The Renegade Lawyer Podcast
The root cause of all lawyers' problems is financial stress. Financial stress holds you back from getting the right people on the bus, running the right systems, and being able to only do work for clients you want to work with. Financial stress keeps you in the office on nights and weekends, often doing work you hate for people you don't like, and doing that work alone.
(Yes, you have permission to do only work you like doing and doing it with people you like working with.)
The money stress is not because the lawyers are bad lawyers or bad people. In fact, most lawyers are good at the lawyering part and they are good people.
The money stress is caused by the general lack of both business skills and an entrepreneurial mindset.
Thus, good lawyers who are good people get caught up and slowed down in bringing their gifts to the world. Their families, teams, clients, and communities are not well-served because you can't serve others at your top level when you are constantly worrying about money.
We can blame the law schools and the elites of the profession who are running bar organizations, but to blame anyone else for your own woes is a loser's game. It is, in itself, a restrictive, narrow, mindset that will keep you from ever seeing, let alone experiencing, a better future.
Lawyers need to be in rooms with other entrepreneurs. They need to hang with people who won't tell you that your dreams are too big or that "they" or "the system "won't allow you to achieve them. They need to be in rooms where people will be in their ear telling them that their dreams are too small.
Get in better rooms. That would be the first step.
Second step, ignore every piece of advice any general organized bar is giving about how to make your firm or your life better.
The Renegade Lawyer Podcast
The Power of Direct Response Marketing for Lawyers with JD Dwyer
Dive into the world of Direct Response Marketing with John Dwyer, aka JD, from The Institute of Wow. We explore strategies for small businesses, focusing on unique marketing tactics that stand out. Learn how JD's collaboration with Jerry Seinfeld skyrocketed sales and discover the power of being the "un" in your industry.
This episode is packed with actionable insights to elevate your marketing game. Don't miss JD's special gift for listeners at the end!
Ben Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury and long-term disability insurance attorney in Fairfax, VA. Since 2005, Ben Glass and Great Legal Marketing have been helping solo and small firm lawyers make more money, get more clients and still get home in time for dinner. We call this TheGLMTribe.com
What Makes The GLM Tribe Special?
In short, we are the only organization within the "business builder for lawyers" space that is led by two practicing lawyers.
One thing we're sure you've noticed is that despite the variety of options within our space, no one else is mixing
the actual practice of law with business building in the way that we are.
There are no other organizations who understand the highs and lows of running a small law firm and are engaged in talking to real clients. That is what sets GLM apart from every other organization, and it is why we have had loyal members that have been with us for two-decades.
The game that we're talking about in direct response marketing is problem solution marketing, and there's five components to it. Number one provide them with their problem. Number two aggravate their problem. Number three provide the solution. Number four provide proof, which, generally speaking, is testimonials. And then number five is a CTA, a strong call to action, and so I get them to go through that which, if you want to really drill that down, that's problem solution what's somebody's problem and what's the solution you give them? But the thing that I teach them and not many people use, it's crazy, Ben, you're going to laugh, because I'm sure that you use it and you've seen it used all the time. They don't use either scarcity or a time limitation. So I always say to them look, if we have a special package, if they get in by Friday at five o'clock, they get a special deal, o'clock they get a special deal.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Renegade Lawyer Podcast, the show where we ask the questions why aren't more lawyers living flourishing lives and inspiring others? And can you really get wealthy while doing only the work you love with people you like? Many lawyers are. Get ready to hear from your host, ben Glass, the founder of the law firm Ben Glass Law in Fairfax, virginia, and Great Legal Marketing, an organization that helps good people succeed by coaching, inspiring and supporting law firm owners. Join us for today's conversation, hey everyone.
Speaker 3:This is Ben. Welcome back to the Renegade Lawyer Podcast, where each episode I get to interview somebody inside or outside of legal, an entrepreneur who's making a ding in the world. And today it's going to be really fun because we're going back to my roots, which is direct response. Marketing with John Dwyer goes by JD goes by JD. The company is the Institute of Wow. Pre the interview, we had a little discussion and a lot of our mentors are the same, going back 20 and 30 years ago. So this is going to be a really cool chat and stay all the way to the end, because JD has got a really terrific free gift for everyone who listens to the end. So, jd, welcome to America from down under, sir.
Speaker 1:Thank you, ben, and I love the way that you did the intro. Really, we're only two seconds into it and you've done a direct response trick. You said stay to the end because we're going to give you something.
Speaker 3:Yes, it's embedded in my DNA. As law firms who are not the top spenders in the market, able to spend millions and hundreds of millions of dollars building our brand, how can we get our voices heard, get someone who may have a problem or an opportunity that we consult to just raise their hand and identify themselves to us so we can start a conversation, often by some free lead generation magnet or something like that. That's what I'm really good at, that's what I was born on from the Dan Kennedy and Bill Glazer world and that's what you are an expert in and have built your professional career doing so.
Speaker 3:I'd love to hear. I always like to talk. We'll get to tactics and strategies and things like that, jd, but how did you get to where you are today? What has been your business and entrepreneurial path?
Speaker 1:Back in my 20s I did the college degree in advertising and marketing and all of that. But as we know, that's a piece of paper. The real training, of course, comes when you work with someone, and there was a major supermarket chain here in Australia still is the major supermarket chain called Woolworths. So I was lucky enough to score the job as the head office marketing guy for them in my early 20s. I had no clue what I was doing, so it was a big risk on their part and what we used to do is take a lot of the concepts out of direct marketing, concepts out of Tesco, out of London, which is a big retailer.
Speaker 1:Things like, for example, when you spent $10 in the supermarket, you got a stamp the green stamp stays back in the day and you'd lick the stamp and put it onto a saver sheet and that saver sheet would be about the size of maybe your hand. And when you saved up 10 of these stamps on your saver sheet, you could get cheap cookware or cheap glassware. And I stood back and saw just how powerful this what we call repetitive trade concepts were and I thought this is unbelievable. This is actually an artificial stimulus to getting people to come back and back, because if you had six or seven stamps out of the ten stamps that you needed to get the next piece of cookware, then you weren't going to another supermarket.
Speaker 1:Then all of a sudden, we started to put scratch games on the scratch sweepstakes games, and I could see that that was unbelievable too. If you scratched out your little card that you got at the cashier and you got $1,000 in red and you had to collect $1,000 symbol in blue and green and yellow to win the $1,000, I could see how that was stimulating repetitive visitation as well. And so I left and set up my own business, which was called the Dynamic Ideas Company at that time. What we did? We provided those sorts of concepts that I learned how to do at Woolworths. We provided those to businesses of all sizes and then, yeah, it just went from there. I grew that business and we sold that and these days, much the same sort of business it's called the Institute of Wow.
Speaker 3:Before we went live, you and I were talking about our own personal histories in our marketing education and one of the things that's evident is that there's a lot of young people, there's young lawyers, there's young marketing assistants that are helping law firms, who may not have ever even heard the term direct response marketing. They understand terms like social media and Facebook, ad campaigns and things like that, and to a certain extent, they may have heard about branding and getting your name out there For all of that, jd. Let's define some terms. What do we really mean when we talk about direct response marketing? And I'll just presage this it's the most effective thing we've ever done.
Speaker 1:I get asked this question a lot, ben, and I say that if you were going to an advertising agency or these days it's a digital marketing agency and you were talking to the owner, who's normally a bearded hipster or has a ponytail, and he will say to you you, we've got 152 likes today, the children are likely to say, daddy, thank you very much, but we're hungry, we want some food, and so therefore, the vanity metrics thing, of course, is very tempting for most people when they go to a marketing agency and they go oh, look, we haven't got any food, but geez, we've got a lot of likes. My view is that the digital advertising company will say to you get them to fall in love with your brand so that they'll taste your product. What we do is we flip that model. We get them to taste your product so they'll fall in love with your brand, and it's a big difference.
Speaker 1:I've got six millennials, we've got the fun trap family, my wife and myself. They're all in their 20s and early 30s. It's funny. They will absolutely support oh, dad, everything's got to be branding, you've got to put it on the side of a bus and the back of a taxi and you've got to have a nice little, normally a tagline that rhymes. Then they get married and have a mortgage and they knock on my door and go dad, have you got any of that direct response stuff so we can get some money?
Speaker 3:really quickly, exactly, and you need a jingle too if you have your name on the side of a bus. So let's talk generally for a moment of ways that a professional services my market and the listeners here are primarily lawyers or teams supporting lawyers, but you have accountants, you have tax advisors, professional services. What are some ways that you have helped JD professional services? Use direct response marketing to let someone have a taste of the product first.
Speaker 1:There's something we've been doing in the last year which is just record-breaking. How's that for a drum roll, ben? I think, based on what I said before, get them to taste your products so they'll fall in love with your brand. The thing is that over the last 20 or 30 years, I've tried every incentive under the sun, so it wouldn't matter whether it's getting them to buy your product or your service and you give them a free skateboard or microwave oven, or you give them a dining voucher or gasoline voucher or whatever holiday vacation, whatever it might be. We've tried everything.
Speaker 1:There's one that stands out from the rest and I'll touch on that in a moment, but my view is that if I owned a seafood shop, I would have a hostess or hostesses outside my seafood shop at lunchtime and dinnertime handing out calamari samples, hoping that whoever tasted those calamari samples would come into the store and buy a barramundi okay, fish and fries. If I was in a coffee shop, I would have little sample shot glasses of coffee outside the shop no one does that the crazy part about it is nobody samples.
Speaker 1:And in the professional services industries and you're in it, I'm in it where basically we're selling what's between our ears. Give them a taste for it. And I know that you can say that's podcasts like this or it might be webinars, but what we've found is it run a contest on social media. So we have a thing called the Facebook contest formula and basically we tell whoever the client is, just give away your washing machine or your lounge suite, whatever it is, in a Facebook contest and you watch what happens. You will have, if not hundreds, thousands of people who will enter that contest. And guess what? They've just glowed in the dark because they want your product or service. We ran one just last month for a company that has a pool slide business, so they sell slides to people with swimming pools. We said win a pool slide on Facebook. Now, nobody living in an apartment is going to want to win a pool slide. So therefore, presumably whoever enters that contest has got a swimming pool.
Speaker 1:Guess what? He got 1,600 leads in a matter of weeks. He gave one pool slide away but had 1,599 people who he could ring up and say look, bad news is you didn't win. But the good news is we've got a special deal on that pill slide this week. If you get in by Friday, you get by the other day. It's just leads from heaven and I would suggest that anyone who might be listening or watching this podcast do that. We have a few tricks and we trick it up a bit. So therefore, obviously, few tricks and we trick it up a bit. So therefore, obviously we make money out of putting it together. But the thing is you don't even need me, you can do it yourself. Just give away your product or service as a prize and just watch what happens.
Speaker 3:Professional services is a little different, because we don't have a pool slide to deliver or even to offer. We've often used free reports, books, things like that. I'm curious whether you have seen, either in the legal industry or in other professional services industries where the folks are making money with their brains, different strategies or tactics, or even if it is free report, free book, what are some of the top internal strategies for generating leads through that offer, because you've got an offer at the end of this one free digital book, which is an awesome, cool taste of your product.
Speaker 1:Yeah, ben, the free opt-in, as they call it in the game that you and I are in. So that's marvelous and normally it's a free book or a free report or something like that, but nothing matches a free Zoom consultation. I find that if I have a Zoom consultation so it's very similar to what we're doing here I'll probably have a one in three hit rate and it can't be one of these stupid 15 minute consultations. Nobody can fall in love with you or what you stand for in 15 minutes, so it's a proper 45 minute consultation. I've obviously got to be careful that I pitch that to the right audience, because if I pitch that to startups then I'm going to be wasting a lot of my time.
Speaker 1:But I have a better one in three hit rate out of that and I know that if I was to give that to one of the two sales guys that I have selling our package promotions, they would have a one in 10 hit rate, because they just don't have my history.
Speaker 1:In my instance they're getting to talk to the guy who dreamt all this sort of stuff up, whereas if I pass that on to one of my sales guys, they'll have a one in 10 hit rate. So my view is is that if you back yourself and that is, give up your time, and obviously you've got to pre-qualify them you just don't give it to anyone. When they come onto your landing page, it asks them certain questions how long have they been in business, what do they do with marketing at the moment, and so forth then at least you're going to be talking to a qualified prospect, hey guys, this is ben, if you like what you've been hearing on this podcast not just the marketing and practice building strategies, but the philosophy of the art of living your best life parts.
Speaker 4:You should know that my son, brian, and I built a tribe of like-minded lawyers who are living lives of their own design and creating tremendous value for the world Within the structure of a law practice. We invite you to join us at the only membership organization for entrepreneurial lawyers that is run by two full-time practicing attorneys. Check us out at greatlittlemarketingcom.
Speaker 3:Let me go adjacent one space here, because you brought up something that's interesting and it's applicable in professional services practices. You talk about your sales team and training them and getting them. My question would be how do you get them to move towards your level? Because, yes, you have this ton of experience, but truly every sales call that maybe they're doing may be costing you money. So what are some of the ways that you and your team have trained your own salespeople? In law we would say the intake team, right, the sales team, to really step in and be your voice.
Speaker 1:Ben, it's very hard. You're either a salesperson or you're not, and don't get me wrong, of course this training can improve their performance, I guess, aside from getting them to digest a lot of the case studies that I've got. When you reach the age that I am, because I'm a baby boomer, then you've got quite a few case studies under your belt. And I always say you can predict the future if you look at someone's past. I'm not saying you can predict the future absolutely, but you can predict the future if you look at what they've done in the past. So I make sure, when a sales guy comes on and we've only got two we're not a huge company by any means, but if I've got two I will get them to absolutely digest all of the mantra that we've got. First of all, the game that we're talking about in direct response marketing is problem solution marketing, and there's five components to it. Number one provide them with their problem. Number two aggravate their problem. Number three provide the solution. Number four provide proof, which, generally speaking, is testimonials. And then number five is a CTA, a strong call to action, and so I get them to go through that which, if you want to really drill that down. That's problem solution, what's somebody's problem and what's the solution to give them.
Speaker 1:But the thing that I teach them and not many people use it's crazy. Ben, you're going to laugh because I'm sure that you use it and you've seen it used all the time. They don't use either scarcity or a time limitation. So I always say to them look, if we have a special package, if they get in by Friday at five o'clock, they get a special deal. And you know what? That doesn't happen too far. I haven't seen it happen for too many industries and you and I have grown up on it with Dan Kennedy and everything else. But by the same token, give them a special deal but it's only available until Friday at five o'clock.
Speaker 1:The moment that I give that training to the people who have been working for me, they double their conversions, double. So they'll say that this particular program, whatever it might be, we have insured price promotion. So therefore we teach people how they can have a million-dollar prize, but it would only cost them $20,000. Okay, they're basically deal or no deal. And who wants to be a millionaire? All those TV shows, basically the prices are given away by Lloyds of London. All right. So these are big office found headlines win a million dollars if you buy a product this week. So we teach businesses how to do that and we put it together in a package so they just don't have to worry about it. It's all done for them. If I say, look, that package is normally 9,500, but if you get in by Friday it's 7,500, it will double their conversions. But if you get in by Friday, it's 7,500. It will double their conversions.
Speaker 3:How much of your training of these up-and-coming salespeople, jd is devoted to teaching them how to ask curious questions. That really leaves the prospect feeling like, oh my gosh, I never really thought about that and I don't even have the answer. Can you help me? Because we found that to be really effective, both in selling great legal marketing memberships but also in selling to automobile accident clients or disability clients who call us. It's almost like the salesperson doesn't need to be an expert to in everything that you just went through, as long as he or she can ask a curious question, can listen with empathy and can enter the conversation that is in the prospect's head. Do you spend time teaching that?
Speaker 1:I guess my simple version of that is telling them for God's sake, get onto their website and their social media platforms and find out everything about them before you talk to them. There's nothing secret. Now the thing is, is that my generation, the baby boomer generation we came from a world where basically no one knew anything about you into this world that we live in now they know what we had for dinner last night, because there's this insatiable appetite to take photos of wherever you went for dinner. So I just keep on saying to these people look, do not start behind the pack. Make sure that you check out normally their website and their social media platforms. You can go a bit deeper, but that might be called stalking. But just check all that stuff out before you talk to them, and they will be mighty impressed when they know that you know what they are.
Speaker 3:Dan Kennedy often writes and talks about how surprised he is that the salespeople who are pitching him on a product or service haven't done exactly what you just said. He's a relatively famous guy, right and easy to find out who he is, what he's doing, what he's interested in, and he is shocked at how few people actually go and do that sort of homework before pitching him on some product or service. And yes, it's the little things. Again, when we're marketing small biz and we're doing guerrilla marketing, direct response marketing, we have to do work. We're gonna do more work than the guy who's just whipping out his credit card and spending a bazillion dollars on big branding. I know you have a story. You have a really interesting story with Jerry Seinfeld and he helped you smash sales records on big branding. I know you have a story. You have a really interesting story with Jerry Seinfeld and how he helped you smash sales records for a particular company using direct response marketing strategies.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about that for a minute. Ben, I'm glad you brought that up, because I thought how am I going to name drop Jerry Seinfeld? Well, it's funny, it's spooky that you should bring the question that you just brought up, because I did do a lot of research on George Shapiro, who was Jerry's longtime manager, who only just passed away about 18 months ago, and in order to get his attention, I actually dug deep and found out everything about him and the fact that he actually produced a little movie called the Boys from the Bronx, back whenever it was 10, 15 years ago. And when I first spoke to him I could actually recite all of that background of his history and it just made such a difference. He just said oh okay, that's interesting that you've checked me out. I mean, didn't need to check Seinfeld out. Everyone knows everything about Seinfeld, but this was his manager and how it came about, Ben is.
Speaker 1:I had a client here in Australia called the Greater Building Society, so they're a bank, and what they wanted to do is sell more home loans. And I said to them look, if you think that price discount is going to win, then you must be on drugs. And they said what do you mean? I said you're up against the Wells Fargo banks in Australia. Now, they're not called the Wells Fargo in Australia, but they're that size bank and this building society. Whilst it was the 250th biggest business in Australia, it was nowhere near the size of the Wells Fargo. And yet they're on television with a traditional advertising agency and on social media every day saying get a home loan for 6.2% or whatever it was Guess what. The Wells Fargo would be 6.1% within five minutes. It'd be like a corner store taking on Costco and thinking they're going to win on price. And so, therefore, I said to them look, I've been doing some TV infomercials for a travel discount company. How about I actually introduce you guys? And instead of giving a 1% honeymoon rate, which every bank does when you're going to get a home loan for the first time, why don't you devote that 1% and give it to the travel company and they'll give you a discount travel product? And they went okay, smart aleck, we'll give this a shot. So this is pre-Seinfeld. We came on TV and we said get Seinfeld. We came on TV and we said get a home loan from the Greater Building Society or swap across from the Wells Fargo to the Greater Building Society and we'll give you a free vacation. They tripled their home loans within the first three months and they quadrupled them within 18 months. The thing went nuts. And this idiot who you're talking to did not do a door deal, I did a consultancy monthly fee. If only I had got 0.1% of anything, I would have bought Fiji, I think. So.
Speaker 1:Anyways, it turned out, this thing went for about three or four years and it broke record after record and then the general manager of the company said okay, smart aleck, it looks like you've earned your stripes. We've picked up all the low lying fruit. What's next? And a friend of mine had been doing a campaign down under for an insurance company with Billy Con connolly, the scottish comedian, and I said how did you do that? He said, look, we just gave him 1.5 million dollars and wherever he was in the world, we just took a camera crew and got him to do the commercial that we packed up and came back to australia. So I thought that doesn't sound too hard and I got the bank to put out a survey of who did they think would be a good celebrity to, or sports star to promote their product. I'm hoping it was going to be a star from down under.
Speaker 1:Guess what the results were Jim Carrey, Robin Williams, Jerry Seinfeld. I realised I dug a hole for myself and so, anyway, I chased Seinfeld for about six months he's harder to get to than the Pope until I came across George Shapiro, his manager, and I did what I told you I researched him. So when we did get on the phone, I knew his history and he said did we leave it with me? I'll put it to Jerry. And to my surprise, Jerry said yes. So therefore, we had Jerry Seinfeld for three years as the spokesman for this building society, coming on Australian TV. I fly to New York and we do all the commercials throughout that three years, and he would come on TV down under and social media to say get a home loan, get a free vacation. And if the home loan figures were not good before he came on, they went through the stratosphere. It went from good to unbelievable and this building society, who pretty much was unknown to a lot of people in Australia, all of a sudden became a global brand overnight, courtesy of Seinfeld.
Speaker 3:And an underlying principle of that that I want people to hear and listen to and maybe go back and listen to again, is that you made it easy for Jerry Seinfeld to play with you, right. Again, this has nothing to do with marketing per se. This has to do with building relationships, professional relationships. It's the question I asked you before we went live how can this be a home run for you and how can we make it easy for the others? So that's a hidden principle inside of this podcast about direct response marketing. It's about human relationships. Think about that. Everything is not a competition. How can we build a win-win deal here for both of us?
Speaker 3:Any direct response marketers and it comes as no surprise, since you are a fan of Dan Kennedy and Joe Polish and that world is that you often say that a great strategy is to be the UN, the UN of the business. We picture ourselves at Ben Glass Laws like we're the unlawyers. People come into our office, jd, and they say what is this place really? Because it doesn't look like a law office. And we say we're really good lawyers in our vertical, but we're entrepreneurs first and we're dads and spouses first. But let's talk about that, because I do think this is the smaller businesses' mighty weapon is to be a bit renegade, to show up differently. So what do you mean when you use that phrase?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so be the under the industry and, of course, all of us who do seminars and do events and so forth. We've all got to come out with our own little catchphrases. So I guess it's one of mine. I stole one off the bottom of one of those little calendars that you used to flip over and there was a motivational quote at the bottom and I thought it was classic and I've stolen that. That was to make a difference. You've got to be different. And in terms of the un thing, I just say to people look, be unusual, be unlike and be unconventional. Don't be like the guy down the road, because there are so many businesses that I put into the category of me too business, and if you're selling solar panels for people's roofs of the houses, then your product doesn't look any different from anyone else. The thing is is that the Beatles did look and did sound very different from most of the other groups at the time. They were very unusual. And so therefore I say to people just try and be unusual, be unconventional and be unlike anyone else. A good example would be a butcher, okay, so therefore, your local little town with the butcher.
Speaker 1:We lived at one stage in a little town here in Australia. It was Andy Griffith style town and so therefore it had a little main street and we lived on 14 acres and we'd moved from the city to the country. Remember Green Acres on TV? Younger people won't, but Green Acres was a city couple, anyway. So therefore there was a butcher in town and he said to me listen, can you help me, jd? There's another butcher that's sitting opposite me and he's always cutting my prices. And he said so therefore there's only a chance that you can give me a hand. I said the guy across the road closes his door to keep the air conditioning in, and visually that's an impairment. But why don't you make sure that you buy the air conditioner where it shoots all the air down at the door and leave your door open? We have a pretty warm summer here in australia, okay.
Speaker 1:And I said also why don't you have a sausage sizzle outside your butcher shop? Every day? You or one of your staff have got the chef's hat on. You're dressed up like the proper barbecue guy would be dressed up, guess what. When my wife went in to pick the kids up from school, what do you think the kids said? They didn't say oh look, we've got to get home to play football or whatever it might have been. They said, mummy, are we going to Daryl's butcher shop? It was called because they knew they could get a free sausage sizzle. Where do you think Gail bought all of her meat from? Now, he was unusual. I'm not gloating over this, but eventually the other butcher shop across the road about a year or so later went broke. They closed up and it became a pharmacy. But he was selling pretty much the same product. But what he did was that he was very unconventional in the way that he marketed you probably worked with lawyers.
Speaker 3:You certainly have paid lawyers. How many are unwilling to do what you just said? They went to law school, and law school teaches you how to play inside the lines. The profession here and I'm sure it's the same in Australia teaches lawyers how to play inside the lines. And yet, if they can figure out, how do I be un and I think that being un can be as quote little as showing up and telling your story right, because everybody has their own separate, unique, special story.
Speaker 3:Being on can be like our processes are different. One of the things my son did we were seeking referrals from chiropractors, and so he had lunch with about 10 or 12 chiropractors and he asked them tell me what you think about lawyers, tell me what your biggest headache is, what do you hate about lawyers? And they all said pretty much the same thing, and so we then directed our marketing back to these same chiropractors and said here's how we run our business and this is how we have solved for the thing that you hate about lawyers. Literally, jd, probably $400 of lunches led to $100,000 of attorney fees because we showed up.
Speaker 1:Yep, and also, too, what you did. There was something that most businesses don't, and that is you collected data. I'm absolutely flabbergasted, in this information world that we're living in, when everybody can see what Amazon did. You go to any restaurant in the world today. You can spend $100, $200, $500, and they don't know who you are. Mcdonald's don't collect data. They've got a QR code at the counter. If you want to go to that trouble, okay, and they've got apps and so forth, but try telling an over 45 what that's all about.
Speaker 1:The crazy part about it is we have a restaurant called the Lobster Cave as a client, and they're a very expensive seafood restaurant. We saved him $3.25 million a year on all of the advertising he was doing by just giving 50 cents to every waitress or waiter when they collect the name and contact details of whoever had lunch or dinner there. Waitress or waiter when they collect the name and contact details of whoever had lunch or dinner there and what happens is that let's say it's a she. So she, the waitress, walks up and there's you and me and two others have just had lunch and she puts a check on the table and then she hands out old-fashioned style about the size of a packet of cigarettes, a little entry form that says win dinner for 10 of your friends at the end of the month. Give us your name and your contact details. Now we're basically after their phone number, their cell number, and so what happens is that he's up to 90,000.
Speaker 1:Now he's been doing this for three years. He's up to 90,000 on the database, whereas most other restaurants wouldn't even have one. And all he does is every afternoon he's got 150 seats. At three o'clock in the afternoon he sends out one of my text messages and it might say something like hi, ben and Louise, chef Pierre would like to invite you for dinner tonight. A lobster tail meal for two for $68. Now you're not going to leave less than $200. That's an average of two people. So it's not bait and switch, but pretty close to it, right.
Speaker 1:And so, therefore, what happens is he sends that out at three o'clock and he's full every single night. That's 365 nights a year. He fills all 150 seats and he fills them in 10 minutes. So he will just say to his secretary at three o'clock how many seats do we have at four? And she'll say, oh, 80 out of 150. He said we better send out JD's bullshit text, message number four or whatever it might be and out that goes and she walks in. I've been there, he walked. She walked back in 10 minutes later and says we're all sold out. Nobody does it. What you did you collected data and used it.
Speaker 3:We had several years ago. There was a restaurant that opened in our town here and I liked the restaurant and I went there three times, two lunches, one dinner. Nobody ever asked my name and I predicted it wasn't in a high traffic area but it could have been successful. And, jd, in nine months it was closed. It was amazing and they had good food and good wine. Nobody ever asked my name.
Speaker 3:The version of that in legal is, and a big part of direct response marketing is having and maintaining a CRM, a database of both referral sources, because they're very important to us, but also folks that we represented or folks who have come to us and we weren't able to help. We're old school paper, monthly eight-page newsletter with interesting articles, not just canned stuff. So at Ben Glass Salon, people who come to our conferences, we spend almost no money on digital advertising. Yes, we have SEO, yes, we have social media, but in terms of buying ads that get pushed out, our spend is, I think, zero right and we're having our best year ever because we understand humans and we've got a terrific. I tell people our Rolodex is huge, right, and of course we've got a terrific. I tell people our Rolodex is huge right, and, of course, you have to explain that to young people too sometimes.
Speaker 3:But it's critical and it's easy to do. If you've never started it, you just start. There's so many great technologies today that will help you do this. But data is so important Because here's the other thing. The other thing is every one of us is busy and every one of us has a finite amount of time and money to go spend on the business building aspect of our lives. This dollar out or this hour out brings three back and this one brings seven back. That tells you OK, here's how I can choose to go use my time. It can be challenging sometimes in a digital world to track attribution of leads, for sure, but most people don't even try.
Speaker 3:And that's just a shame.
Speaker 1:It was one thing, ben. There was a guy here on the Gold Coast in Australia that ran expos, in other words weekend events for the Home and Garden Expo, or it might be the Swimming Pool Expo. Do you know he'd been running that for seven years and had not collected the details of people that came to his weekend expo.
Speaker 3:Yeah, your restauranteur's idea of here's your chance to win dinner for two is a terrific incentive that you've talked about earlier on this podcast and by the way, the waitress gets 50 cents for every one of them.
Speaker 1:So therefore the whole idea is to incentivize her. So when she would put the check on the table, she'd stand there. So she'd have a pen in her hand, hand out four entries, and she'd say because they go, oh, we'll fill that in. She'd say, no, no, let's do it right now. So therefore she had almost 100% hit rate because she stood there and watched them fill the format.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's amazing how the attitude of employees can change when they have their own incentive for asking the right questions of callers or, in this case, folks who were sitting down to have a meal. Again, in the legal space, that's a huge bucket, a huge hole in the bucket of many law firms. They get these calls, they find out the call isn't really a case that they handle and there's nothing else done with the data. There's no attempt even to collect name for a newsletter or even an e-newsletter, which is challenging or anything at all like that. That's a matter of training and then having some technology that we can dump this information into.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you know what we've done now is that for any of these what we call avalanche leads promotions that we run on Facebook, there was one guy. He said to me two weeks ago okay, I'll launch this. He has a senior's mobility business, so therefore he's helped people with walking frames, with wheels and their little scooters and so forth. And I said to him okay, so we ran the contest for him on Facebook. Win a mobility frame thing. Okay, and they're worth about $800. Wait for this. He got 822 leads in the first week at $0.35 a lead. So all he did was spend $40 to $50 a day on Facebook. He said that he was surprised that there were 75 and 85-year this contest at two in the morning and I said they probably had nothing else.
Speaker 1:He's now got a warm list of 822 people who glowed in the dark and put their hand up and said I want a mobility walker with wheels on it. And so I said to him okay, how are you going with the follow-ups? And he said he's panting. He said we can't get to them, so we've fixed that before. We've now got a robot ringing them. So what happens is he runs this contest each week and so therefore he's going to pick up 800, 900 leads a week and we have an AI robot then ringing these people up from Monday onwards saying, look, you didn't win, but the good news is, we have a special deal on that this week. So now what we've done is because we realized that people can be a little lazy. We've got AI involved to basically ring those people up and see if they might like to buy one.
Speaker 3:The principle you've just discussed is the principle of follow-up. Like, just because someone actually responded to your ad the first time, for whatever reason, there was incentive or whatever, doesn't mean and if they didn't buy doesn't mean that they're now lost right. And so having some system of human beings and technology usually a combination of the two that sends interesting follow-up is just another way that most law firms can close or tighten the hole that's at the bottom of the bucket. Let me ask you this, as we're coming near the end I'm curious about your own sort of personal habits and personal study. You mentioned Joe Polish, kennedy Glazer. Who these days do you read, watch, listen to follow to satisfy your own interest, really, in the human psychology of marketing, which is what you and I have been talking about for 40 minutes?
Speaker 1:Probably out of all of the mentors out there and you've named a few of them I guess the one that's had the most influence on me is a guy called Seth Godin who wrote the book the Purple Cow. And that book came about because he and his wife were just driving out the country one day and of course they saw gazillions of cows in the farmland and he just said to his wife imagine if there was one of those that was purple. Little did I know that when my kids were younger. We live in a rural property and the farmer next door had to come and ask me could I stop the kids from firing paintballs at his cows because there was lots of purple, orange and blue cows in his yard. My kids had got to that teenage year with paintballs and they thought the cattle next door to our property were good targets. But yes, his book called the Purple Cow.
Speaker 1:I should say that really is very similar to my philosophy of being the un and standing out. If you look the same as everyone else, then you've got to work hard to stand out. The thing is, is that I guess what we tend to concentrate on is artificial wow factors? There's a difference between Coke and Pepsi. There's a difference between Mercedes and just a normal car. Apple doesn't need my help because they've got an organic wow factor, but what we find is that most businesses don't. They're in a me too industry and they look like everyone else. So what we do is come up with artificial wow factors At the moment.
Speaker 1:I got contacted after the Seinfeld thing and it was a travel company who said look, we've got access to unsold hotel rooms around the world. How would you like to offer these to businesses to hand out as a Happy Meal toy? So what we do now is we give businesses the opportunity to give out vouchers for three to seven nights in Vegas and New York and Orlando and all sorts of places, and it's a thousand dollar voucher. We give it to them for 50 bucks. We get it, we get the rooms for free. So therefore, we get the rooms for free. So therefore, whatever we charge is profit. So basically, then people can say come and buy my product or service and you get a three to seven-night vacation in Vegas or Orlando or Grand Canyon. That is what we call an artificial wow factor. That makes them stand out from their competitors, and you know what Hardly anyone does it.
Speaker 3:It's another example of win-win, because the hotel wants to fill those rooms, because those people will buy food and other services. Businesses that you serve are looking for cool and unusual incentives, and that incentive is one of a type that's been around since I was young and it still works. Very few people are using it. I'm curious now what's next for your business? When do you see you guys? In three or five years?
Speaker 1:It's funny because, being a baby boomer, I have lots of questions from time to time why are you still treading the boards? I said we've had six kids, we're the Von Trapp family. All of that money that you're supposed to stash away and buy the private island. That never happened, I have to say, is that we love every one of them dearly, of course, but yeah, you bring up six kids and, yeah, your money is spent on the kids. So that's why I'm still treading the boards.
Speaker 1:But yeah, look, we are excited about the AI thing, like everyone else. It's the new Beatlemania. Everybody's into AI and so I won't bore you with the details. But we've actually developed a whole bunch of products now because we know that small business owners are busy and the biggest problem for them is implementation. I call them robots because anyone over 40 knows what a robot is, rather than the AI agent or AI avatar and all the sort of lingo that the younger people use. And we just say to them now, not only can we provide you with the vacation promotion or gasoline discount promotion or win a million dollar sweepstake, we can provide you with all of that and get a ton of leads, whereas what happened before is that you probably would have never got to those leads. We now have the robots that get to the leads and you wouldn't swear blind that they were human. You do not have a clue that this is a robot.
Speaker 3:I have heard some of the newest voice AI technology and it is scary. It is so good technology and it is scary. It is so good and we've trained some computers on my voice using hours and hours of presentation video and it is scary. I tell my kids I've written my eulogy and I'll present it at my funeral because it's so real.
Speaker 3:Before we went live, you showed me a really cool book that you have an electronic version of, and I asked you if you would make that available to our podcast listeners. So talk about what the book is and how they can get it, because I saw it.
Speaker 1:I'm like this is cool, as I said to you pre our podcast discussion, I had to write a normal regular book, which is called the Avalanche Leads, but when I got into this webinar world, I was told you've got to write more than one book. Oh God, here we go, and so therefore, I thought, if it's the Institute of Wow which is my business, then I better write something that's a little bit bigger than the normal traditional book. And so, being the idiot that I am, I came out with a book the size of a tabloid newspaper. It is.
Speaker 1:Boyd newspaper it is. This is $420 to print, so that's not any profit for me. For me to print this book, it's $420 because it's leather bound with gold tip edges and all of this and inside here is about 300 pages of case studies that worked and of course I think somewhere towards the end of this I show off with a guy called Seinfeld but of course you wouldn't expect me to do anything else there but the real value for anybody who's watching or listening to this book. It's called the Wow Manifesto and it's a swipe file I'm showing off here, but it's a swipe file from heaven, because what you're getting is all of the winning.
Speaker 1:I didn't put the ones that didn't work in here, I put the ones that worked, all of the winning case studies for around about 15 or 20 years and, yes, pre-digital and digital. Everything's in there. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter whether the concept was, you know, five years or 25 years ago. It's the concept that works. The actual delivery of that concept whether it be through social media or newspapers, that doesn't matter. So therefore, you probably want to know how to get it. Just go to wowmanifestocom forward slash gift.
Speaker 3:And the reason that it works is that human psychology and the way we make decisions and the way we think has not changed in thousands of years probably, and that's why our students are students of the old stuff first. So, jd, thank you for making that offer to our listeners and one more time, give the URL. We'll put it also in the show notes and I just want to thank you for coming on the program today, because this has been, for me, really fascinating. I was born into direct response marketing and it's rare to talk to somebody who actually understands direct response marketing today, as we're recording this near the end of 2024.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Ben. I'll give you the URL once again. So it's wowmanifestocom. Forward slash gift.
Speaker 3:Awesome, sir. Thank you, JD, for being on the program.
Speaker 2:My pleasure, ben. All the best lawyer podcast. You may be a perfect fit for the great legal marketing community. Law firm owners across the country are becoming heroes to their families and icons in their communities. They've gone renegade by rejecting the status quo of the legal profession so they can deliver high quality legal services coupled with top notch customer service to clients who pay, stay and refer. Learn more at great legal marketing dot com. That's great legal marketing dot com.
