This is Dean Jackson, welcome to the More Cheese, Less Whiskers podcast. I've got a great episode for you today. I spoke with Matt Mason. Matt had been doing some nine-word emails approaching a new audience that he was trying to build a relationship with. One of the things that people always bring up to me especially when they're trying to approach new businesses, using a nine-word email as a cold email approach is that they run into problems or friction when they, as they call it, 'reveal their whiskers'.
When they make the switch they feel like they're tricking people into thinking that they're going to be bringing in new business. We had a really great conversation to set the tone of that and the bottom line is you've got to be in the business of getting results for people, and you've got to be so confident about your ability to get those results that you're willing or have evidence that shows that it's a sure thing. That gives you the confidence to make a better offer. I always ask, what would you do if you only got paid if your client gets their result?
This was a really great conversation. We talked about hearing aid specialists and we talked about pharmacists, and how to approach them with something that's really going to save them a lot of time. Enjoy this episode. You're going to get a lot out of this one.
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Transcript - More Cheese Less Whiskers 012
Dean: Matt Mason.
Matt: Hey Dean, how you doing?
Dean: I am fantastic. How are you?
Matt: I'm doing well. Appreciate you having me on.
Dean: Welcome to the evil scheme hatchery. What kind of evil schemes are we going to hatch today?
Matt: I know we were talking about that nine word email and the cheese and whiskers concept, so just figured I'd get some feedback on that.
Dean: Okay, perfect. Can you set the stage, tell me what you do and what the context of it is, and then we can take it from there?
Matt: Sure. Basically right now I am in sales, but I've been in the marketing world for probably about four, four and a half years at this point, so was thinking about starting up just a small consulting business on the side. The idea here is just to get my very first entry into consulting by working with hearing aid companies, hearing aid businesses, maybe franchises, maybe audiology companies, to just help them sell more products and that sort of thing. The idea I had is to open up with something similar to the nine word email and go from there. Just do something really simple, like actually implement that concept for them, and then once that relationship has been opened up I can talk to them about other projects.
Dean: Got you. Do you have any experience with hearing aid companies, or with hearing aid marketing? What was the attraction there? Why'd you choose that?
Matt: The attraction, I guess, was because my dad is actually going to be getting some soon we think, and I realize that there's a good market there. That's really it.
Dean: Your idea was to kind of reach out to some of the hearing aid companies using a nine word email. You actually did it, right? You went out and sent some emails to people?
Matt: I did.
Dean: It's kind of funny, we've never talked before, but I know that what triggered this is seeing your post in Copy Chief, in Kevin Rogers' community. You were kind of laying out what had happened, and that started quite a discussion. Can you share what happened, and then we can kind of break it down from there and see how to move forward, kind of thing?
Matt: Sure. I'll summarize the thread as best I can. Initially I had posted a five-email sequence that I had already tested with 22 people. I just had been finding email addresses manually using contact forms, that sort of thing, online. Basically the feedback I got was that, number one was, "You're doing it wrong," which was good to hear, because that's why I posted it. Specifically though, it sounded initially, and this is paraphrasing multiple people, but it sounds initially like the first email I'm sending is sounding like it's coming from a customer, and then the second email I'm sending is now, "Hey, buy stuff." That switch in perceived positioning from customer to service provider is a real jolt for them, and people don't really like that. Just trying to figure out how to move it out so I'm not coming off in the beginning like potentially a customer, and then switching to service provider and then irritating people, and having them not respond or get angry or whatnot, that's the basic idea.
Dean: Part of the thing is, this is where people often get kind of off track, using the nine word email let's say. I talked about the deployment about that in a situation that was kind of outbound with some restaurant owners, and that's where this all got started. It is difficult to reach out to anybody, any kind of new business, because they are constantly being bombarded. People are always trying to sell stuff to people. I'll just kind of give you the background of how that actually came about, because it's instructive here.
I have a company here in Florida that does all my postcard mailing, and one of the things that they have is a division that does birthday marketing for restaurants and spas and small businesses, where you can send some postcards on somebody's birthday and offer them a gift card to celebrate their birthday and to come into your restaurant, or your spa or whatever it is. They had a list of restaurants, and had just emailed to 3,200 or 3,600 restaurants, they mailed this HTML, beautiful looking email, that was 100% about them and how they could fill your empty tables. That was the headline on the thing, "We'll fill your empty tables."
Seemed like it's kind of outwardly focused, but they're using stats from the National Restaurant Association showing that 84% of people will celebrate their birthday by going out to eat with a group of at least six people. They're saying, "We've got these postcards that, we help people bring those people into your restaurant." Their approach was generally go go in and try and make a $3,000 sale, in that they would get people to send 500 cards a month for six months. That was kind of their approach to this.
They sent out that email and got nothing, no clicks to the website. It was crickets. Initially they thought, maybe this isn't going to the right people, or, this list is bad, or, we got bad emails. He said, "What would you have done differently?" That was where I suggested that approach of, first of all, selecting the right target audience. Profit activator one is selecting a target audience. These would be people who own restaurants or do birthday parties. In order for somebody to be interested in doing birthday marketing, they would be a subset of the people who actually accommodate birthday parties. I said to send that email just with the question, "Do you do birthday parties?" That is a very simple, straightforward question that is sort of a qualifier to start the conversation, but there's a lot more that's going on there.
I've been using that kind of model in re-engaging leads that have fallen off out of communication, or people who are 90 days or more old. We've used something like that with the nine word email. Saying, "Are you still looking for a hearing aid," would be an approach we would use to a hearing aid prospect, kind of thing. It starts the conversation.
Robert Cialdini's new book, Presuasion, just came out a couple of weeks ago, and-
Matt: It's actually sitting on my desk here, right in front of me.
Dean: Is it really. One of the things that's fascinating about that is that this whole book is about sort of the meta environment that sets the stage for influencers to work. One example that's kind of very similar to this is the ... Have you read part of it yet, or you've got it on your desk ready to go?
Matt: It's about two fifths of the way through maybe.
Dean: Okay great, so you may have read about the section where they talk about the survey takers at the mall, where people come up to you with the clipboard and, "Do you have a couple minutes to take a survey?" When they did that initially, you may remember the results were that 29% of the people would do the survey, so two thirds of the people or more would refuse to do the survey. Then they switched their approach to starting the conversation with, "Hi, do you consider yourself a helpful person?"
Matt: Yep, I remember reading that section.
Dean: 77% of the people would then go on and take the survey. That little shift, that kind of thing, is something that I may have stumbled on a few years ago, and now seeing the actual science behind it, of how that sets the frame for the way people are looking at a conversation. What I said to the guys with the restaurants, the realization that I had from that, is that when you approach, because they had done some other approaches to dentists and not had much success, when you're going into a business, almost ...
I say it like this. Every person on every level of every business is 100% authorized to bring money into the business, but there's only a very small percentage of those people, maybe one or two, who are authorized to take money out of the business. When you're going in with an approach that seems like this is going to be taking money out of the business, the natural tendency of the people who are not authorized to take money out of the business is to protect the owner, or the entrepreneur, or the restaurateur, from these people who are trying to take the money out of the business. They deflect that. If you think about the psychology of what's going on, if it's means, which it is if you're doing it right, your intention is to help bring money into the business, then making that established up front is a way of at least starting the conversation. That's the frame here that we come from.
Where people go off track is that their ultimate offer is not to bring money into the business, but to take money out of the business. That's why people feel like, well that's tricky. Of course it is, because now you're trying to switch to, "Give me money." Which is not the same thing. When you look at it, the reason that I asked about, if we use your hearing aid, example, I asked what the experience is in the hearing aids, is do you have a track record of, "This is what we did, and this is how it works, and this is the certainty that I have in being able to turn your investment into a multiple of that investment?"
Matt: As far as it goes, personally I don't, and that's why I wanted to start off just with implementing the nine word email for them on a, "If it works pay me, if it doesn't don't pay me" basis, because then that way I can prove it works at no risk to them, and also show them ... I guess that's the same thing, show them some results. That will just open the door to future projects which I could also offer them on a risk-free basis, maybe percentage of sales type of thing.
Dean: Yeah, exactly. My advice would be to do that for people. Get into a situation where they are 100% winning before you're asking for or getting any money. The thing that I always couple, this is the challenge with people taking one concept without the totality of the rest of it, because the philosophy that drives it is saying, "What would you do if you only got paid when your client gets a result?" Part of the thing is that, if you were to take that approach with one hearing aid specialist, one audiologist, whatever, going and looking at their ... Showing them, deploying the nine word email as an example, because that's something that any business could do and get a result. It's the closest thing I have to magic trick, and I'd lead off with that. Part of the thing that, my recollection of the way that the videos of the things you were talking about was, that you were alluding to an email that you had, that you could deploy, and trying to exchange the money for that, but only if it works. It was still kind of a philosophical trade kind of thing.
Matt: Yeah, that's more or less it.
Dean: You weren't sharing them the email to try. When you look at it like, you've got a number of things that you could do to help them. You're not a one-trick pony. You're not just going to, if that's the only thing you've got. That would certainly be a way that you could, with very little effort, and very little time and effort on their part to deploy something like that, could get them ahead of the game, and we say playing with house money, in a way. They're ahead on the relationship with you. You show them that relationship.
That's something that I've used, that nine word email is part of our email mastery program. I run full page adds in Success Magazine and other magazines telling the whole story of the nine word email, including what the nine words are, so that somebody could read the article, is what they would refer to it as, and execute something that's going to make them money, whether they have any interaction with me or not.
The idea behind that is that it's a difference in approach, that most of the direct response approach to something like that would be to run an ad that says, "An amazing nine word that revives dead leads," which was the headline that we had on it. Then most of the direct response approach would be, "These nine words are so powerful that, once you deploy these nine words, you'll see that people will respond, and here's why. Once you know these nine words ..." And, "This gentleman tried these nine words ..." And, "You can get the nine words at this." Using the mystery of the nine words to compel people to come, and "I've got to find out what these nine words are." Rather than taking an approach of, "Here's the nine words. Try this. I've got a book that will show you all kinds of things that you can do with email."
That approach, my mindset going into writing that was, I was asking myself a question: What would I do if Success Magazine was paying me $10,000 to write that article, if my intention was to make this the most valuable page in the magazine? As opposed to an approach where I'm paying them $10,000 to let me run this ad. It changes the way that you approach things. If your intention was to go in and say to one hearing aid specialist, "Let me try this for you, let me show you these nine words here, and let's see what happens," and that way you've got a different approach.
Have you gotten to the part of Presuasion where Robert Cialdini talks about the difference between asking for someone's opinion and asking for their advice?
Matt: I have not gotten to that part yet.
Dean: Very interesting.
Matt: Do you mind real quick if I just summarize what you said? I think it's pretty clear now where I've gone wrong.
Dean: Yeah. Okay, tell me.
Matt: What you're suggesting, it seems, is just, instead of trying to get them to pay a very small amount for me to implement that nine word email approach for them, to show them, in essence, "Hey I know what I'm doing," just give it to them, and then once they see it works, then they will be open to discussing future projects and future business.
Dean: Right, that's exactly right. If somebody comes into the ... That's where you've got to take ... It's almost like you've got to take a pharmaceutical approach to it. By that I mean, you've got to do the R&D, and you've got to invest in the proven formula that actually gets the result. You can't start advertising and say, "Hey take this pill, I think it might work. I don't know what's going to happen yet, but I'm hoping for the best, and I think that it should be worth $199," or whatever it is. When you go to one hearing audio specialist and you say, "I heard about this, and I'm really anxious to try it, and here's the idea. Do you have people who've inquire and haven't bought? Let's try it and see what happens." Then when they send it ...
Matt, I get emails and Facebook messages every single week from people saying ... Here's the latest one, just yesterday. Somebody said, "Dean, hope you're fine, just a quick update to tell you that your nine word email smashed it again. This time it worked magic for Brad Comely, the London plumber that you know." This was someone who came through one of the Breakthrough Blueprint events. Then his words, "My office manager's moaning at me because she can't book them all in quick enough." I said, "That's great. What did it say?" The email said, basically, "Have you had your boiler serviced this year yet?" Then when they reply, then saying, "They're booking boiler cleanings in September and October. Would you like to be added to the list?" That whole, going to their clients, just those simple types of emails, just work so well.
I just think it's kind of funny, that whole ... Here's one just from last week. "Just nine word emailed my list for my event next week. Email is blowing up, my team is having a heart attack, LOL. I think we've had 300 responses in the last 20 minutes. Did I mention I love you?" An hour later it says, "I think we're up to 650 responses!" It's so just that, evidence after evidence after evidence.
That's a strategy that I think you could use to build a relationship. If you start the relationship like that, just giving and bringing people into that business, they're going to try it. If they've got any number of those people, it's almost certain, if they send an email that says, "Are you still looking for a hearing aid," that's going to get some response, and they're going to think that you are a magician. They're going to say, "What else you got? What do we do now?"
Matt: This makes so much more sense, so much more sense than what I was doing before.
Dean: Right. Now when you go to the second audiologist, when you go to the second hearing aid thing, and you start your conversation and then you say, "I just did this email with this hearing aid company in wherever and we got these results, do you think that we could try this with you," now you're trying it again, and you're building this preponderance of evidence that this strategy works. You've built relationships with two really great R&D labs now, and everything that you're doing then is about building the algorithms that are going to be repeatable to any audiologist. There's so much wisdom in picking a business category, like hearing aids, that's local, and you can create a syndicated solution.
I've done so much of that stuff in the real estate world, for instance, that I create this algorithm that gets listings, or an algorithm for referrals, or finding buyers, or converting leads, or multiplying their listings. I've got all this experience, this 30, 25 years of experience in applying marketing systems to the real estate business, that I know with certainty that I can go to any real estate agent, anywhere in the world really, anywhere that real estate is traded, and have a repeatable algorithm that, if they deploy it, they get a multiple of the money that they spend on doing it. Which gives me the confidence to make an offer that allows them to pay when they get the result. Which is a completely different approach.
Matt: That's along the same lines as what I was thinking with this longer-term, is get some under my belt, get the experience, and then from there, build on it.
Dean: That's exactly right.
Matt: That's great advice, thank you very much.
Dean: You're welcome. So often the very beginning of something like that, rather than spending marketing dollars, spend your marketing budget on behalf of somebody to test your ideas, and document your success. That's better than spending money to try and convince people to try something.
Matt: Absolutely.
Dean: Yeah, put your money where your ... You bet on your ideas. You bet on the success of them. That's like having unlimited checkbook, basically. Whatever your capabilities are capable of delivering, that's the level of check that you could write, basically.
Matt: Very cool.
Dean: All determined by how much value you can create. If you do have a way that hearing aid specialists can deploy, spend $1 and get $5, $10, $15 back, that's a license to print money, for both of you.
Matt: Yeah, absolutely.
Dean: That's a different approach kind of thing. It's very difficult to make that transition from being all cheese, switching to whiskers. That's no elegant way to do that. The way around it is to make it all cheese.
Matt: Seems so simple.
Dean: That's always been my intention. It's like, "Yeah, but when do you show the whiskers?" People take that approach of blaming me, that we're trying to trick people into something, and I've never ever taken that approach. I've showed them that that's where you're going wrong, is that dude, you do have whiskers there. There's no way around it. You can cheese-coat you whiskers.
Matt: That's a good way to put it. I think that ... I don't think, I know that solves the problem I was having. Thank you very much.
Dean: You mentioned, you want to talk about something else that you're working on, and we can do that too.
Matt: Great. Yeah, if you don't mind, I would appreciate it.
Dean: Not at all.
Matt: This thing that we've been talking about, it's something I will be doing at some point, but I'm actually being pulled in a lot of directions right now, and this thing that I'm about to mention is one of those stronger directions. What it is, is a family member's business. I asked her if I should leave her name out and she said she would prefer that, so I'll just leave it at a family member. The basic details are that she has a high level faculty position at a well known university, a college of pharmacy, and she and her business partner have a, I guess you could call it a quick reference guide for the dialysis of drugs. For our purposes I don't think we really need to go into details on what it is, but just know that it's a quick reference guide that is used by pharmacists in dialysis.
Basically what they have is, I think it's three or four ways to sell this. The first is just a standard booklet, which I believe they sell for about $15, and this is just a, I'm guessing here, but maybe 40, 50 page reference guide that would go into your pocket as a pharmacist. They also cell this as a wall poster, and you'd put that on the wall of the pharmacy, and if you're delivering drugs to patients you look at the poster, see the dosage guides and whatnot, and makes it easy that way. It's also on an app.
That's part of it. The big thing that we're trying to figure out is, how do we sell this as a site license to actual health systems? Meaning that instead of just selling them some booklets, or selling booklets to the pharmacist at that health system, how do we market it so the health system themselves will spend $1,500, which is the price of the site license, to be allowed to put this on their internal website for their employees, their pharmacists, to access?
I'll mention, just for context, that without really trying, just because it's mentioned on their website, there have been four orders in maybe the past six months or so for this, just people who have seen it and said, "I am the pharmacy manager for so-and-so health system, we want this on our website. How do we make that happen?" The cool thing about that is, this is a $1,500 product but it was sold completely by email. These people approached my relative by email, said "How can we make this happen," and my relative said, "Here's how, sign this paperwork for the license, pay us $1,500, and it's yours." That was it. No phone call necessary.
Also I believe it's important to mention that the institutions that have this, two of the four are really big colleges of pharmacy, or health systems within a college. It's something that is highly desired to people, all the pharmacists love it, so we're just wondering how to approach these people and sell more of these.
Dean: What would be the conversation that these ... It's pharmacists, that would be the end user of this?
Matt: Yes, and that actually brings up the next thing I wanted to mention, which is it's the pharmacists who would be using it, but it is the managers, the directors of the pharmacy, who are now in an administrative role, who would actually be buying it, but they wouldn't be using it.
Dean: Again, one pharmacist would be the path up from this. Does it save them time, does it increase their accuracy, does it solve a problem that they have? Do they have to do these calculations manually? Otherwise, what are they doing without this?
Matt: Without this, basically the difference is, without this they have to go into some online system or website and look all these things up individually, and it takes minutes, whereas this quick reference guide takes seconds. It's really a convenience and a time saver.
Dean: That's the kind of thing that, if they saw it, they would say, "Wow, that would save me time." Because they're using it every day, is it for all different drugs? Or is it just an occasional thing that they would need for these specific drugs? How often would they be using?
Matt: It's used quite frequently, because to my knowledge it has, I believe, all the drugs that are used in ... I'm not the pharmacist, you'll have to excuse me if I get a little bit of it wrong ...
Dean: Yeah, I get it.
Matt: All if not most, we'll just say.
Dean: It'd be something that, literally, they would be referring to ...
Matt: All the time.
Dean: Continuously, all the time. There's no other solution like it?
Matt: Great question. That was actually one more thing I wanted to mention. Let's see, I'm just taking a look at my notes here that I've made for this. There is an older book that is ... I don't exactly know what you would call it, but when somebody in a profession, or when every single person in a profession, knows about a book, it's kind of the standard reference guide ...
Dean: Like the Kelly Blue Book for cars or whatever.
Matt: Yeah, exactly.
Dean: It's the standard.
Matt: It's like that, but for pharmacists. That book exists and it goes into more detail than this quick reference guide has, but it hasn't been updated since 2007, so at this point that's nine years. I looked at the reviews online of that book, and people are screaming for an update, and there isn't one. This quick reference guide, although it doesn't go into the detail that that book goes into, it does fill that void. To the knowledge of my relative, who knows a lot about this stuff, it's the only solution of its kind. There's nothing else out there like it.
Basically what it comes down to, and I think this is the last thing I wanted to mention, just to make sure you have all the information, what it comes down to is, if we go back to Breakthrough Advertising, Eugene Schwartz, it seems to be a level three awareness. Meaning, the prospects are solution aware. Basically they know the result they want, but they don't know either that this product gives it, or really the reality is they don't know this product exists. I'm just taking one more look at my notes to make sure I get this right. Let's see. Basically what my relative told me is, there's a need for a dialysis dosing guide, and there's a need for clinical information about the dialysis drugs, and currently they're using the internet or that outdated book. That's the last bit of info to round that all off.
Dean: In that way, a lot of that thing is, they have a desire for the solution, they don't know that one exists kind of thing, but they would recognize it if they saw it as, "This is going to save me a lot of time, because it's such a hassle. One of the things that I often look at, rather than trying to be clever about things, or to come up with a really clever headline or approach to this, often, in some ways, it's been said the best way to sell a horse sometimes is with a sign that says, "Horse for sale."
Matt: Yeah, understood.
Dean: You wonder if it's the kind of thing that could visually be illustrated on a postcard, to show what it is and articulate the differentiation there. You should be able to get that, if you look at the Breakthrough Advertising, the whole idea of doing all this research, understanding where they're coming from, and being able to articulate the offer in 10 or 11 words, if we could come up with a headline of it that is essentially saying what it does. "This poster saves whatever amount of time. Easily look up every drug dosage," or however you ...
The thing about it, most of the time people think if you're in a context like this, that people can have a headline that rolls off the tongue. One of my favorite things in Breakthrough Advertising is his assertion that sometimes this research, you're going to spend hours and days and weeks to get to the point where you've got 10 words to show for all of that time and research, and the entirety of the success of your ad is going to rest on those 10 words. If you get them right you can launch a whole new industry. If you get them wrong, no other words that you say after those 10 are going to save it. When you look at that it's like, literally I think you can, in one glance, on a jumbo postcard, be able to show this idea of the poster, or the booklet, or the app, and articulate exactly what it is, and here's where to go to get it. That should be, if it really is a better mousetrap, recognize it and be able to get that. The good news is that you've got visible prospects. By that I mean you can identify who the pharmacists are.
Matt: Yeah, there's actually a list of about 55,000 pharmacists who belong to an organization of pharmacists, and that list is rentable, which is great.
Dean: There you go.
Matt: They have a lot of selects as well, so we can target exactly who we want. Speaking of headlines, and the easiest way to sell a horse to have a sign that says "Horse for sale," along those same lines, I was kind of thinking that way before we got on the call here. The idea I got off the headline, playing off the idea that all the pharmacists know this book, the previous one, but it's outdated and they're looking for something, the headline could be, "Finally, an updated 2016 quick reference guide for the dialysis of drugs."
Dean: That could be all that's needed right there. You've put some thought into that, that's a pretty clear articulation of what it is, and somebody who sees it will recognize that. That's the kind of thing where you could test on a small basis, and have some conversations with some of the pharmacists. Actually going right in to talk to them, knowing that when you figure out what ... If you have good data from 500 of them, we're going to have some indication of how the other 50,000 of them are going to react. Remember in My Life In Advertising, Claude Hopkins talked about going in to see bakers. Have you read that book?
Matt: I know I've at least started it. I don't know if I finished that one, but there have been hundreds of marketing books that I've read.
Dean: Right. He would go in and, again, ask for, and this is what Robert is talking about, asking for advice. People love to give advice. If you're popping in to see some pharmacist and asking in that way, "Would this be useful, how would you find this useful," and using their words ... Seems like you've already stumbled on the idea of going to Amazon and looking at the reviews, the negative reviews, and finding out what people don't like about it, or that it hasn't been updated. Sometimes it's that simple. A crystal clear, "Here's what I got. The 2016 reference for the dialysis of drugs." They're not making an emotional ... It's not like a personal preference decision. This is something that is going to spark that, "Wow, this is going to be very useful."
Matt: Absolutely. I'm right onboard with you there. I guess that leads me to the real question that I wanted to ask, which is, if the goal here ... When you break it down into dollars, this is not an expensive book for a single pharmacist to buy, at maybe $15.
Dean: Right, I get it.
Matt: If we're trying to focus on the larger dollar amounts, for example the site licenses at $1,500 per hear for these institutions to put on their websites, like I mentioned earlier, and as you already know, it's the people who are in charge of the health systems who are actually approving this and doing the buying, but they're not the users. Who do we market to, how do we make that happen?
Dean: I think the pharmacists might be a good path to the top. The pharmacists ae visible, and if they're part of a larger organization, or part of a group, that they could point you on the way up, who to speak to, or who to approach. Are those people visible? Do you have visible prospects for that? Can you get a list of who the right person is?
Matt: I believe we can, because my understanding of it, and I'll have to talk to my relative to confirm, who has the business, but my understanding of it is, those people at the top are still licensed pharmacists so they'll still be visible prospects. They'll also be likely members of that pharmacist organization, 55,000 strong, and with all the selects that are part of that organization's list, I think we should be able to target them. Assuming we can, do you think we should send this to, say, 1,000 people who can make the decision, or 10,000 people who can't, and hope it'll filter up. That's, I guess, what I'm trying to figure out.
Dean: If you can get right to the people who could make the decision, it's the same thing. They're going to recognize, or maybe they won't recognize, that this is a big problem for their ...
Matt: That's what I'm thinking. They may not.
Dean: For their pharmacist. That's why I would approach it from both ends. If you can find the big decision makers and go right to them with it, that's a viable approach. If they're visible, if you can get a list of them and who they are. If they have the same understanding as the front line pharmacists would that this is a real thing, this is really going to save me minutes, potentially a half hour or 60 minutes, a day maybe. Who knows? If they're using that that much. Also, that's going to drive efficiency and accuracy and all the things that the people who are organizing the networks would be, certainly, interested in. Because all those efficiencies multiplied over hundreds or 1,000 locations is a big, big impact.
Matt: Yeah, that's great. I agree on all counts. I guess the last thing, then, is, and this was something that my relative had mentioned could be an issue, since these decision makers are at the top and they're doing the administrative work, if they realize that the pharmacists need this, easy sale. We go straight to them, and they recognize the problem and they buy it. If they don't recognize that their pharmacists are having this problem because they're no longer doing the pharmacy, they're doing the administrative stuff, then that's a little different. I guess in that case we may ... Do you think we'd have to, I guess, get an internal champion on the pharmacy level and have them refer it up, or do you thin it would still work, just with maybe a different sales angle?
Dean: I think that part of the thing is, certainly if you have advocates and champions from the front line, that they're showing, boy this is saving me this much time every day, then there's got to be a frame for that, at the administrative level, of the return on accuracy, or return on this information. Having it at their fingertips, or right in their eyeline, available all the time, is a savings that certainly could make it more appealing as an administrator. We've done that in a lot of ways, putting "return on" in front of something.
We did a 90-minute book with a gentleman who has a company that does workplace OSHA compliance work, consulting, and there's nothing less sexy than safety compliance. Talk about something that gets delegated down to the HR department who can just get the new posters or whatever. But this guy was really passionate about workplace safety, and one of the questions I often ask the person is, "What could you do for somebody if they would just let you do the best thing that you know how to do for them?" If they would just get out of the way and let you do that, what would be the dream come true that you could provide for them? He went on and talked about how this can be a competitive advantage, in that if you have a safe work environment, people talk. Your retention of workers, your downtime from sick pay and injuries, your cost of lawsuits or health insurance, workman's comp, all of these things. So we did a book called Return On Safety: Turning Workplace Safety Into A Competitive Advantage And Bottom Line Profit.
That is a conversation that the C-level suite would love to be involved I, because now they view it as something that can impact the bottom line. This guy, it was a game changer for him. He would get, now, invited to speak at events, and people will call him and say, "When can you install this in our company?" He's viewed, elevated himself to, a profit maker within the context of something that has been commoditized.
Matt: Yeah, that's interesting.
Dean: That whole concept of return on whatever is just elevating the impact of what it is that you're doing. How is this actually going to impact them? For the pharmacists the appeal is that this is going to save you time and hassle. You're going to have it at your fingertips, and you're going to know what to do. On the administrative level, if you look at how deep the organization is, it's what would the big payoff of all of this efficiency across the whole organization, the whole network, be? It'd be a big number, certainly a multiple of 1,500.
Matt: Yeah, that's a great point. Since this is a newer idea I obviously haven't put any thought into it yet, but basically just to summarize, what I'm hearing you say is, just take the angle that's going to appeal most to the directors of pharmacy, pharmacy managers, the administrative people.
Dean: Mm-hmm . That's it.
Matt: I guess what it comes down to is, we need to get on the phone with these people and just find out what those issues are, what they're looking for, and all that.
Dean: Yeah, you need to get in the business of documenting overwhelming evidence for your case. If your case on the pharmacist level is that this is going to save you this much time, there's nothing that would be as helpful to you, and as instructive to you, as to present this to 10 pharmacists and see what their advice would be, and if this is something that they would want, and then to document maybe how much time it actually saves them. Not speculative, but to have them just kind of estimate through the day, or observing in their environment.
I think there's lots of great content that you could create around this. It's pretty easy to demonstrate by videos, and because it's a product-based thing it really falls into the, the more you tell, the more you sell, kind of thing. The more that they can see it in action, they get the video of the poster situation, in the pharmacy, and documenting reality TV style, this is how we use it, getting real testimonials from the real pharmacist saying, "I look at this chart a dozen times a day, and it saves me three minutes every time. This is how I used to do it. This book hasn't been updated since 2007 but I have to dust it off, bring it out, open it up, and get to the page, and look through the things, and show them the struggle of the old way. Now all I have to do is, I look at this, I pick my finger, I go right down here, there it is. It's saved me three minutes every time I do it. I love it."
Matt: Yeah, that's great. The nice thing too is, she has, my relative has, I don't know how many, but it has to be high hundreds if not thousands of pharmacists who already have this. Because it's been in existence for a while, they just update it, usually, every year. There's demand for it there without really much advertising, they make sales on their website, so there's a lot of people that they could go to, she and her business partner, to get more info on all the stuff we've been talking about.
Also, I don't know if it's really relevant to our conversation, but I will at least mention that in the past, and actually it's changed a little bit, but this booklet was sold in the US, and is still sold outside of the US, to large drug companies, for generally $20,000 to $40,000 for x number of copies, of them just to give out to pharmacists as a giveaway.
Dean: Of course. Yeah, why not?
Matt: They have multiple contracts like that, and so that just goes to validate, I guess this is why I'm saying it, that this is something that is absolutely valuable, that people really need and like to have.
Dean: Mm-hmm . What a great way, there's the kind of thing when you look at it, that who else is trying to start a relationship with pharmacists? What a great opportunity for them to give them something to start that relationship. Just like you're saying. Why not have it from that side too? Could be the same kind of thing.
Matt: Kind of like, who else has access to my audience? That sort of thing?
Dean: Yeah, right, exactly. Who else wants access to your audience? Who else is trying to approach pharmacists?
Matt: Interesting. I have to put some thought into that. That's a good idea. Good point. I think that's about all the stuff I had on the agenda, and it looks like we're right on time, so this is perfect.
Dean: Really, great. That was good. I enjoyed that. Think you had some great input. That approach, I'm glad we could clear up the nine word email approach and philosophy.
Matt: Yeah, me too. It was something that definitely needed to be cleared up, as you saw in the forum. Glad we did that. Appreciate you taking the time. Once again, it's been awesome. I have a lot of ideas to go hash out, and thank you.
Dean: Thanks a lot Matt.
There we have it, another great episode of More Cheese, Less Whiskers. If you'd like to continue the conversation I've got a couple of things for you this week that can help us go down the road here for you. Last week, on episode 11, we talked about your profit activator scorecard. I would encourage you to find out what your profit activator score is. You can do that if you go to MoreCheeseLessWhiskers.com and look in the show notes for episode 11. You'll see a link to where you can go and complete your profit activator scorecard. It'll give you a lot of insight into where you are right now.
It also turns out that, at the end of October, I have a Breakthrough Blueprint live event where you can come spend three days with us, and we're going to go deep in applying the eight profit activators in a small conference room kind of setting. It'd be 10 or 12 people, and we'll spend three days just applying the eight profit activators to your business. If you'd like to come to that event you can go to BreakthroughDNA.com, and you can download a copy of the book that we share about the eight profit activators, or you can send me an email, dean@deanjackson.com, and just put "Orlando" in the subject line. I'll get you all the details about the event. I'd love to spend three days with you, I think you'll enjoy the environment and get a lot out of creating the blueprint to set you up for some really great execution over the next few months.
Have a great week, and I will be back next time with another episode of More Cheese, Less Whiskers.