The “Heisenberg” of marketing reveals how to 10x’s your sales
Published: Thu, 06/02/16
I call Jack the “Walter White/Heisenberg” of marketing:
Always hiding out all day in his motor home lab, cooking up software for us marketers for exploding sales, smoke billowing out of the vents…
Anyway, we got to rapping at the last Oceans 4 about how to as much as 10x’s your sales.
(Especially during launches, special sales, via your auto-responder sequences, etc.)
Enjoy:
BEN SETTLE: Before we dive into how to get as many as ten times more sales ... tell us a little bit about you and what you're up to these days, and what you've done in the past and some of your experience with this sort of thing.
JACK BORN: Sure. I am a software entrepreneur. I create software that helps entrepreneurs and marketers increase their sales and automate it, so that's what I'm passionate about. I've created tools such as AW Pro Tools, which is a software for anyone who uses AWeber. Helps add marketing automation and really powerful list segmentation features to AWeber, which bottom line makes AWeber marketing more profitable. I've got a software product called Boxshot King which makes it easy to do three-dimensional graphics without needing to use Photoshop, which helps get you more sales by having attractive pictures of the digital products that they're purchasing.
I've got a product called Deadline Funnel which makes it real quick and easy and powerful to add evergreen deadlines to your funnel, so that everyone who's coming through your sales funnel gets their own individual deadline. It tracks them from device to device, even if they're reading some of your emails while they're out at the coffee shop or wherever. It tracks them from device to device through a whole bunch of different ways that I'll talk about later.
The other things that I've done in the past, I used to be the marketing manager for Perry Marshall, who's well known in the Google AdWords circle. He's been around for a long time, and so you can find his books about buying traffic and advertising on Google AdWords and Facebook. He devoted an entire chapter of his recent book, "80/20 Sales and Marketing," to a concept that I came up with called the Tactical Triangle.
I've been really eating, breathing, sleeping marketing for the past ... I don't know, what has it been now? I think it's like 12 or 13 years, so that's the short version of my background. I'm one of these guys who ... you know, a long time ago I used to work in Corporate America. I actually used to work for Merrill Lynch, and I realized that me and Corporate America just weren't getting along. I used to think that I don't play well with others, and in actual fact I do play well with others, but it's when I'm being told what to do, that's when I don't play well with others. I like to set the rules and the agenda, so a perennial entrepreneur.
BEN SETTLE: You're just finally starting to put yourself out there instead of being the guy behind the scenes for all these different softwares and everything. Is that right?
JACK BORN: Yeah. I am trying to get more visible, which for me has been a little bit of a challenge because it's a lot easier sometimes to sit back behind the safety of the green glow of the computer screen, and create the software and create videos and do a few webinars and stay safely in that sort of virtual cocoon. I am trying to get out there. I mean, you and I and Andre and Todd Brown did Ocean’s Four, so we got nine other folks. Actually it was way more than nine folks. We got a whole bunch of other folks in a room together with us in Orlando and had a really great event. That was a lot of fun.
I'm doing things like that, and yeah, I'm getting out and doing a lot more speaking engagements and just trying to be a lot more visible. I've been doing a lot of webinars lately, and doing interviews and podcasts like this one.
BEN SETTLE: The analogy I always use for you is you're the Walter White of marketing. I just envision you like a trailer in Florida ... no offense ... with like smoke billowing out the top as you're cooking up all this cool software, which is all based on marketing psychology, isn't that right? Everything you create is based on all this deep psychological material.
JACK BORN: Yeah. Well, before we get into the deep psychological stuff, which I love getting into, there's some really cool studies on the science behind using deadlines that I know that we want to get into. Before we get into that, you called me the Walter White of marketing. First of all, I'm losing my hair, so I'm at the point where I'm about to shave it anyhow, so I'm about to go full-on Walter White. The other thing is, like you said, living in Florida. I don't know what it is about anytime that CNN or any sort of national news program is interviewing someone in Florida, they always choose someone with a trailer in the background, and it makes me so mad because it's not representative of our state. It's like guaranteed, we have to have the trailer in the background.
BEN SETTLE: What is some of the psychology behind deadlines? Everybody says, "Oh, yeah, deadline, big deal," but there's a hell of a lot to a deadline, if people want to maximize their sales with basically doing no extra work.
JACK BORN: Right, so a quick story before we get into it. I'll tell two studies that I find fascinating that show the power of using deadlines, but a story that actually comes from our recent Ocean’s Four Mastermind. During the day, we would break for lunch after doing some hot seats, and during the lunch breakout session the first time, I was sitting at a table and Todd Brown was there and so was Rich Schefren. Rich Schefren was really big, doing a whole bunch of launches several years back, and then he sort of stepped away from that and now he's coming back and he's getting very active. Before we even started talking about Deadline Funnel, he didn't know that this was a software product that I had, and he was just talking about deadlines in general.
He said, "You know, I started doing these webinars recently, and I was doing them and I wasn't getting the results that I was expecting. I went back and looked at the script and the script looked good, so I would try some things and try to improve it. Then it dawned on me. Holy cow, I'd forgotten how powerful deadlines were. What I did was I did one with a deadline, and what happened was on the last day, we sold more on that last day than through the five previous days when we had the live webinar, the encore webinar, the replay, et cetera."
It was on that last day that he sold more than all the other days put together, combined. That was one interesting case study of someone using deadlines. Specifically to the science, there are some really interesting studies, and I've collected a bunch of them. I've picked two of the ones that I think are the most interesting, so here's one.
In this study, they had two groups, so picture this. They went to this group, and for one-half of the group they said, "Okay, we're going to give you a choice. First of all, here's a $50 bill." They put a $50 bill on the table and they said, "Okay, so one option is that you can choose to keep 30 bucks." It was phrased like that, option A, keep 30. "Or we can flip a coin, and so you have a 50/50 chance of all or nothing. If it's heads, you keep it. If it's tails, it goes away."
Now, the other group, same thing. They said, "Okay, here's your 50 bucks," but it was framed like this. "Option A, you lose 20, or we flip a coin and it's all or nothing." It sounds the same, and in actual fact it is. There's no difference between keeping 30 or losing 20, but it's how it was framed. What happened was, for the second group where they had the choice of either, "Okay, what do you want to do? Do you want to lose 20, we'll take 20 away, or flip a coin," the coin flip was chosen at a rate 43 percent higher than the coin flip in the first group.
What that shows you is that people hate losing, because it's really the same option.
The bottom line, in case it was a little bit tough to follow, the bottom line is that these two groups were given the same option, the exact same options, but the way that their choices ended up was by just framing how one of their options was set up for them. It completely altered how they decided. In the second group, 43 percent more people chose the coin flip, because it was framed as, "Well, if you don't do the coin flip, you're going to lose 20 bucks, guaranteed." That's one study, and it just shows that people absolutely hate losing stuff.
There's this concept. I don't know if you follow professional poker, but there's this concept of going "on tilt." What happens is, in a poker tournament, when someone gets a "bad beat" ... so they have good cards and they make the right play, mathematically it was the right thing to do, but it just didn't go their way and they lose a whole bunch of money ... a lot of times they'll go "on tilt," which means all of a sudden their decision-making process gets completely out of whack. They end up throwing good money after bad, because they're trying to get back the money that they lost. They're no longer making good decisions. The whole prospect, even the thought of losing something that they already have, really messes with people's minds, and it completely changes how they behave.
The second study is that ... and this is really, really fascinating, because you wouldn't think that this would work in a situation that has to do with losing weight, and that's why I wanted to share this one with you. In this study, there was a group of people that were given a goal of doing 7,000 steps a day. I believe it was just walking around, so this was a fitness challenge, so can you walk 7,000 steps in a day, okay, and this was over 13 weeks.
Okay, so there was a couple different groups. One group ... we'll call this Group A ... received $1.40 for every day that they did walk 7,000 steps. Group B, they were entered into a daily lottery, but they were only eligible for that lottery if they had walked the 7,000 steps the day before. Group C was given $42 up front each month, and a buck forty was taken away each day the goal wasn't met. Just imagine this. "Here's all the money up front, but we're going to take money away if you don't walk this 7,000 steps." Then there was a control group, where they just said, "Hey, you need to walk 7,000 steps because it's good for you," so they didn't give them any incentive.
What they found was that the prospect of losing money ... so the group that was given $42 up front and then a buck forty was taken away from them for every day that they didn't achieve those 7,000 steps, it actually resulted in a 50 percent relative increase in the average amount of days that they participated in hitting that goal, a 50 percent increase. Again, it's really the same thing. You do the math, and getting 42 bucks up front and being penalized is really the same thing as being rewarded a buck forty every single day, but the outcome is tremendously different. This whole concept is called loss aversion, so the doctors that studied this, that did this study, really said very simply what we all know. People are more motivated by losses than gains.
Those are some examples of what happens to our brain when we're put in a situation where we're going to lose something. That's really what deadlines do, is it really forces someone to make that decision. Something's being taken away, so in a marketing situation, you're either taking away an artificially low price, so a sale, a discount, or they're going to lose out on some bonuses or both. When people have that sitting in front of them and you remind them, "Hey, this is going to go away, this is the last day, this is going away in a few hours, okay, this is the last hour," all of a sudden it really forces people to make that decision. As you can see from these experiments I just outlined, loss aversion is something that really affects us in a very, very powerful way. It's not a small change, it's a huge change.
BEN SETTLE: Yeah, and companies like eBay do this too, like play it like a fiddle. If you see an auction coming down, it's like a feeding frenzy where the price starts ... everybody starts bidding at the last minute.
JACK BORN: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, and there's other companies like ... you know, QVC has built their whole empire on this whole concept of scarcity. You know, a certain number of items left, and there's also time on the ... they're using double scarcity, so there's X number of items that are available and you see that going away, plus there's time on the clock and then they roll into the next one. It wouldn't be nearly as effective if they were saying the same things but they didn't have the countdown clock on the screen, or they didn't have the number of items and you see it ticking down and going away. They know for a fact that it really, really motivates people to take action right away. As you know, delay of the sale is the death of the sale.
BEN SETTLE: Yeah. It reminds me of something else, especially the Rich Schefren story there. It's something that I heard Dan Kennedy say, and I don't know if he said it or maybe someone else said it. I don't know. I lose track of who says what anymore, but somebody said it. It's very simple, but nothing gets done without a deadline, right? Nothing. We would never do our homework, we would never get up in the morning, we would never do anything on a schedule, right?
JACK BORN: Oh, yeah. Absolutely.
BEN SETTLE: It's a powerful thing to tap into. I'm assuming that when you were born, Jack Born was born, Baby Born, when Child Born was born, that you didn't have a copy of these scientific studies sitting in your hands when you came out of the womb. What was your first big "aha" moment with using deadlines that made you think, "Huh, there's really something to this"?
JACK BORN: My first personal experience with it was actually the first business that I launched. Now, this is going back a long time, but after I worked for Merrill Lynch, I went to work for a client of Merrill Lynch and I worked for them for a year, and this was a health care staffing company in the nursing niche. I worked for this group of people for a year, and than after that year I decided ... actually, I'll tell the truth. I got into an argument with my boss and I told my boss to kiss my ass. Called my wife on the phone and I said, "Guess what, I'm working somewhere else. I just told my boss to kiss my ass." She said, "Okay. Well, what are you going to do now?" I said, "I don't know, but we'll figure it out."
What I ended up doing was I ended up buying some code online at a website called Hotscripts.com, and this was a job board and I decided, "You know what, I'm going to compete against this company that I just left, and I'm going to create essentially the eBay of nurse recruiting, where I'll have recruiters on one side and nurses on the other. I'll figure out how to make money later, but let's just see if I can get this thing working."
The code had all sorts of bugs in it, and I went and I purchased a big, thick book on PHP 4, which anyone out there who's a coder realizes how long ago that was. I bought this huge book called the "PHP 4 Bible," and it really was. It was about as thick as three Bibles stacked together. I started going through the code, and that was my first introduction to programming.
I spent the next year doing odd jobs. I actually worked on the aircraft carrier, the JFK, installing furniture on the JFK while it was being repaired in Jacksonville. I mean, just all sorts of weird stuff. Actually, a quite funny side story. One of the first things I did after ejecting from Corporate America in search of my freedom was building cubicles for other office workers. I thought it was funny that I was actually making money building prisons for other people to work in, and that was how I was going to eventually buy my way to freedom.
Anyways, I was doing all of this while I was trying to get this business up and running, and so I had it going but I wasn't charging any money. The thing was just running for free, and my idea was, "Well, I want as many people using it as possible before I start to charge people for it." This went on for about 11 months, and then finally my wife came to me and said, "Okay, you've been doing this for a long time. You've been putting a lot of time into this. It's really time to flip the switch and see has this just been an interesting hobby, or do we actually have something here."
This was many years before anyone had heard of Jeff Walker, so there was no manual for doing a product launch, so I just decided, "Well, I'm going to price it at 300 bucks a month, and I'm going to give people a week to buy." I started sending out emails and telling people what the price was, and I got one buyer the first time that I sent out the emails. The emails went out to a small group of businesses, clients. I was selling advertising to the corporate side, and initially I got one person who raised their hand and said, "Yeah, we're on board." Other than that, it was nothing but crickets, and I thought, "Oh, my God, I've just wasted the last 11 months of my life. I'm going to have to go back to work." I got on the phone and started making a whole bunch of phone calls that really didn't do a whole lot.
We got towards the end of the week, and I said, "Well, a promise is a promise. I'm going to start turning off accounts." I started turning off accounts, and lo and behold, the phones starting ringing. The phones started ringing and people said, "I can't access my account." I said, "Yeah, I've been sending you emails saying that today was the last day." "Oh. well, let me go get my boss because I don't have the corporate credit card, and I want to keep using your site." I said, "Okay, hurry up, because you need to get your money in today." Lo and behold, in that week I brought in $20,000.
That was my first personal experience with deadlines, and that really got that website up and running, and it never would have happened without deadlines. If I said, "Hey, here's our new pricing structure, but you know what, whenever you feel comfortable making that purchasing decision, you just come on, you just go ahead and put in your credit card," that never would have happened. It really was the deadline that forced everyone to decide, do you want to be in or do you want to be out. It was from that moment on that I realized how powerful deadlines were and I saw it for myself.
BEN SETTLE: You became like a utilities company, where you gave a deadline that payment is due by this time or your power is shut off.
JACK BORN: Absolutely. Flip the switch and the power grid goes down.
BEN SETTLE: Do you have any tests that you've done with deadlines that just showed a gigantic increase in sales?
End of part 1, to be continued tomorrow.
In the meantime, to try Jack’s Deadline Funnel free for 14-days… and get a discount on it if you decide to keep using it… go to this link:
http://www.EmailPlayers.com/deadline
Offer ends Sunday at midnight.
After that, too late...