Break the Rules, Win the Market: Day with Dan Kennedy (2 of 4) | #Marketing - Ep. 16

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This is the Russell Brunson show. What's up everyone? This is Russell.
Welcome back to the show. Um, I hope you enjoyed last episode.
You had a chance to sit in at funnel hacking live, the VIP day with my interview with Dan Kennedy. We had a chance to dive into some really cool things and And the feedback so far from you guys has been awesome.
And that was just part one of four of my two-hour interview I did with Dan. So today we're going to jump into part number two.
And this is going to be a really fun one. Some of the key highlights you're going to learn about during this interview.
One of the things Dan talks about is called the radical big idea. This is why every market leader has to have a bold message.
It cuts through the noise. We're talking about that.
We're talking about creating and taking the heretic position in your market and how challenging the industry experts will create instant loyalty and attract customers to you. Talk about the man on the white horse, which is one of my favorite things Dan talks about.
Why most sales and marketing insiders give you really bad advice, secrets handling, criticism and backlash and negativity, all your haters, things like that, and a whole bunch of other really cool things. So I hope you enjoy this next interview with Dan Kennedy.
If you haven't plugged into the Dan Kennedy world, Dan is where I learned business from originally almost 20 years ago. I still to this day, the person I listen to the most on marketing and business advice is Dan Kennedy.
I had a chance three or four years ago now to to actually acquire and buy his company. And it's been so much fun to help grow that company and that brand again.
And if you're not a member yet of his newsletter, the newsletter is amazing. If you go to nobsletter.com, it's the monthly newsletter.
It's like getting a seminar from Dan Kennedy delivered to your house every single month. And it's one of our favorite things we do here.
So if so if you haven't plugged into the Dan Kennedy world yet, you need to, especially after listening to these interviews and yeah, so no BS letter.com is where you go plug in, get a, you get like $10,000 to Dan Kennedy stuff for free. And then we ship you out a newsletter every single month with, with cool Dan Kennedy stuff.
So this news has been running for 40 plus years. It's think the longest running marketing and sales newsletter on the planet.

I've been a subscriber now for almost 20 years.

And if you're not a member yet, then you must hate money.

That's the only logical explanation I can think of.

All right.

Other than that, we're going to jump right now into part number two of my exciting interview with Mr. Dan Kennedy.

So this is your radical big idea,

which in my case was,

the whole damn thing you could show is not a business.

If you actually want a business, here's right. And then the second thing you do is, it's linked,

is your heretic position,

where you are outright taking on the wise elders, the authority, the church, the board, the authority, who you are saying is all wrong. And if not by name, certainly by title.
I did a lot more work with sales audiences and sales people than I did anything else in my early years. and if you go read the No BS Sales Success book so I am I'm getting marketing speech it's very front of the speech I told salespeople that their sales managers were idiots okay the suits if you you're with a big company, you got a bunch of suits in an office tower somewhere, who are basically bean covers.
If you're with a smaller company, you got a sales manager, but he's a nitwit. First of all, he's really you who got promoted to be a manager.
He doesn't know anything about how to help you sell more. And he's detrimental to you because he tells you to do what he did, which is sales is a numbers game, make more calls, dial more.
You know, if your income is good today, Russell, you're just not seeing enough people. You got to go see more people.
Right. And I would say if that guy hadn't got promoted to manager, he'd starve because you can see all the people you want.
But if they're not a match with you and what you're doing you're gonna starve

right the whole thing is about getting in front of people who are like an eight or a nine or a ten

of ability to buy and willingness to buy so uh my heretic position was

kill all the sales managers right uh which by the way i rarely got invited back

Thank you. position was kill all the sales managers, right? Which, by the way, I rarely got invited back.
But I got a lot of customers because if there were 300 in a room, there were 100 who were already thinking it. And they're like, they're the first ones through the back to buy whatever it is, and they're now like glued to you with Velcro because you have spoken the truth, right? And they instinctively knew it, but nobody said anything different, right that second thing, you figure out what your heretic position is going to be.
And then the third thing you figure out is what your man on the white horse position is going to be. Because ultimately, you have to have an alternative plan, right? You have to now ride to the rescue.
You can't just come in and blow up everything and walk out, right? There's no profit in that. So you have to have a man on the white horse position so that now that I have shown you that these people out of ignorance or for their own purposes are selling you a really bad plan.
and you're working a really bad plan, I got the alternative, and I will happily lead you to the land of milk and honey. So you have to figure out those three things, and then be able to, um, um, advertise them, market them, broadcast them, right? Which we now do more through media than manual labor, um, online and offline, right? there's dies on the, can't think of their names, their brothers.
They mostly advertise on CNBC, on TV. They're all over the place online.
They're like the gurus of options trading. So they are appearing in the stock market media where almost everybody else, the pundits, the guests, everybody on Bloomberg, on all of them, right? They are all essentially pimps for stocks, either specific ones or you got to be in the market, you got to be in the market, you got to be in the market, right? And then a bunch of them are also buy and hold.
You got to be in the market and don't worry about whether it goes down, someday it'll come back, right? That's their pitch. So in the midst of all this, these two guys, they're running the free book campaign right now.
They may even be a ClickFiles user. Same company does them and does Charles Payne.
So their whole argument is, don't buy stocks. Everything these people are telling you about stocks is wrong.
You should only buy options. And here's the math difference.
Here's a stock. In three weeks, you would have made 11%.
That's real good. But with options, you would have made 260%.
And so they've got this. They have a radical idea for where they are.
Everybody that's talking to you about the stock market, that your eyes are glued to the Dow, and forget all that shit. And here we are.
We got the White Horse plan. You can make more money on one trade than you're making the whole year screwing around this way.
Right. Now, of course, they don't mention how much you can lose, but, you know.
Oh, so so those are the three things you do. Right.
So in like we're speaking, I told you what I did.

And basically, I put them in what we now call the info marketing business, fed by customers acquired by their speaking, right?

And Cairo, we put them in prepay, and we taught them how to run a prepay practice and a cash practice, no insurance. And after showing them that what they were doing was just a horrible hamster wheel.
I mean, pay-by-the-visit is a really bad model because people don't show up. You know, the dropout of treatment plans and pay-by-visit is around 80%, no better than 50 if you're really, really, really, really good at it.
Prepaid, if you've parted with $20,000 or $30,000 or $40,000, you kind of tend to show up for your appointments. And so, and you actually, it's actually good for the patient because they actually do the stuff at home they're supposed to do to help themselves get better, right? So we installed prepay as the man on the white horse positioned how bad the business was otherwise.
I have a client that I also have an interest in right now, sobarimplants.com, where we were saying to the dentist, the days of general dentistry and filling a tooth, you got to forget all that because one implant case, it's the same as the options trading argument. Right.
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Oh, and in publishing, I never really taught it to anybody. But what I did, so when I started to do my first book, the landscape's very different today because the gatekeepers are diminishing and, well, they're changing.
Amazon is actually now more of a gatekeeper than the publishers. The promise was they were going to go away, but they didn't.
But in the 70s and the 80s,

all the way into the 90s, the publishers were much more important than they are today. And the bookstores were much more important than they are today because almost all books were sold through bookstores.

And so there was a hierarchy.

When you ask any other author or you query the publisher or whatever, how do I get my book published? There was like a little rule book. There was dog bot.
Hey, well, you've got to do a big proposal and a competitive title analysis. And then you've got to find agents who have represented your kind of content.
And you've got to submit packages to the agents. And you've got to grovel and beg and plead to get some agent to accept you as a first-time unpublished author.

And then if you're lucky, that agent will get you a deal,

probably with a small, insignificant publisher for little or no advance.

And then you get to write the book.

And then all about late, the book would get published.

And if you get out there and hump and hump and hump and hump and hump so it doesn't die you might establish a good enough record that you can get a second book deal right so this sounded really slow to me, right?

And the mathematical odds were and still are astronomically against you. The number of proposals the average agent gets coming over the transom is, I don't know, 20,000 a year, 30,000 a year,40,000 a year.
He's got some NYU intern going through them and picking out the ones he should see and sending the rest of them all the standard rejection. I mean, the system was horrible, right? Just horrible.
I said, if I'm going to settle for small, anyway, why don't I just go see the publishers?

Right?

Because I'm a sales guy.

And if I get in front of somebody,

I can kind of sell.

Not every author could do that.

But I can do that.

Right?

Well, you can't, you know.

So now the wise troops are telling me you can't do that. Well, why can't you do that? It's just not done.
They said, well, why isn't it done? Well, they won't allow it. I said, well, if it's never done, how do you know they won't allow it? Because nobody's done it.
Well, you can't do it, right? So the big, it's called Book Expo now, American Booksellers Association. All the publishers exhibit there for all trade.
It's smaller now because of Amazon effect, but it's all the bookstores went there. So I went.
And most of the publishers, the small ones for sure, the presidents are there in the booth. The editors are there in the booth for the five days of the show.
Even the big publishers, they're there for a day or so. So I doorknocked, essentially.
I went for, they're all there in one place, right? Booth to booth. Here I am.
You should publish me. Here's what I want to do, right? And I got a deal.
I didn't get exactly the deal I wanted, but I got a deal sitting on the floor in the food court with the woman president of the publishing company and um afterwards uh my agent at the time who i fired who had told me you can't do this he said i don't know how this could possibly happen i said you go boot to booth and you know then you interrupt their conversation and you talk to them you know it's not and so um i had a bucket list item um i always wanted to do mystery novels, but I got enough rejection slips early that, you know, I'm the Woody Allen thing, you know, try, try, try, try again, and now stop. You're making a fool out of yourself.
So now late, gee, you you know i still would like to do a couple mystery novels so mystery writers of america has an event every association has an event so i go and i'm standing in a room panels are up front it's the same crap i heard 40 years I i mean for fiction now well you got to get an agent and so you got to kiss agents butts and you got to try and find a really tiny little agent who'll take a first-time author and yeah i'm listening to this the back of the room and'm thinking, this is a bucket list item for me, man.

I ain't going to live long enough to do all this.

This is a bad plan.

And we have,

who lives one community over from us,

a well-published,

mid-list,

I mean, he ain't big time, but he's got like 30 mystery novels published with the same main detective character and so forth. So if you think about, like, Spencer, it'd be a low-rent kind of Spencer.
And he's right

in my backyard.

So I can

do math.

I have my nonfiction agent

pull his Nielsen numbers

so I know how many books he's selling.

I know roughly what his

royalty is. I now know

what his annual income is.

And it's less than impressive.

And

Thank you. is.
I now know what his annual income is. And it's less than impressive.

And I happen to now have money.

So that's a good shortcut a lot of times to the entrenched establishment.

Right?

So I go and say, I'd like to second share, do a book with you. I can provide, because all his books are based in Cleveland and around Cleveland.
I said, I can provide a setting you haven't used yet that you probably don't know much about, which I'll educate you about. I have some character ideas.
And then I basically, I want a second chair. I want to watch.
I want to learn. I want to, okay.
And, uh, and I'll write you a check for X, which is roughly twice what he's making from writing the next book, which you'll still get that money, because I don't want any of the money.

I just want a published novel. You can keep the money and here's a check.
And, of course, he took it. We actually did two books together.
And you could have probably done it with almost any second tier, you know, if you wanted to spend money.

And I don't know if the publisher knows.

I didn't tell him, but I don't know if Les did or not.

I doubt it.

It would be frowned upon by the Mystery Writers Association of America.

You know, they might even yank his membership.

That's how tough people are about defending their establishment. But most of this is always nonsense.
It's just nonsense, you know. It gets entrenched over time because it gets passed on.
Talk to the next batch, getting in a business. to the next batch, getting in a business.

To the next batch, getting in a business. And pretty soon it's the religion, the secular religion and the organizing system of that business.
and no opportunity for independent thought exists until you trigger the simmering unhappy natives who are living in the system but are privately questioning it. I'm curious because my next, where's our transition now more to like you becoming that person and doing it.
But so my next question is kind of twofold, but one is you said the third of the people that are in the room are, you're feeling that way, but most of them aren't doing anything, right? They're just feeling that way. So number number one is like how do you not have the fear to go and actually be that person but number two like what are the other things you have to do like to become that person be willing to step up and actually be the person leading the charge well so if you want to leap to the second part of the question.
The fear is real.

You do have to be prepared for the backlash that will inevitably come. In most cases, they are unlikely to strap across to your back and march you up the hill and crucify you.
We have laws about that. But there are people from time to time who come close.
Trump's one of them. Well, had he not won, he'd probably be doing five to ten in an orange jumpsuit somewhere and be bankrupted.
So there will be a backlash. And the better at this you are, the more successful at it you are,

the bigger will be the backlash.

Right?

So you got to know it's coming.

And so some of it is psycho-emotional.

You have to not care about the critics. When I was doing a lot of speaking, I mean, I tried to get some people to get up and leave.
That's a sign of success. That was like you knew you knew you were you know right at a place where everybody got it nobody was missing your point um um and you gotta not care about any of that you know and people tend to obsess over it you know one way or another they'll get complaint letters um i mean i can't other than when they've been funny I don't think anybody has shown me one

30 years

now I know we get them I know we get them and so now you get them whether you know it or not they're coming into your office I promise you and I've never been interested in it, unless it's a funny one.

And then Bill would show it to me or Carl would show it to me,

but for the most part, I don't care.

I care about the one I got, not the 10 I didn't,

and I know there will be more of those than there will of these so I care about their value right those are the two things you care about so you have to be like okay uh with with how that works uh early on like at NSA I had to be okay with being there for three days and seeing people cluster to avoid me, right? Or deliberately talk amongst themselves at the cocktail reception loud enough that I heard it. You know, I'd be okay with that stuff.
And mostly I found it, you know, funny. Charlie Daniels is a great, the title of his book is something like, Don't Worry About the Empty Seats.

So that's one.

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Atlassian. Two, you do have to prepare.
I should really look at my notes to make sure I don't mess this up. You do have to prepare those around you because, especially now with social media, your family is probably going to see it.
Your staff is going to see and hear it. and they have to be kind of immunized to it, right? And you have to do your own, in politics, it's called opposition research.
So you want to know what is in your past and present that can be attacked for whatever reason. Most people have at least a few things, you know.
I always said if I ran for office

my first two hour speech would be the confessional of you know all the things that here's my dirty laundry you got it all exactly don't ask um and so you got to kind of know where the opposition will attack if they can.

Right.

I got a lot over the years, for example, of he he's only in it for the money.

Right.

Which I have always openly addressed, right? I mean, I love you all, but I wouldn't be here if I wouldn't get paid. I mean, sorry, but, you know, I've got a hobby.
And they have four legs and they don't talk back.

And they, you know, they're much easier to amuse than you are.

You know, you just show up with a carrot and you're goling.

So I've always said, of course I'm in it for the money, right? And so should you be too? Business is about profit. And so a question is, where's the profit in that? And if there's no profit in that, why in the hell are you doing it? So in many cases, in our kind of business, you can preempt it by teaching it.
Right? You can preempt it by disclosure. Transparency makes a lot of personal attacks impossible.
right um it's like i've never attempted to hide the fact that I went through a personal and corporate bankruptcy. And it's further and further, of course, back the longer I live, but it's there.
And I assume if you Google deep enough, you would find it. I have no idea because I don't do that.
But

I knew if I'm going to be in this, trying to hide that, it is probably going to bite my ass

at the worst possible time. So better I tell it than somebody else tells it.

Thank you. at the worst possible time.
So better I tell it than somebody else tells it. And then I might as well tell it funny because there's some funny stuff.
And so there's transparency to decide on. And there's sort of a preempting of a lot of attack by telling everybody what your critics are going to say about you.
So, you know, one of my very first business experiences, and I have, the more distant from it I am, the fonder my memory is. I learned a lot.
I didn't make much money. But I learned a lot in multi-level.
And so I started recruiting distributors at Amway when I was 15. You're not even legally on to do it, but, and I quickly discovered the instant quit phenomenon, right?

So typically, you would sponsor somebody in an evening. And if they hadn't talked themselves out of it the next morning themselves, as soon as they left the house, contrary to your instructions, they were going to tell people that they had joined Emily.

And they were going to get an earful.

And whoever they told it to, co-worker, friend, neighbor, mother-in-law, whatever,

was instantly on a mission to rescue them by selling them out of it.

If all those people had become the distributor instead of the distributor, I'd have made

a lot more money because they were much better salespeople than the people I was sponsored.

But I figured out by number four that this is going to be the state of the union, right? And so the evening ended with the talk of, here's the five things you're going to hear if you insist on ignoring me and telling somebody what you have done.

Here's what you're going to hear.

And here's why it's based on ignorance.

And here's the facts.

And then we have a cassette tape.

There's a cassette tape, which essentially was the same talk, right?

Here's the, I think the title was,

The Five Ways People Will Destroy Your Dream by Noon to Mark. Here's the title.

You need to listen to this in the morning, right? Because you didn't have a prayer. And I've done some version of it in almost every business since.
You know, if the chiropractor is a patient and the spouse is not a patient, chiropractors got big trouble. Because the spouse is talking the patient out of being a chiropractic patient every day.
So you got to do the same stuff, right? Here's what fools are going to tell you about chiropractors. And here's why it's not true.
And here's where they got it from. So if you don't do that.
So you do all of this stuff to prepare. Because the more you scare them, or the more angry you make them when you take this approach to a market, you both scare the establishment and you make them angry.
So the more you do that, the more they will try to exile you. I was thrown out of the National Speakers Association for quote quote

ethics I was thrown out of the National Speakers Association for quote quote ethics violations by the ethics committee had to sue to make them rescind it and reinstate a with no gap in the dates in the directory, so it is as if it never happened,

and a printed apology in the newsletter. So they will exile you if they can.
They will try to kill you, but I don't mean that physically. But like with deplatforming, Think about the last four or five years or so, the virus years forward.

Think about the last four or five years or so, the virus years forward. Think about how many thought leaders, if you will, doctors in political circles have just been deplatformed.
They can't process any credit cards. Their site's taken down.
So they've effectively killed them. So they will try and kill you.
And failing that, they will also, if they have media and they have friendly media, that media will now attack you.

In chiropractic, where we're introducing prepay,

the main trade journal, Dynamic Chiropractic,

it's published every week.

It's like a newspaper.

But calling it a newspaper is like calling ABC a news network.

You know, I mean, it's it's oh they went after us like every week and they rallied other media to go after us every week all the way to 60 minutes um so the main company that I worked with was attacked on 60 minutes. Yeah.
Um, and, uh, the owner of the company was an idiot. Um, and he spent four days on his yacht with Morley Safer and a camera crew.
I mean, uh, and, and it was pretty bad. I mean, it was a pretty, it was, it was a pretty good hatchet job about this company teaching everybody, all these chiropractors, how to rip patients off and take $20,000 and $30,000 from them all at one time.
I mean, it was pretty ugly. But for five years, we used as seen on 60 Minutes and as seen on CBS.
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