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Dear Friend,

Earlier this month a good friend and mentor of mine named Gary Halbert died, and I’ve been thinking a lot about him this month, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the influence that he had on a lot of my marketing.

You know, Gary was one of the greatest marketing minds, and his newsletter that he cleverly called ‘The Gary Halbert Letter’ was perhaps one of the most influential voices guiding the careers of countless marketers and copyrighters all over the world, and I was fortunate enough to count Gary as a friend. He lived in Florida, and we go to know each other, and we got to spend time together, we got to talk on the phone a lot, and you know, he was a great person to bounce ideas off.

And early in my career when I was first starting out in marketing, he was definitely one of the first people that I learned the concepts of marketing from. And I was thinking about it over the past few weeks here, what were some of the most influential ideas that I got from Gary, and I wanted to share some of those ideas with you, because if you’ve been listening to Marketing Monday you’ve seen a lot of Gary Halbert influence over the year here in a lot of the concepts that I have. And I have to say that knowing these concepts and knowing Gary Halbert had changed my life and changed the course of my life, and if you can adopt these principles of marketing they can change your life too.

So I’m going to share five of the best ideas that I got from Gary Halbert. So here it is:

Idea #1: Use patient, baby steps to get the name, address and telephone number of everyone who is likely to be your customer.

Now we talk a lot about this potato chip marketing, about leading with the giving hand, about making a low resistance offer, all of those things are sort of derivative of this idea of using baby steps, especially when you can’t just get a list of the people who are likely to be your customers.

You know, if you’re selling something to chiropractors, or doctors, or dentists, or golfers, all of those things you can readily and easily get a list of people who happen to be chiropractors, or doctors, and you know that that’s true, and you can market to them. But what you can’t do is we can’t buy a list of people who are going to sell their home in the next six months, or people who are going to buy a home in the next six months, because those things are behavioural. You know, they’re things that people, they come up and they enter the process of buying or selling a home, and often what we try and do as marketers and as realtors and lenders is to try and convince people that they should choose us, you know, just based on our ads.

You know, we spend a lot of money on personal promotion things, and that’s why personal promotion has really become the prominent marketing technique in real estate, where people want to get your name out there so that people know to choose you. But what Gary taught in his concepts was to start out with a very, very small step. Start out with something that would get people who are thinking about selling their house, or thinking about buying a house to raise their hand. And he used to tell a story, and the first time I heard it really crystallised this concept for me.

He used to talk about how tugboats can move big ocean liners, and how even though they’re so much smaller, and they are dwarfed by the size of these big ocean liners, they are able to move and direct the flow of those ocean liners. And the way that they do it is they start out with shooting a fine line, a small rope, up over the bow of these big ships, and the people on the big ship can start attaching and pulling in that small rope, which is attached to a larger rope, which is attached to a bigger cable, which is attached to a big chain that now this chain is attached to the big boat, and that gives the engine, that gives the tugboat the ability to pull and direct this big ship, this big ocean liner.

And you know, the analogy there is that even though they need that big chain to move that big boat, if they started out trying to shoot that big chain up over the bow, they couldn’t do it. They wouldn’t have enough power to get that big chain up over the bow, but they start out with something very small. They start out with a very small cord, and that cord is attached to a larger cable, and that cord is attached to the larger chain, and as you’re pulling it all in they’re able to direct the flow of this ocean liner.

And it’s the same way with our prospects. Even though, you know, we’re not going to spend all kinds of money on personal brochures and on things that are going to direct people to choose us and list with us right from the power of our very first mailing, but what we can do is we can make simple offers on a tiny postcard that we mail to an entire farm area, and get all the people who are thinking about selling their house in the next six months to raise their hand, and that’s like that tiny line that we’re sending up over the bow. That when they send that tiny line, now we know who the people who are going to be selling their house in the next six months are, and we’re able to, through future communications, through building our relationship with them, strengthen that relationship so that it’s a strong as that chain, and we can direct those people towards us.

So that has been a big influence in my life, that’s been one of the things that has really been at the core of all of the marketing that I teach, of starting out with very, very small offers, not about you focusing 100% on your prospects, and then as soon as they take that first line, now we start slowly, over time, building that relationship so that we’ve got that relationship bond with them.

Idea #2: Always remember to speak to one person at a time.

You know, Gary used to say that even though your ad is seen by hundreds or thousands of people, or your letter is mailed to hundreds or thousands of people, it’s ultimately read by one person. And the greatest thing you can do is to think what would you say to one single person if you were able to sit down with them.

You know, Gary had a great skill of being able to write in a way that made you feel like you were the only one reading that letter, or that ad, that you were the only person. And you know, he used to say that you would want to focus on the only person that matters, the person who is your ideal prospect. You’re not going to water down your message to try and appeal to everybody; you’re going to speak as if you’re speaking to one person who absolutely wants what it is that you are offering. And you’re only going to speak to that person.

You know, you’re going to speak to people about what they want to talk about, in the way that they want to talk about it. You know, buying a horse farm is different then buying a condo in the city, and you’re going to speak to the person who’s looking for a horse farm differently then you’re going to speak to the person who is looking for a condo. You know?

Even though you want to help everyone, people are always and only focused on themselves. That’s why I’ve become such a big advocate for approaching one target market at a time. You know, you can have as many target markets as you want, but you are best to focus on one at a time and make every single marketing piece that you send, or every single ad that you run only speak to one ideal prospect in one ideal target market.

Idea #3: Focus more on what you say then how you say it.

You know, Gary had a great phrase called ‘human engineering’ and, you know, it was interesting because he used to tell this story to illustrate this point that what you say is really the core of your message. If you’re message is completely on target, the response that you’re going to get from your audience, or the person, the one single person who’s reading your message, is going to be very positive.

You know, he would tell a story of imagine that you were expecting a baby, and you’re wife was pregnant, and you were at work, and you were in a conference or at a meeting, and people, you know, your cell phone wouldn’t work in the building, and they’d been trying and trying and trying to reach with the news that your wife had just given birth to triplets, and you’re, you know, somebody is faced with the task, they finally get a hold of the receptionist at the conference room where you are, and they’re given the message to get the message to you that your wife has just given birth to triplets.

Now is there any possible way that you could convey that message, are there any words that you could use to convey that message that would not get an excited response? You know, you could say “Hey, guess what? Your wife just had triplets.” Or you could say “You know what? You’re not going to believe it, your wife just gave birth to triplets.” Or “You better get to the hospital right away, your wife just had three babies.” You know, people get caught up so often in being a wordsmith, in trying to figure out exactly the right words to say, or the most, you know, you used to say pithy words, or clever ways of writing or saying things.

But I guess the essence of what he was really saying was that the substance of your message is what’s really more important then how you say it. And that’s why he always talked about focusing on your offer. On focusing on what it is that you’re saying to people, and not necessarily on how you say it.

Idea #4: Use life or death provocations to clarify your thinking.

Now you’ve heard me talk before about scenarios where, I’ve talked about it with lead conversion, where if you imagine that your life was on the line for something, how would you behave and what would you do? So the example I gave was: What would happen if I gave you 100 leads today and said “Here they are, now it’s April 29th and you’ve got one year from right now to bond with these 100 people, and if any of these 100 people buy a home in your town without you, you are going to be beheaded.”

Now, you know, it’s very interesting, isn’t it? I mean, if you raised the level of your thinking to that extreme, that your life depended on the way that you follow up and build a relationship with these 100 people, do you think that you would convert more leads? Of course you would. You know? And this is the kind of thinking that if you can get yourself in that state of mind, is really where you’re going to have breakthroughs in your thinking.

You know, I often talk about it from a standpoint of listings. What if you were on a listing appointment, or for the next 12 months that any listing that you take from now on, if any of those listings don’t sell within 30 days you’re going to be beheaded, what would that do with the way that you take on listings? You know, you’d probably be a little more discriminating right up front, wouldn’t you? You’d probably make sure that you didn’t walk out of a listing appointment with a listing that you know is not going to sell because its overpriced, or because the sellers aren’t motivated, or because the house doesn’t show well and you don’t have the courage to tell them that.

If you are approaching these mindsets, if you’ve approaching these situations with the mindset that your life is on the line, that’s really going to clarify all the things that really matter. You know, if your life depended on it, you would not take a listing that was even a little bit overpriced. You wouldn’t take a listing that just needed a couple of little things done to get it in show ready condition. You wouldn’t do that if your life depended on it. But because your life doesn’t depend on it, and because we want listings so badly sometimes, you take listings that you know are expired the minute you walk out the door. You know? Or you start working with buyers who you know are never going to buy a house, or can’t qualify for a house.
You know, all of those kinds of things, when you put that mindset to the test, you’ll find that it will absolutely lead to clarity for you, and it has for me.

Idea #5: There’s no more valuable skill then the ability to put words on paper that motivate people to take action.

And that really has been the biggest life changing experience for me. You know, marketing is the ultimate leverage because with marketing you can duplicate yourself. You can send out marketing pieces in your stead. You can have your marketing piece working for you again and again and again while you’re not working. You know? One sales letter, or one postcard, or one marketing campaign that works can completely change your life.

You know, it can take you from cold calling to having prospects calls you. It can take you from not knowing where your next transaction’s coming from to having a pipeline of more prospects then you can possibly handle. Marketing truly is the source for anything that you want in your life.

You know, I can’t say it enough how important learning marketing is, and how valuable it is to you. You know, I just look at my life and the things that have come into my life as a result of applying myself to studying and becoming a master of marketing skills. I mean, I get to split my year between two beautiful homes in Toronto and Florida, I drive a Porsche 911, a Mercedes SL500, we’ve got a BMW X5, I belong to two country clubs, I get to play golf three times a week, I wear shorts and flip-flops every single day, I’m living the lifestyle that I’ve designed specifically for me, and every single element of that life is made possible by my ability to put words on paper, or words on a website, that motivate people to take action.

If you have that skill, if you have the ability to get people who are going to sell their home to raise their hand and identify themselves to you six months before they sell their house, that is a life changing skill. If you’ve got the ability to have people who are going to buy a home in your marketplace come to you and identify themselves to you before they go and identify themselves to any other of your competitors, that is a life changing experience for you.

You know, that is why I’m such an advocate for you taking time every week out of your business to step away from your business, apply yourself to studying, marketing, to implementing marketing programs. Marketing programs are the ultimate leverage in your business, and that’s why I’m here every week, to help you really get a handle on your marketing.

That’s it for this week. Let’s tune in next time and we’ll talk about even more ways to get listings, to find buyers, and to convert leads. Have a great week.

P.S. check out this incredible archive of The Gary Halbert Letter