Bridging the Gap between Selling and Marketing to Increase Business

Mike: Hi Carlos, it’s Mike here.

Carlos: What’s up, Mike?

Mike: Just so you know, I’m recording, and I have your permission to record?

Carlos: That’s right.

Mike: You’re an Herbalife distributor?

Carlos: That’s right.

Mike: Is this your first time multi-level marketing?

Carlos: I had done some Amway, five years ago. There was nothing wrong with it at all. I actually had an income every month. I just didn’t pursue it. I had moved, and had other issues, and just didn’t follow through with it. When I got asked to do Herbalife, I got asked to do it as a customer. I lost 51 pounds in two and a half months.

Mike: Hey, that’s great!

Carlos: I kept it off and I felt awesome. I realized that I live in Miami, and that a lot of people in Miami want to look good… because it’s the Sunshine State.

Mike: Right.

Carlos: I thought, “Well, I’m in Miami, and they say that the wellness and health industry will be a trillion dollar business soon. Why not dig into this? I’m getting started at the right time.” This was something that I thought of myself. Then I went out and found somebody to explain to me about Herbalife. Once I did that, I got into it. Before that I sold cars.

Mike: You sold cars? Used cars, new cars, or what?

Carlos: I sold Mitsubishi, Hyundai, Daewoo, Lincoln, Mercury, Isuzu, and used cars. For 5 ½ years, I made a name for myself in that area, and learned to market myself by trial and error. It got to the point that around the fourth year where I stopped taking walk-ins. I only worked on a referral basis. I hired an assistant to come in three times a week to organize my files because I was just too busy.

Mike: You must have been reading Joe Gerard’s book.

Carlos: Correct.

Mike: He was referred to you by Zig Ziegler, wasn’t he? He’s great.

Carlos: Correct. That’s exactly how it went. In my home library, I have maybe forty or fifty books on sales and marketing. I learned to market myself. I bought the best programs, did everything that I could to just be able to sell cars without having to take the walk-ins. Now I’m in Herbalife. Last month check, net, after my accountant does the taxes, was almost four grand. But I know that for some reason or other, I’m not doing my best at the marketing. I can feel it. I can’t pinpoint it, but maybe I’m missing something. I’m at an impasse, at a plateau. I feel like I’m just around the corner from doing something big.

Mike: What has been most successful for you in your marketing with Herbalife? What has gone really well for you so far?

Carlos: I’ll be honest with you. I don’t know if you know much about the personality type I’m staying with. I’m an extrovert. Going face to face has done well for me.

Mike: So you’re out there doing what 99% of us don’t do. You and I know that you’re an extrovert, I’m an extrovert, and we don’t have any problem talking to people. You know that out of 100 people, 98 would rather go crawl up in a corner and hide.

Carlos: Of course.

Mike: That’s what you’re going to be battling against. You say to yourself, “If I could just find me 10 people like me to push this business, I could retire.”

Carlos: Yes.

Mike: But going through all those people is like sifting... you’re looking for the extroverts. Going through all these people and finding them - that’s what you’re banking on in this business, really.

Carlos: You have a point. You know, Mike, I have a saying, “chance favors the prepared mind.” Just yesterday, I was giving a class on “How to contact people one-on-one.” Somebody approached me, an up-line marketer. Many people call me “Q,” so they said, “Q, can we speak to you?” I said yes, and they said, “You give a great class. How’s your recruiting going?” When I said, “Sir?” and he repeated the question. “How’s your recruiting going?” I told him, “Well, it’s there.” He explained, “You sell well. You sell a lot of product every month, but if you had five people under you, you would sell at least twice as much.” That made sense. I’m not big on recruiting. Not because I don’t try to I just am not really good at it. I’ve been in sales since I was 13. I sold flowers. Then I upgraded to plants, and the deal was that if the boss wanted three dollars for this plant, then anything that I sold over that was mine.

Mike: Were you selling direct sales?

Carlos: Yes, I was actually selling plants on the street corner.

Mike: What else, what other kinds of sales?

Carlos: I worked for Bali’s health spas in the Wall Street area, at Bali’s Jack Lalane, the health spa. I was there as the programs director, which is a glorified name for sales.

Mike: You were selling memberships. That’s a hard sell.

Carlos: Yes. Again, I used the concepts of Zig Ziegler and Tom Hopkins. For example, I have a system where every week I look at my page on my PC, and I send out birthday cards.

Mike: Great.

Carlos: Anniversary cards, thank you letters, and if, while they were there, I was able to get a hint of when their birthday. At times, I try to slip in, “Oh, when was your kid born? He’s what, eight?” and I would write that down, and send their child a birthday card. That impressed them, because they say, “Hey, he remembered my kid’s birthday.”

Mike: That’s what Joe Gerard did, and that’s exactly what you need to do.

Carlos: When I was at my peak every day, I spoke to fifty people. I got ten names. I’m still missing somewhere, another ten or twenty names. These people I could market myself to in some format.

Mike: I think I know exactly where you are, because you’re at where I was at one time. I studied Zig Zigler, Brian Tracy, all those guys, and I became I think a pretty good salesperson. You never master the skill, but if you compare me, or compare yourself, with a hundred other people, we’ll probably be one of the leaders as far as selling. You say to yourself, “If there were just a hundred of me. If I could just duplicate myself...” You’d be rich, wouldn’t you? Do you want to be rich and retire?

Carlos: Of course I do. You know that for a fact.

Mike: Okay. Well, that is the missing element, I think. You say you’ve never heard of Jay Abraham, and you know what marketing is, but you don’t really “know” what it is. I’ll tell you what it is right now. It’s “salesmanship multiplied.” Let’s say it’s you selling a customer on Herbalife products, but instead of you doing it one on one, expending your energy on it, marketing will allow you to take your sales message - whether it’s an audiotape of you selling somebody, or whether it’s a video of you selling somebody, or whether it’s a sales letter, or a fax, or a newspaper advertisement, or a magazine advertisement, or any form of your sales message - you do it in front of ten people. You may be able to sell product to at least three or four of them.

Carlos: I’ll be honest. Actually, my closing ratio is seven out of ten.

Mike: But there’s only one caller. You can’t be everywhere at once. What if you took your message, and put it into a form that you could write down, or put on a video, or put on an audiotape. There could be a thousand Carlos’s now, couldn’t there? Delivering your message. That’s what marketing will teach you. It will teach you leverage - how to take yourself and clone yourself in how to keep your sales message playing in front of your customers without you actually having to be there. Does that make sense?

Carlos: Yes.

Mike: That’s what marketing is. That’s the only missing ingredient. There’s only so much time, and you don’t have the time to be everywhere. You’re doing great with your effort, but you need to multiply, and add some zeroes to your bottom line. The only way you can do it is to leverage, to use your sales message in a way that you don’t have to do it with a lot of effort, and you do that with advertising. When I say advertising, I mean that you’re not out there using your shoe leather. You could use some sort of regenerating ad. Let’s say you send a fax out to people who are in ill health, and you say, “If you want to lose 50 pounds in the next six months, give me a call.” Only the people who called you were the people you dealt with, the people who have a high level of interest. You could probably increase your closing rate, because only interested people are calling you. Your positioning is going to be different. All of them have raised their hand and said, “I’m a little bit interested.” With your sales skills, and your sensitivity to the subject, and your belief in the product since it worked for you, you’ll probably sell them one hundred percent of the time. Right?

Carlos: Right.

Mike: Those are the people you want to deal with. You don’t want to be cold-calling people when you don’t even know are if they are interested in health or losing weight. That’s a waste of time. You only want to be selling or getting your sales message out to people who have raised their hand and said, “I’m interested.” You do that is by using a regenerating qualifying ad. I was involved in multi-level marketing for years, and one thing that I became very frustrated with is recruiting. You know that there aren’t many people, like you, who can sell. To try to sell one person on getting involved, and train them, wastes your energy. The guy that recruited you, did he have to waste his energy in trying to teach you how to get excited about the product?

Carlos: Honestly, sir, I’ve been giving them classes.

Mike: He was lucky to find you, wasn’t he?

Carlos: Actually, he says that every day.

Mike: I’ll bet he’s kissing your butt, because he’s looking at you saying, “This guy is going to make me rich.”

Carlos: You’re right.

Mike: Because all you need is one good guy like you under you to build the business. He’s just got to keep his minimum monthly sales. What I encourage you to do, if you have the good skills, and if you want to learn this marketing - you’re making some good money now, and you could probably keep doing this - but I would encourage you to start educating yourself. Think about control of your own line of health products, where you have control. You can do it very simply. There are hundreds and hundreds of companies with private label health products that are of the same quality as Herbalife, I promise you. Herbalife has the history and everything behind it, but you could get a line of herbal products and nutritional products that you feel just as good about, if you do some research. And you can have them manufactured under your label, Carlos’ Herbal Supplement, or whatever, for pennies. Do you realize the markup on these products?

Carlos: No, I don’t.

Mike: It’s incredible. A $20 product probably costs them about $2 to make. I can show you on the internet, if you look for private label herbal products, you can find private labelers and manufacturers of all kinds of herbal products. There are tons out there, and many are of great quality. With multi-level marketing, they have to mark it up big time. No multi-level marketing company will make money selling something with a little margin. That’s why it’s so lucrative. I’d encourage you to get your own line of products. There are companies that will drop ship for you, and you put your own label on it. If you like selling, and you’re a good hustler, and you can sell product, you can make a fortune just selling on your own the product. You’ll be keeping all the profit, instead of giving it all to the multi-level company. If you like selling product, you can find it at steeper discounts from people who are high up in the company who have to meet their minimums, and they dump their product on the market. Fresh, brand new product. If you really had customers who wanted product, you can pick them up yourself. Do a search on eBay for product. Find people who are dumping the stuff.

Carlos: That makes sense.

Mike: That may be an additional source of retail profits for you on the side. I would encourage you to do this. I would encourage you to look around on my website, and read some of the descriptions of what I have for sale. Listen to some of the audio clips. There’s a guy named Jay Abraham, and if you’ve never been introduced to him, is the granddaddy king of marketing. He’ll open your eyes up to marketing concepts. You won’t be able to sleep at night. That’s how I was. It is great stuff. Since you understand sales, you’ve got the hard work behind you, all those hours and years of studying Zig and Joe Gerard, out there selling cars and stuff. You’ve got it now. Now you just need a little bit of a different way of thinking about your business. You need to learn some ways to leverage your business. Then Carlos just pushes the buttons, and doesn’t do all the grunt work.

Carlos: Let me ask you, Mike. I love your presentation. I love the fact that you’re sympathetic. What I’d like to ask you is what you would recommend for me to market better.

Mike: Do you like audio tapes or reading best?

Carlos: Audio.

Mike: Okay, I’m going to recommend you start with something called “The Jay Abraham Boot Camp Tapes.” This is preliminary material that he would send out to his seminar attendees before they came to his $20,000 seminar. It was a prerequisite that they had to study before they got there. It was to give them his introductory grounding into his marketing philosophies. It’s 28 audio tapes. It’s all his major core concepts, and it’s an introduction to Jay Abraham. I would recommend you start with something like that. I sell that set of tapes for $200.

Carlos: How many tapes?

Mike: There are 28 audio tapes. It also includes some booklets and written information, some bonus material that you can just stick in the bathroom or throw in your car. It’s stuff that you can just start immersing yourself with these concepts. And I offer a hundred percent money back guarantee. I assure you, you’ll be blown away by it. It will be the beginning, I think, of just a whole total new way of looking at business because it may change your mind on a lot of things.

Carlos: I’d like to ask you four questions.

Mike: Go ahead.

Carlos: This is a boot camp. 28 tapes for $200.That’s not bad. That’s actually about $8 a tape. That’s awesome. What kind of payments do you take? Do you take credit cards?

Mike: I take all of the above: any major credit card, PayPal, check, or money order. Whatever you’re comfortable with.

Carlos: These tapes, they would help me break water?

Mike: They’ll do more than break water. You could just study these tapes and have more ideas than you could work in a lifetime. As you know, your sales education isn’t an event. You don’t go listen to one six-tape thing of Zig Zigler and know how to sell. You learn your sales through experience. It’s a process, but it’ll be the beginning of a whole new dimension of your business education. It is a starting point. You many find that you want more. Many times, once you get a taste of this stuff, you want more and more. It’s almost addicting. Then you’re going to come back to me and say, “Mike, I’ve devoured this stuff up. I want to go deeper.” I’ll set you up with more detailed content and specific seminar programs, some of the actual seminars I have, where people paid $5000, $10,000, and even $20000 to go attend. I have those available for pennies on the dollar.

Carlos: I like that. My third and fourth question is: Did Shelly know that you liked “Wacky Pac” stickers when you met her?

Mike: Did Shelly know? She did not know I liked “Wacky Pac” stickers. Do you remember those?

Carlos: Do I remember those? I’m jealous that you still have them and I don’t.

Mike: I still have a whole stack of them, probably about 4 inches thick, in my bottom drawer. I’ve saved them ever since, but they’re not worth much, Carlos. Go on eBay and you can find them all day long.

Carlos: Really?

Mike: Yeah.

Carlos: That’s my growing up.

Mike: Did you collect them?

Carlos: Yes. I loved them. Some of the stuff that they had, like the one you have here, “Shot Wheels”, I remember that.

Mike: I remember it, too!

Carlos: And “Fatina,” I love it!

Mike: I’ve got a whole stack of them in my bottom drawer. I remember as a kid just looking at them, and reading them, and collecting them. It’s like what we did as kids. This is what the kids with the Pokeman cards do today.

Carlos: Yes, true, true, true. No offense, but I think that our stuff was a lot better.

Mike: Definitely better than this Pokeman stuff.

Carlos: Just so you know, the reason why I even do this Herbalife, is to fund my company that I just started.

Mike: And what’s that?

Carlos: It’s called “OnQ,” Inc., because they call me “Q.” It’s a play on words. When you look at my business card, which I will mail to you, I’m a motivational speaker, youth group speaker, and sales trainer.

Mike: Okay, that’s great.

Carlos: That’s the field I want to break into. I have a lot of ideas. In about an hour and a half I have to go see a director for a funding agency. They have an organization for youths and they’re in 18 states and 16 countries. One of the people who saw me speak a few weeks back at this youth group home, liked me and asked me if I’d come in. I said, “Sure, let’s see what we can work out.” They’ve already called me twice.

Mike: That’s excellent. That’s exactly what I do. But I do it in a way where I don’t have to drive to do a presentation. I know you’re looking at my website right now. You can develop a website similar to what I have and be able to reach more people, anytime, anywhere in the world, and while you sleep. I have all 61 hours of my audio interviews on a CD-ROM that I give out free. You’ll fill out the form, hopefully, and I’ll send it to you absolutely free. I can impact someone’s life, and what did it cost me to put it on a CD-ROM and send it out? $1.50? $2.00? That’s exactly what I want to do. I want to encourage and help people and educate them in marketing. At the same time, I can make a couple bucks selling some used educational material. But the really big picture is helping youth and helping people who want to learn. I give them access to this information free.

Carlos: I think that you’re right and I will fill out this form right now.

Mike: Fill it out and get it to me. I know you’ve got an appointment. You can call me later, or you’ve got access to my e-mail address, you can write me. Think about what we’ve talked about. If you want the tapes, get me some money. I’ll even pick up your shipping, okay?

Carlos: I thank you. You’re awesome. I’m quite impressed. I hope you have a great day. And please be aware you’ll be hearing from me this afternoon with an e-mail. I plan to get the tapes this week. I want to take in all of the info on your site because I don’t want to miss out on anything. I guess I’ll be a Jay Abraham junkie soon.

Mike: All right, we’ll talk to you later, Carlos. Bye-bye.

Carlos: Thank you.

Mike: Thank you again for listening, this is Michael Senoff with www.hardtofindseminars.com . If you want to get in touch with any of the people in the interviews, please email me at Contact by Email .