you know, if you've got traffic coming in, you've got good quality traffic coming in, but you're not generating leads.

What's because? There's an incongruency between the traffic, your ad, and then the actual page. Have we all had that happen before, where you've got, you pay for an ad, and you just don't gain leads? Okay. The cool thing is if you're marketing Empower Network, all the lead capture pages, they convert really, really well.

I think the last campaign I did was like 30, 32% on one of them. I think it was that true story page. And that weird marketing tricks one is just always a good one. That thing just sucks up leads like you wouldn't believe. But here's the thing, too, that happens is that you get leads in, and then you don't have as many sales as you think you're supposed to have.

Has anybody had that experience? Where you ran a campaign, maybe a solo ad for a thousand clicks or something, and you got, say, 250 leads, and you just kind of skip over that and say, well, I only got one or two sales, which is where people's heads kind of start freaking out a little bit. And then they'll say stuff like, well, the solo ads don't work. Well, the solo ad just pulled 250 leads out of thin air. It worked.

Right? But what you did or didn't do to create sales, you can't lay that at the feet of the solo ad. You know? So it's like, if you got leads in, the traffic campaign did what it was supposed to do. What you do to create sales is something else over here.

Right? So if you're not making sales, you can't go over there. So we weigh leads on traffic source scales, and we weigh sales over here on the communication scales. Does that make sense? You don't want to weigh this stuff on those scales over there.

So you run an ad campaign, you got a thousand clicks, you got 250 leads come in. That worked. Okay? So the question now over here is, well, how do I get these 250 people to buy? How do I get lots of sales out of this?

And it comes down to what Sharpe was just talking about, which is, I think, taking responsibility, taking ownership over how you communicate with these folks. There's not only one way to do it. So what I'm about to say is not good, bad, right, or wrong. And matter of fact, I should probably qualify this.

You guys remember last night, I'm sorry, Thursday night, when David and David drew on the board over here. There's different stages of the business, right? Everybody with me? Different stages of the business, right? Okay, good.

Now, when you see Rob Ford doing something, you can't necessarily assume you need to be doing the same thing, because you may be in a different stage of the business, right? Okay, so what I'm going to say, this is just what I do. I do think it's something that's applicable to any of us. It's something to touch on. But don't get stressed out about it if you're not a writer, okay, because I'm going to talk just briefly about how to communicate through writing.

And that is this. When I first got started, I just loaded up my AWeber account with a bunch of pre-written autoresponders. And they worked. I made a bunch of money with that. Does anybody in here have a bunch of pre-written letters in your, yeah, in your AWeber?

So that's what I did. And they worked great. And then what I found was, though, I really enjoyed actually sitting down and writing something myself. You know, like you're watching something on the Olympics, and something just amazing happens on the Olympics, and you think, you know, this is kind of like business. And you say, that's an email.

That's an email. And you think, okay, hey, I was just watching, I was watching the Olympics tonight and this happened, and it made me think, man, that so describes where I was when I was trying to figure out how to make money from home. And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then there's a call to action, click here, let's just get started, whatever. So that becomes this, it's time sensitive, because anybody who's watching the Olympics that night saw the same thing you saw.

And your open rate can just be insane sometimes. So gradually what I did was I sort of weaned myself. I kind of turned myself off of having these big long pre-written autoresponder letters, because I just like showing up five or six times a week to write something. If I'm sending an email very late at night, sometimes the subject line just says, hey, are you still up? You know, subject lines, you know, determine your open rate for the most part.

So, so my point here is that when I started taking more responsibility over my communication with my leads, I got a lot more sales with a lot fewer leads. So, I think my list now is like, I think I have like 7,000 people on my list after nine months, which is weenie, weenie. And a lot of that comes from another topic, which I'll just mention just to explain it. I have gotten in such a habit for years of not spending money on marketing,

because I was getting such good results out of the few leads I had. But then when I got to Atlanta, it was like, my God, I'm playing small, and why, I mean, I could just scale all this up, you know, and really, really earn some monster money. And so since Atlanta, I have been doing a lot more spending on advertising, and the results are showing, but it still comes down for me to taking some ownership over this communication process and being myself. Focus. Okay.

Focusing on what we can do for somebody, not, you know, we don't talk about how Empower Network's been in business for nine months and we're in this many countries. It's all about what we can, what we can do for them, and then doing it in a sort of a personality driven way. I do have a couple of things for your notes. Does anyone know what an archetype is?

Did you study mythology in school? You know, there's different archetypes, a few of you, there's kind of that in the marketing industry too. Like Dagan's here, Dagan is, his archetype is, I mean, he's known as the king of never calling a single lead. That's bad ass. Isn't it?

Give Dagan a hand just for coming up with an awesome slogan, right? That's awesome. That's who you are, right? That's just who he is. And he didn't have to like dream that up.

That's not the work of some PR company. He just said, who am I? Well, I'm just the king of not calling people. That's awesome. Right?

So can you see how, like, even if I don't like calling people, which I don't, and I've been following Dagan for years, so I've probably got like every email you've ever wrote. So Dagan is just a bad ass copywriter. So I've got like all of his emails in a file on my Gmail. So you sift through some of this stuff and you think, man, that's just an awesome message. But I couldn't really copy and paste his stuff to my list because we're different personalities, right?

Who in here knows who Frank Kern is? Like, can you picture me trying to send something out to my friends? To my list, that Frank Kern writes to his list? That just doesn't work. I mean, I bought these shorts cause I didn't have any shorts to come to Costa Rica.

I mean, I don't wear shorts. Frank Kern probably doesn't own jeans. He doesn't, you know, his whole archetype is, I'm the lazy guy in the hammock who twitches my little finger and a million dollars comes flying in the door. That's his, that's sort of his public persona. Dillard, you know, Dillard, if I were going to describe Mike Dillard, I'd probably say his archetype, his public persona.

His public persona is Mr. Credibility. He's the guy, you can just picture that if Dillard comes out and says something, he probably was not willing to say it until he actually studied it for two solid months, squeezed every ounce of information out of it, and now he's presenting it to you as, this is my informed opinion. So he's the credible expert. And you got other folks like Tracy Walker.

She's just, she's just the young pretty girl from Atlanta who can show you how to make a lot of money from home. And you got other people who are well-mannered. Yeah. Well, she's the homeschooling mom that makes a lot of money from home. And so everybody's got their own personality, and I think one of the biggest challenges that we have is we're just not willing to be ourself. Like, you hear us say, just be yourself, and you almost want to believe it, and you sort of believe it in your head, but still when it comes to your heart, you kind of think that's not enough.

If I just be myself, that's not enough for me to get where I want to go. And when you start thinking that way, that's the mental mistake that's going to create all of your struggle, because then what you wind up doing is trying to be Frank Kern, and you can't. And I made this mistake years ago, because I would copy and paste, and we still all use swipe files and borrow from marketers that we respect, but you might get inspiration or something from a marketer, but you have to be yourself when you turn around and present that idea to your list, in the form of a video or a broadcast or something like that. And so I used to make that mistake. I would try to be, you know, like Mike Dillard, or I would try to be, you know, a Frank Kern or something.

And what I figured out is I can be the best Tony Rush in the world, but I suck at being anybody else. You know, Jake's laughing at me, but I'm right, Jake, I mean, you've seen this in other areas of your life, right? You can be the best Jake in the world, but you know, you just don't be able to copy everybody. So I think to some degree, part of this game, eventually, whether you know, whether you're over here in that far away left category we talked about, or whether you're working this way toward 20, 30, 50, and a hundred thousand a month, sooner or later, we all, one of the transitions we had to make was believing in ourselves to the point that we would accept that who you are is enough.

It really is enough, warts and all, you know. I mean, everybody jokes because in Atlanta I mentioned I have a bald spot, and nobody will tell you for sure. You know, it's like, I wonder how many people saw that before I did, you know. But like, you know, and I got this spare tooth up here cause I didn't have braces when I was a kid, you know, but we get wrapped up in this thing where we think we have to just be, why does it have to be perfect? Cause our prospects are not perfect. You guys get that?

You know, now if I looked like Aaron Rashkin, I could probably make more money. You know, if I had, if I had Dagan's skill and Aaron's looks, now, we'd be talking, right? But seriously, like that's, and I joke about that, but like, that's the kind of thinking that people get trapped into, because they'll see Aaron and they'll say, you know, well, I mean, he's fit and trim, he's got a beautiful smile, and he's a charismatic personality, and you got a lot more hair than I do. Yeah.

But I didn't have to buy mine. That's, you know. Oh, I'm just kidding. That's a joke. But the self talk can be brutal in this game.

Can it not? I mean, how many people, when I figured out that, like, if I talked to my wife the way I talk to myself, I would be divorced a long time ago. You know, if I talked to my friends the way I talk to myself, sometimes I'd be alone. And the self talk in this game can really be brutal, because you catch yourself almost by default saying, making invalid comparisons.

You know, like you say, well, you know, Aaron's been in the game, say he's been in Empower Network for eight months, I've been in for seven months, and I'm not making near as much money. Yeah. I'm not making near as much money as him. So that's totally invalid.

But that's the kind of game that your mind likes to play, isn't it? And what's your mind say? What's your mind say? Why am I not? What's wrong with me?

Yeah. Why am I not getting those results? And I think the thing that we have to remind ourselves constantly is that we're all on our own journey. We all came in, you know, you didn't see my grind because my grind was several years ago. You know, when I lived in this crappy little house outside of Asheboro, North Carolina, and we didn't have any money for groceries, and I was two months late on my rent, and I took the only $500 I had and joined a home business with it.

And you could just feel all my relatives cringing, like, he did what, he can't pay his bills and he used the only money he had to join a business, you know. So you guys didn't see that. It didn't happen here at Empower, but we've all gone through those stages, those categories of growth, you know, and it's not good, bad, right, or wrong, but I love what Sharpe said two nights ago. He said, there's great power in just locating where you are on that map and just owning it. Hey, here's where I am. It's not where I want to be, but it's not where I'm going to be, you know, and a great deal of moving very quickly through those different stages is knowing why you're here, you know?

Real quick, when somebody does manage to get me on the phone and they say, hey, can I ask you some questions about what I should be doing? I usually say, yeah, but let me ask you one first. What's your goal? And you can tell they don't know, they don't have a goal, because you can see somebody says, what's your goal, and they, you've heard this first.

They're like, well, I, you know, I want to, and you know, right then they have never laid awake at night visualizing what their life's about to look like, they are manufacturing a goal right there, they're in the conversation, and my response to them is, okay, here's what I want you to do, go get put on your goal, because if I gave you, if I answer any questions for you, it's going to be wasted time for both of us, because you don't know where you want to go, you know? So you got to know what your why is. Number two, the second thing I would probably offer today is, some people, certainly nobody in this room has done this, but some people like to, they say, okay, I'm going to do it.

Everybody says paid marketing is the way to go. I'm going to break out the big checkbook, and I'm going to spend, okay, $500 on an ad, for some people it's a thousand, some people it's 200, and they do it. And like for that brief moment, they're a bad ass. Right. And then like they stop, they freeze everything, and they become immobilized, and then they go back into analytical mode, you know?

And they're like, well, how many leads did I get? And of the leads I got, how many convert? And those are good questions to ask, but they're immobilized while they're asking them, because what the bad ass actually does is run the ad again the next week, and the next week, and the next week, because when you catch yourself asking questions like, is this working, you're actually in the company trying to decide whether to join or not. Now I don't want to ask you about raising your hands, but I will say I have been that guy where I've actually been in the company trying to get other people.

I've asked other people to join, but if you listen to my self talk, I'm actually trying to decide whether to get in the business or not. And I have a friend of mine in Tucson who runs every day. I don't run unless someone's chasing me, but she runs every day, and she says, I don't have to, you know, people talk about, you know, you get up and it's cold, or you get up and it's rainy or whatever. She said, no, I don't have that problem, because I decided to be a runner. I don't have to decide every morning whether I'm going to run or not.

Right. I made that decision one time for the rest of my life. I'm a runner, and runners run. That's what they do, right? So it's the same thing in business, is like, I don't get up.

I don't hinge my belief, or my confidence, or my security level in this business based on how an ad goes, because I ran an ad last week that sucked. I don't think I got a single lead out of that ad, and by the way, I hope that shatters some mythology, because there is the myth that all these people in the front row have got it so dialed in that they never miss a trip, right? Like it just all, every ad is just dripping with milk and honey, and every ad just sucks up money like a tornado on steroids, you know? But that's not real. I mean, I write ads that suck.

I write ads that suck up a lot of money, but you never know until you run it, but you can't become immobilized by the analytical side of your head and freeze everything and try to see if it works. It works. We know it works, you know? We know it works. So the first thing is know where you're going.

Get excited about what your life's about to look like, you know? Number two is just play full out. Get your damn foot off the brake, you know? Whatever your business is. I mean, those of you watching this program, it doesn't matter what you're marketing, but this is a fact of human nature.

Human beings love to have their foot on the brake, you know? We just love that for some reason, and then complain about why we're not doing 120 miles an hour. Did you want to take a break? No. Do you want to take my picture?

There you go. Hold on. I'll be right with y'all. Thank you. I saw her taking photos.

I thought, surely she wanted this magnificent mug. Right? No. So know where you're going, you know? Know what you're about.

Know what your life's about to look like. Get your foot off the brake and just play full out, you know? Whatever your business is. Of course, those of us who are marketing Empower Network, you know, I'll be honest. I think we have it a little better than most because we have a lot of this stuff built up.

You know? I'll be more honest. I think we have it a little better than most because we have a lot of this stuff built in, so it's a little idiot proof, which is good for people like me. Sharpe, that's what comes to mind for me today, bud.

I'm complete. Yeah. Let me ask another, you're supposed to talk for another hour. I'm kidding.

Hold on. Here real quick. Let me ask you a question. Yeah. Let me ask you a question.

Right up front, right off the bat, we're talking about features and benefits, and most people, and most company videos do this, they're just awful, you know what I mean, look at the picture of the front of the office building and the sign that's made of a special kind of tin, you know. Yes, but why do people, what are the reasons why people will join, I mean, not just this but any opportunity, like as far as joining an opportunity, what are the benefits and the reasons from your perspective of why people join? When I did phone prospecting, huh, I don't think it's an accident that every single prospect I ever talked to all wanted the same thing. What was it? Every one of them, they just didn't want to work for somebody, and they wanted to have enough money to do what they wanted, when they wanted, with the people they were in love with. That's it, period. That's, now if there's something else, I never identified it, but most people just didn't like where they were working, and they just didn't have enough money to do the stuff they wanted to do with the people they wanted to do it with. Now how much else do they care about? Most of the time, no, they don't. That's all they care about, most of the time. Most of the time, that's it. Now sometimes they want to save the whales too, and that's not, well, they think they want to save the whales, right, you know, because they're trying to glorify themselves, yes, you know, beyond the guy that just wants money, you know what I mean. But they just want money, don't they? Do that, don't they? They'll make up reasons, I would get in there, but you guys just want money, and I want to help people, yeah, that kind of thing. Not really, not really, they just want the money. Yeah, if they wanted to help people they'd quit their job and move to Africa and go help people, you know what I mean. They want money. And the thing is, I want to point this out, guys, anybody remember the original video we made for Empower? Anybody see that? I mean, we had to take, we had to take it down, you know, I probably shouldn't say this in the recording, but we had to take that video down. But the truth is, what did that video talk about? Getting money. That's it, for like 25 minutes. Do you remember that? I didn't see it, I got here late. Oh, I got to find this thing and I got to send it to you. Who saw that? You did? You guys see it, it was like 25 minutes of getting money, wasn't it? Now that video outconverted almost anything that we've ever done. Like it was, it was literally that we had 200 slides that said 100% commissions, 200. Yeah, the most hilarious thing, the most hilarious thing you ever, I gotta show it to you, just, but then you'll show it to people, and we had to take it down. Yeah, sign up again. But guys, I mean, this is useful to see, right? People have pretty much the same problems, if we're marketing to people, we're in network marketing, yeah, same problems everywhere, right, which is people are trying something, it's not working. That's the essential problem, that boils down to whether they think they need more leads, or whether they need a better line to wander around in Walmart with, right? They are trying something, and it's not working, or they think they're trying something, and they're sitting there a lot, and that's not working either, so they keep buying stuff or whatever, right? But they have that problem manifest in about 18 different ways, and the reason they want to solve the problem is because they want to get more money, right? That's pretty much it. Now there's a million ways to phrase that, you know what I mean, there's a million ways to make it cooler. People want to get a lot of money, and they don't want to pick up the phone. So when they see Dagan's thing and it says, how I made four thousand four hundred and twenty two dollars and fifty cents last night while I was sleeping, without picking up the phone, you know, on a headline or something like that, you know, it's like a fried hammock on a beach somewhere. Yeah, right, they also want to not pick up the phone and not feel like a moron, right? But they want to do that and get a lot of money at the same time, right? It's funny, I did a meeting one time where, just to illustrate the point, I asked how many people in here want to get rich quick, and like nobody raised their hand, you know, whatever, that's a forbidden phrase, you're not, he said that, but then you ask people, do you want to be financially independent, oh yes, I want to be financially independent, you're not going to be financially independent. Would you rather do that sooner or later? Always sooner. So you want to get rich quick? Oh no.

It's funny the lengths that people go to stay stuck, to just not admit that they want what they really want. They want to get rich quick. Which is a plan to get rich quick. I'm going to lobby that we just make that our slogan.

This is a place to just come and get rich quick. Yeah, they're in a get rich slow scheme is what they're in right now. It's not even a get rich slow scheme. It's a get rich never scheme. It's a not get rich and hate my life scheme.

Give him a hand.