Reframing sales and elevating others with Dennis Yu

– Welcome everybody. To another episode of performance marketing insiders, we’ve got a real treat for you today, as you know, we’re all about secrets, cuz it only takes one or two little secrets to just absolutely light it up. And today we’ve got the master of secrets. We’ve got my guy, uh, a marketing mastermind. Who’s actually in the process, he’s on a mission, but also in the process of creating a million jobs he’s been featured in New York times, tech crunch, CNN, the economist on NPR. He’s widely published bestselling author of two books, Facebook nation, which is used by over 700 colleges and universities today. Uh, and then just recently printed the definitive guide to TikTok ads. Mm- hmm uh, with my guy Perry, Marshall, this is the host of the coach U show CTO, CEO, and co-founder of Blitzmetrics, ladies and gentlemen, Dennis Yu.

– Welcome Mr. Chris, always good to see you.

– The one and only Mr. Dennis, you, I love talking to you, man.

– I love listening to your voice.

– You’re the smart, you’re like easily among the top five smartest people. I know. And you’re just like so cool. And your vibe is just like, so so right. I just like it.

– Well, when you bring out fried chicken, I’m there every time you’ve the fried chicken, you know, I’m there

– Absolutely man. Well, welcome to the show. We’re super happy to have you. I wanna start with like the main sound bite, which is, I want you to reveal one of your secrets. Just one. I know you have a ton, but I want to hear one secret, uh, for the audience, basically think about some of your biggest wins. Some of the things that had made you most successful. If you were to impart one secret onto the audience, what would

– it be? Here’s one. And let me know if you’ve ever heard any variation of this, cuz a lot of people have these secrets, the best way to drive conversions, which is to get people to buy from. Is to never talk about yourself, but only have your clients and friends talk about you. So think about what that means. So most people they’re selling, they’re trying to get people on a 15 minute phone call they’re they got landing pages, all these things that are designed to get people, to buy, buy, buy, where it’s them, the company, the manufacturer, the agency talking about what they do. But imagine if you had your best customers that were doing this mm-hmm So, you know, we had the golden state warriors as a client for five and a half years, and we ran their ads and you know, a lot of people I’d be in the office of the CMO and he’d get three phone calls from agencies while I’m there all trying to hit ’em up on digital marketing and analytics and building websites and email and marketing automation and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. And we just laugh at that because those people had zero credit and zero authority. So what I did was by one time, I was invited to keynote at a conference in Norway. You ever been in Norway? No crazy. And this is one of the biggest conferences in Norway where they fill up a stadium and last year’s keynote was Richard Branson. Mm-hmm and they said, Hey, Dennis, would you like to be the opening keynote this year? I’m thinking I’m not Richard Branson, but I’m not gonna say no to that. Right? Yeah. But instead of me speaking, I said, Kenneth, I’d love to come and I’d love to teach a workshop and all this, but for the opening keynote, I appreciate the invite. But I’d like to invite the head of marketing for the golden state warriors to be your keynote. Cause I think that that would be way more powerful, but I’ll still come teacher workshop. I’ll still do all these other pieces. And so the golden state warriors came and taught, you know, had the opening keynote and talked all about how they turned a million dollars of ad spend into $38 million of Ticketmaster, provable ticket revenue, and grew the email list and sold more merchandise and did all these great things. and I felt like the whole thing was an infomercial promoting us, promoting what we did, but that’s not how the audience perceived it because it was the warriors talking about what they did logging in to their Google analytics, logging into their Facebook ad account, logging in and showing all the ads, showing exactly the performance, showing conversions, showing, spend, showing how many tickets were being sold. So how does that, why is that more powerful than me giving a presentation on? Well, this is the six step process that we use to set up ad campaigns and drive sales and optimize mm-hmm .

– Why is that? Well, it’s, it’s obvious. It’s obvious why it’s more powerful. Cause third party credibility. Right? So if I tell you how awesome I am, it’s less believable than if you say how

– awesome I am. Yeah. If I talk about how

– awesome I am, but why is nobody else doing this? So, so three questions basically, and they don’t know any better. Why is nobody else doing

– it? Yeah.

– How do we do it? Mm-hmm. Really just two, those two. Yeah. How come nobody? I mean, cuz it’s, it seems obvious now that you say it, but it seems actually quite insightful cuz nobody’s doing it. Everybody’s selling themselves. Right.

– There’s two reasons. One is that the, the inertia of selling usually translates to a model of, you know, account reps at sales reps, people that set up meetings, appointment, senators, BD, whatever you wanna call it, this whole function around sales. And so sales people have quotas and they get commissions and they’re trying to line up as many calls as they can. That turn into leads that turn into, you know, closed one, whatever Salesforce level, you know, marketing, qualified sales, qualified all the way through until you have a deal and give, have an LTV. And then it moves over into inside sales. Like there’s you, you, you know, you know that that’s like the whole process. And so that machine just operates the way it’s always operated without realizing. In the last five years, 10 years, the world of digital has completely flipped things to be based on word of mouth where you can Google a company. 80% of people by the time they’ve gone to a company’s website, have they’ve already decided to buy. Yeah. So all the research is done outside of your own channels. So that means word of mouth is super powerful, which is why TikTok so powerful because you can boost other people’s posts. So number one, right? Reason why people keep doing this the wrong way and talk about themselves is cuz the sales channels haven’t evolved to incorporate word of mouth and referrals and reviews, right? High powered. I don’t wanna call them testimonials cuz that’s also bogus too.

– Well, Dennis, you’re blowing my mind right now. Literally blowing my mind. I have chills a little bit because. You hire a, even a smart, like chief sales officer, you know, chief revenue officer. Yeah. They’re gonna come and install that traditional, you know, BDR set appointments and pass it off. Yeah. They would never think to go after a strategy like this, probably because it’s just so different. And probably cuz they don’t know how yeah. You know, but it might make sense to so web mechanics, you know us, we don’t have really a sales team I’m in the process of installing one. Right. Cause we’ll need one, you know, to continue scaling. But maybe instead of doing it the old way, maybe we set up a sales team in the new way. So instead of BDRs that set cold appointments. Maybe those BDRs do something else. I don’t know. But, so let’s go to the how so for, for anybody listening right now that has a sales team or runs a sales team, how could they maybe not transform the entire thing, but how could they tap into this a little bit more, this idea of getting your customers

– to sell for you? Yeah. Let me give you a super powerful, valuable nugget. And this is when we sat down and ate fried chicken with your head of marketing. Yeah. And he was doing cold calling and, and very clever in the way that he was doing it. And that’s this never have anyone in sales with sales in their title. Of course. In any company, if you have under a hundred people everyone’s in sales. Right. Cause what happens if sales is in the title, what happens to the prospect of the lead when they see sales in the title? Automatic

– shut down. Yeah.

– Yeah. Cuz what do you think that person’s gonna try to do? What kind of respect do you have for that person? Here’s what you do. You reframe them. Now, a lot of people will, they’ll rename into like customer success and, you know, client management or like some sort of thing, which is really just sales. But I wanna go many steps further. Think about this way. Let’s say that, you know, God forbid and your brand new model, why you’ve got in an accident because Elon Musk’s self-driving thing didn’t work. Right. And then you had to go to the hospital. I love that model. Why car you have wow. That thing accelerates nicely. Oh yeah. And, but, but you know, you go to the hospital into the emergency room and what happens in the emergency room. Well, you know, they look at you and they, they triage for the people who are the most likely to die or most urgent. And then they x-ray, you take your blood, all this, and along the way they say, Chris, it looks like we’re gonna have to do the surgery on your arm. Right. Cause here’s the x-ray and here’s the broken bone and we’re gonna do the surgery and it’s gonna cost this much. Or, you know, whatever it, here’s the whole thing we’re gonna do. And then different people. They have, you know, whatever runny noses or cancer or whatever it is. And they’re all being treated. How many sales people, Chris are in the emergency room? Zero, zero. Do you think if they put emerge, do, do you think that they put more sales people than BDRs in the emergency room that the hospital can increase their sales?

– Uh arguably, but probably not. No.

– Well, why not? I mean, you, you, you need more sales people if you wanna scale. Right. I mean, if web mechanics wants to scale, you need to hire more sales people. Well,

– I don’t know. I mean, we could have, well, yes, it probably would not work

– in a hospital setting. Why not?

– Uh, because it’s an urgent, like it’s an urgent need. You know, like if I have my arm broken mm-hmm I want that fixed. I may not be interested in the upsell or the cross sell, you know, mm-hmm or the insurance package or the extra insurance package.

– But let’s say it’s something really critical. Like you had this head injury or, you know, you had a heart attack or something, would you be shopping around for other heart surgeons and see who could give you the late, you know, Hey, you know what? The hospital across the street, they’re offering heart surgery for half off. If I buy by tomorrow, would you like to go to that place? No, definitely not. But you know what, but if you buy the heart surgery, they’ll give you a liver transplant for half off. . How about that?

– No, no, no,

– thanks. So everyone in sales knows the BANT mall, right? Yeah. Budget authority. Need timing. Well, when you have inbound leads that come through referrals, because they know who you are and they’re in clear pain because they have an issue with whatever their PPC or leads or they launch a new product or something’s not right. Okay. And they come to you. And if, if you’re good, if you’re like web mechanics and you’ve been doing this for over a decade and you’re good, people know who you are, right. People in your town know who you are like you, I remember we’ve walked into restaurants or whatever, and you just like run into these people. I’m like, you’re the, you’re the mayor. Basically, as far as I can tell Chris, right? They know who you are. And so this natural referral thing is already happening to drive these inbound leads. So if you are featuring your customers and clients and partners all the time, giving them credit, making them look good, running dollar a day to push that content out there, like the podcast episodes, putting dollar a day. So people see it on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, all that on, you know, SEO. So it’s showing up in search results. Then customers come to you and thus this sales team. It’s now more of a diagnostic team where you don’t have to convince the client to work with you. What they want is a diagnosis of, well, all, you know, I have, I have chest pain. Is it because of heartburn? And I need to take a Pepto bisol or do I need heart surgery? And so I need an expert who can tell me this. So when you go to the hospital, you don’t question the expertise of the doctor, do you? No, they’ve got the right lab coat, the stethoscope around their neck. When you get on a plane, do you question whether the pilot is gonna be, you know, are they gonna crash the plane? No, no, no. So you have trust in whoever that is because they’re certified cuz they’ve done it a long time because they’re not using cars, used car salesmen, slick tactics. Right? So I think if. If the rest of our industry, no matter what the industry is, levels up then digital marketing or whatever it is that we’re selling. Won’t appear like this slimy thing that needs to be pushed on the people where we have to try to convince them that they need this thing that they don’t really even want. Cause by definition, if you’re cold calling them, you it’s cold. You don’t have relationship strength. They don’t have clear need. You’re trying to hunt and find a problem that maybe you can get them to buy into. That’s just, that’s an uphill battle. That’s a really hard place to start. Why not just elevate your customers and then all the other people that are like that will say, Hey, you know what? I’m like that person, I want that same result. I need to talk to Chris.

– I love it. I love that. So the big idea is get your customers, your raving fans to basically sell for you. Yeah. And there’s, there’s playbooks, you know, in our space, in the digital marketing space, but let’s pretend that you’re like a financial service company. Like let’s say

– you’re a bank. Yeah. Like how would you do that if you’re a bank or so my friend, my friend, Caleb Williams sells life insurance. That is a hard thing to sell, right? Oh yeah. Just imagine all those ugly conversations about super commodity. Yeah. But if your loved one dies and are you, what’s going on with your Roth IRA and for taxes and are you investing your stuff properly? And if, is the market going up and down and how, like, those are all different kinds of financial services, should you switch out your credit cards? You know, is your credit score too low? Like there’s all, it’s a, so he basically sells financial services and he sells, I believe the most difficult financial services.

– Yeah. Which is UND differentiable. Everybody has the same products and the same

– prices and the perception of people that sell life insurance is kind of scammy. Right. Yeah. So let me tell you about Caleb. And then this is going to apply to any kind of services based. It could be lawyers, any, any sort of expertise based business. Right? So Caleb, when full disclosure, he’s a client, I’ve known him for a few years. He executes all the things that I tell him to do, which makes them just so happy when people actually follow through. When I say do this, this and this, and they do it. Yeah. So four years ago he was a, nobody, just some kid who ran the investment division inside a bank, and he had no digital presence at all. And I said, you need to start interviewing people who are well known interview the VPs of the other banks. Start speaking at conferences. So I put ’em on some of these stages. Like I put ’em at traffic and conversed summit. So we spoke in front of a thousand people and put ’em on a bunch of stages, which is easy. I can just do that. And he published a book, which is a good book. It wasn’t just some book to check the box. It actually is a good book called the end asset and his podcast just last week hit 500 episodes. So he’s interviewed all the top names in financial services. You name it, right? These guys who have millions of YouTube subscribers, people that run the big banks, presidents of the major associations he’s interviewed them. And last week I was in Denver at his conference mastermind. He called it where he had. The biggest players in the industry at his mastermind, speaking openly sharing their secrets, talking about, you know, how they sell their products. Cause like the biggest thing in like life insurance and financial services is like, how do you staff up your teams and sell these products and use digital marketing and you know, that kind of thing. Yeah. And he had all these folks that we’re sharing. And this is some 26 year old kid that four years ago was 22 and was a nobody. Wow. And he followed the technique, Chris, that we just talked about, which is he never talked about himself. He just elevated other people. And so what happens when you talk good about somebody else reciprocation, they wanna say good about you. So if you’re interviewing clients, which of course he’s interviewed all these clients and he does do a good job in advising. Like obviously if you don’t, if your firm doesn’t do a good job, then this, this word of mouth thing actually backfires against you. Right. But he hired a good team of other consultants and advisors and whatnot, and they do a good job. So he is got great references and those people are happy to talk about him. So he has some of the top people in the industry that are clients of his, which I think is hilarious. And so his business grows because of his word of mouth. And so if you’re a bank and you’re selling any kind of products, do you have figures? Do you have other people who are respected that this? So the idea of the lighthouse is if you want to sell to a particular customer base, look at who they respect and get and interview those people. Because if, if the, the people you want to reach, see that you and the person they respect are together, then they’re naturally going to want to follow it. That the trust that they have for their figurehead Conveys onto you that that’s kind of the secret that we’re talking about today. And most people don’t leverage that secret because they try to go to a direct sale because they’re going for a direct lead and booking the appointment directly instead of wait a minute, if I can play inception, which is the dream inside the dream inside the dream, I can influence this other group in such a way to get them to talk good about me. Yeah. Yeah. I get them to talk good about me by talking good about them.

– It makes total sense. It makes total sense. People don’t do it. People don’t do it. Yeah. It, well, it takes a different type of thinking and a different. Uh, almost a different skill set, but it’s not difficult to do. No. Um, but let’s talk. So let’s talk about a, let’s just say that there’s a firm that already has a sales team entrenched mm-hmm and they offer a good product or offer a good service. They have happy customers. Mm-hmm is there a way that the leadership of that team could start some of this inception strategy? I love how you’re always thinking about inception strategies, like dollar a day to the media outlets, for instance, like that’s brilliant. Yeah. Um, but is there a way that this could be activated with a traditional sales team or do you have to totally

– change the whole model? No, no, no. You can use the existing sales team, but you have to shift. There’s two things you have to do at the same. So you have to shift the mindset of the salesperson, who is all about cold calling and every, no, every, no, you get, it leads to the next. Yes. And here’s the techniques to try to get people to put the money down and say yes, and like still you can do all those things, but you have to shift them to where. So, so the way I would, I would shift their mindset. I would hold my own conferences and as people would come in and they’d register and pay a lot of money to come into this thing. So as they would come in, we would hand them a white doctor’s lab coat with their name on it. So it’s say Dr. Chris mechanic, right? Dr. Dennis U doctor. I think I might have one of these somewhere here. I can show you what they look like, because I wanted to reframe where this person, instead of being some sales person like, oh, I hope I could like try to get 15 minutes on the phone with you. I wanted to reframe it to where this person felt like an expert and they had enough expertise to be able to say things that were interesting. We built their personal brand and pimped out their LinkedIn built websites for each of them, put a Twitter out there. Try, you know, tried to build up their public figure just a little bit. They’re not trying to become Gary Vaynerchuk, but just trying to put a little bit out there. So that way, when someone spends time with them, then it’s not just some sales guy cuz. Before you meet somebody, Chris, how often do you Google them and look at their link every time, every time. So you have to build up some very basic personal sort of presence. So that’s one is shifting the perception of that salesperson to feel more kind of consultative. So it’s not like talking about salesperson, they’re just gonna try to sell me, right? Yeah. Like, oh, I’m actually actually get 15 minutes to talk to Chris mechanic. Wow. This is really cool. I better prepare. I’m excited about it. I’m not just gonna blow off the appointment, which is what most people do. It’s a salesperson. Ha I’ll just skip them and not even show up, you know? Yeah. That’s one. And then number two, the marketing people. So this is like that whole like sales versus marketing kind of thing, which people, you know, so each,

– each person, each person, each BDR or whatever should have some semblance of a personal brand. Like they’re yeah. That’s hard to do. Yeah. LinkedIn profile should be tidied. Yeah. Maybe have a personal website, just like a yourname.com or do

– co or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. It’s like 20 bucks to do all these things. Right. Then they have to make some one minute videos on their cell phone, post that on Facebook, their LinkedIn, their website, and they can get the whole exercise done in an hour. And then if you want, you hire a couple Filipinos or people on five, just to process all that kind of stuff to, you know, make it look nice and whatever, and, and you’re good to go. It’s good enough. It’s just a thin little layer. Just enough to look like this person has, has some professional presence. Yeah, right? Yeah. It’s that simple. So that’s number one. And then the second part is the marketing people have to drive those inbound leads, which is bound lates, which is actually easier. Then getting the sales people to build their personal brands and change their mindset. So for marketing to do this, they need to put out thought leadership pieces, some kind of lead magnet, maybe the CEO or founder has a podcast. Maybe like somehow they have to produce. Maybe they, you know, they publish a book or they speak in conferences or maybe they already have some of that, but it’s just not being seen. What I’ve seen is that people will have a podcast or they’ll be on TV or whatever, but they don’t have a marketing team that’s picking up those mentions and then boosting those out for a dollar a day. Like we talked about mm-hmm I was in Kosovo last week. Can you believe that they used to be part of Serbia. They left in 2008, 2 million people in that country. I was on the largest TV station in Kosovo, which I guess is like being a, a big war for a small, giant, it’s still natural TV. Right. And a bunch of people saw me on TV. Dennis U comes to Kosovo to teach digital marketing and great jobs and, you know, great headline. I got to meet the president, some of these other things. That’s awesome. I mean, it’s still a country, right? I didn’t even know it was a country. That’s how ignorant I am, but that was good media attention. But did you see that I was on TV, Chris? No, no, you didn’t. So what we need to do is anytime there’s a media mention, anytime there’s something like a podcast, any, anytime we’re on an article, anytime, like one of us makes a good LinkedIn post or whatever, we wanna repurpose that into other channels, meaning yeah. We cross post it. Meaning we copy that. Let’s say we had a great, you know, this is a great zoom call. Well, we’re gonna transcribe it and pull the snippets out of it and turn it into a blog post. And yeah, maybe put little bits of it on Instagram and turn it to Instagram reels or whatever it is. We’re gonna SEO for it. Put it on YouTube, maybe run dollar a day on YouTube for key points. So

– that’s brilliant. So that, so it’s basically like if you’re a sizable company, if you have been in business for a while, and if you have good products and service and a smart team that’s committed, you’re probably getting some degree of press already. You’re probably doing some cool stuff already amplifying it with dollar a day strategy. I think we could do a whole topic on that, but basically the idea is like humanize and add credibility to the actual sales team. Yeah. And then have the marketers, like not just driving traffic to, you know, the lead magnet about how can you do HR better, but also take a small little tiny portion of that budget. Mm-hmm to amplify and do that inception strategy.

– Let me give you a concrete. Brilliant. So, you know, this is not everyone listing or watching. This is not some theoretical thing we’ve done this thousands of times. So, you know, Ashley furniture. They’re now called Ashley HomeStore, the world’s largest furniture, retailer and manufacturer. We had sales people in each of the different store locations in like Chicago in Arkansas, in like Alabama, wherever Seattle, they were making one minute videos just. About, and we had a list of the different topics, like, Hey, talk about this couch, talk about how you grew up. Talk about your favorite restaurant in town. Talk about, you know, what kind of colors go with each other, right. Just like, kind of talk. So people get a sense of who you are as a person, not just like Ashley furniture as a 4th of July blowout sale. Like, okay. We’ve already seen that. That’s like a newspaper TV ad kind of thing, you know? Yeah. But actually like humanize yourself and do some cell phone style videos walking around the store saying like, you know, I really like this particular lamp. And the reason why is because it reminds me of like, when I grew up, my grandma used to have a lamp like this, or just telling little stories like that. So we collected hundreds of these stories from across the different stores, not professionally shot. We got some flack from the branding people from like central marketing saying, we’ll just, this violates our brand guidelines and right. Doesn’t have, you know, needs to have our logo there all the time. And it needs to you like, just let, let us do our things. Stop interfering. Yeah. Are you guys doing this? We need to be every thing needs to be like driving the sale and the next item that we have and like, no, no, no, just let us do our thing. Just stay away for a little bit. Okay. So we did, we had the blessings of the other execs to like get off Dennis’s back for this experiment. And we used Facebook and Twitter and some of these other channels, and we ran dollar a day against those particular posts in those particular cities. So if you were an Amherst New Hampshire and there was this girl, Rebecca, and she was talking about something about her and how she grew up, and her favorite place is an Amherst, New Hampshire people were coming into the store saying, Hey, I’d like to talk to Rebecca is Rebecca here. And so people would say, I want they’d name. The person they’d want to talk to instead of like, oh, let me get you the next salesperson. No, I wanna talk to Rebecca. And then when they’d meet Rebecca or Sam or whoever it was they’d, they’d say like, wow, I can’t believe I’m actually talking to you. It’s like, you’re famous, cuz I’ve seen you on you. See what I mean? You see that? Yeah. They’re starstruck a little bit. They’ve never met Rebecca, but because they saw Rebecca talking about whatever she was talking about and then they walked in there that just now, now tell me Chris, how does, how does, what’s the difference between that potential customer, about to buy some furniture? Having seen Rebecca just for a moment on, it was a Facebook ad, but they don’t realize it was an ad, right. Versus them just walking cold into the store saying, okay, you know, we, we just moved into a new house and we need to buy some more

– furniture. I mean it’s night and day. First off, they might not have even entered the store. If it wasn’t Rebecca. And second off, they’re gonna be a lot more receptive to pretty much anything

– Rebecca says. So we track store visits and we had a 17 to ones. Wow. Cause we tracked everything to the point of sale. We tracked emails and phone numbers, all of that kind of stuff. So this wasn’t just like super bowl branding, like, oh, let’s just increase our brand and let’s try to humanize the brand. No, we could, we could drive direct sales and tie it to Google and Facebooks

– store. So seventeens means for every dollar you spent on Facebook ads, you saw 17 bucks mm-hmm

– and revenue. It was so good. I had their head of marketing speak at social media marketing world. And this is a big honor for him because he wanted to speak, you know, social media marketing world is the big conference for the people that do social media marketing. Yeah. So he got to speak there. And instead of me speaking, saying, here’s what we did for Ashley furniture. I had Mike Maro on stage and Mike was so happy. He went to this whole, he, he went through the different stats. He logged into the accounts, did the same thing that I told you we did for the golden state warriors and all that made me look good without me needing to say anything about me. And so all the people came up to him at the end of his presentation and came up to me saying, wow, you know, we’re a retailer too. We’ve got a bunch of crispy creeps. Can you do this for us? We have a bunch of whatever change they have. Can you do it for us? And I said, well, here’s, here’s the playbook. Go through it right here. Give it to you for free. Now, if you wanna hire us, then it costs a lot more, but I want and make sure you see here’s the playbook. And if you want to talk about implementation, then let’s have a call with one of our implementation specialists. I did say sales people. I said, implementation specialists, right? Implementation means we’re going to do this thing. Right. Well, I mean, if you’re gonna talk to an implementation specialist, what do you expect that you’re gonna do

– implement?

– Yes, I imagine, right. I didn’t even need to talk about sales, cuz if they’re you’re, if you’re talking to an implementation specialist, we’re gonna talk about implementing. Right. What else are gonna talk about? We’re not gonna talk about whether we’re any good at what we do. We’re not gonna talk about who are the three other guys that could maybe do this as well. Yep. See, wow. It’s, it’s the same thing. Everything we said here is around this one secret that you

– asked about Dennis U has got secrets for days. I could talk to you for hours and hours, and you’re just dropping secrets, like layered secrets, like with levels of depth. Uh, but I wanna switch gears on, on the topic of TikTok and on the topic of that playbook and on the topic of creating a million jobs with these implementation specialists, like, what are you doing today? Like, what are, what are your, what are your major focuses? What are you spending your time on?

– So for me to be able to create a million jobs, I don’t wanna hire a million people. I’ve hired hundreds of people just to prove that we can do this right. Instead of like Dennis just wrote a book and he has this idea that maybe it’s a good thing. We’re a quarter of the way there in creating our million jobs. We’ve created a quarter million jobs largely through online jobs.ph. My friend, John Jonas started this site and. Tons of VAs in the Philippines. So a VA is a virtual assistant and in the last two months I have crossed the Atlantic ocean six times, geez, London, Pakistan, India, Kosovo, other places to be able to train up people with the support of the government and the large entrepreneur organizations. And then. The equivalent of the fortune 500 companies over there and the larger agencies out there and the entrepreneurship centers to be able to teach digital marketing, because over there at no offense to like no country wants to be called third world. But if the average income in some of these places is a hundred dollars a month and $500 a month, it’s life changing income. If they can learn to do all the stuff that we’ve talked about for years, Chris, like edit videos and run Facebook ads and build websites and landing pages and set up chat bots, like do whatever, like in digital marketing, according to the cookbook, mm-hmm , those people will do it full time. These are people who are eager and hardworking and loyal $500 a month full time doing this stuff, right. That’s three bucks an hour. Look I’m. I was born in Dayton, Ohio. I’m I’m an American I’m I’m as American as all these other people. My English is perfect, but I believe that we need to outsource $3 an hour work. To places like over there so that we, as Americans can focus on relationships and high value stuff. And as our firms grow and we hire more Americans to do relationship oriented stuff, we hire more VAs, which are cooks in the kitchen to do that kind of like $3 an hour work. And no offense. They’re happy about this. Okay. It’s not like they’re being enslaved. The, the head of Walmart’s customer care said that I was exploiting third world labor by hiring all these people three bucks an hour. And I said, no, we’re not. They’re very happy. This is great. You know, so I view it as anyone who’s who’s in sales or doing account management or talking to clients, I consider them waiters. because you’re, you’re talking to ’em about the menu and making sure they’re happy. And how was your 4th of July? And you know, all that kind of like waiter stuff. And then in the back, you have the cooks in the kitchen. But Chris, what happens when, when someone’s a, when a cook tries to come out to the front and talk to the customer or a waiter tries to go into the back where all the cooks are, they’re gonna burn themselves, cut their fingers. Right. You wanna separate the waiters and the cooks. Right?

– Totally. I love the restaurant analogy. uh, and I totally see it. And I agree with you in that, cuz we have a VA Uhhuh, uh, we’re actually a couple VAs and they are the most grateful people. Like they’re, you know, anytime we, we have like a little slack channel, anytime we drop a job, they’re like, thank you. Like that’s the first thing they always say, thank you for this job. Yeah. Uh, and then they go about doing it diligently. Um, yeah, but I. It sounds like a really great idea, but I imagine it’s challenging in a lot of ways. Yeah. Like just language barrier being one of the ways, but what, what are some,

– well, you hire only people that speak excellent English. Not gonna just hire anybody. We hire the top 0.1%. Not even the top 1% you want the people that are so good. You can hang out with them on a zoom call and have a laugh, right? Yeah. You’re not gonna hire people who are just, who like barely speak English or like what, like, look, I don’t mean to insult anybody, but 99% of the applicants that you’ll get are just, just you can’t. I mean, DQ all the way, right? Mm. You want the P so if you hire the right ones and John Jonas, and I talked about this, they can sell, they can do account management, they can manage team members. They can do anything you and I can do. They can speak. They can, you know, run meetings. They, they can do all these things competently, but it’s gonna be one in a thousand people. So you have to have a really strong applicant tracking training system so that you cuz you, you’re not gonna be able to needle in a haystack of a thousand resumes. Right, right. You need people self qualified. So we have all this stuff on how we disqualify people and how they have to go through this whole gauntlet and who, whoever comes out at the end will interview them and see if they’re good. Right. And then higher . But they, we, we disqualified 99 plus percent of the people that come through. So I spend most of my time over there training, and then time in the us, I spend with business leaders and people who have organizations like teams of financial advisors, teams of real estate agents, teams of whatever, in whatever industry. So they understand that this is the structure. They need to govern their digital marketing. And then that sets up for the workers on, and here’s how that works being done. So I’m trying to bring both sides together. And the thing that connects both sides is the process. So here’s the process on collecting the positive things that people have said about you, which, you know, the PR team maybe will do that. The marketing people maybe have some like branding and podcasting and some lightweight thought leadership just randomly organized into a calendar, which is a random organization. And so we’re, we’re taking this content and then the waiters push it out to the cooks and the cooks are processing this content. Mm-hmm . So our people in international, we call, I guess we should call them international workers. That’s the word instead of VA, cuz VA I guess is derogatory, but our international workers are processing that content repurposing the content, running through tools like descript, these AI, you Jasper sorts of tools and then putting it on WordPress, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, whatever, boosting it for dollar a day. And that drives more inbound leads back to the sales team. Mm-hmm interesting. So the, the cooks are working on the food in the kitchen. And so it comes back to the, you know, through the waiter, in the form of. Community management and feedback and, you know, people filling out lead forms. And then, then our waiters can focus on talking about implementation and having expert diagnosis and recommending instead of convincing. Right? Yeah.

– So are there any challenges you’re facing with this or is this just basically looking like a home run? You just have to get to more international workers and more us

– based teams. The biggest challenge is having convincing American companies. of this shift in mindset and people like you get it, but most people are still used to. Yes, but I just need to dial for dollars. And if I have enough cold calls and if I spam enough emails, I’ll get enough leads and I’ll get like, yeah, maybe, but I think that hurts your brand and it’s not an efficient way. It’s ineloquent cuz it makes you just, it just doesn’t look good if you’re, you know, you have people that are giving away a hundred dollars. I, you know, whatever gift cards or whatever it is to try to get appointments. Right.

– True. You, you want, so I guess that’s, that’s just a self perpetuating. So the, so it’s not really a challenge in a way because the folks that are fed up with that find some of your content, right. And then, and then they get basically enrolled into your funnel where they hire you.

– So that’s yeah. The execution, this is actually not hard at all. As long as that underlying business, especially the enterprise business has good things that customers are saying about them. If clients and customers are saying good things about you, we just need to categorize it and prepare it so we can put it into the content factory and then have all the VAs, do their thing, run ads. And then all these leads will come in, which sounds too good to be true. But all it is is just amplifying. Word of mouth. Digital marketing is nothing more than an amplifier of what people are already saying about you. But if you’re a telco in some cases or an airline and people hate you. Then this model might not work so well for you.

– Right? Right, right. That makes sense. Well, Dennis, I’m so happy to have you on this, uh, on this pod because you are the ultimate keeper of secrets. You’ve got secrets. You’ve got frameworks. I think you’ve coined more terms than anybody else. I know between inception strategy, dollar a day, content factory. Like, I just love the way that you think. Um, but the last thing I wanna touch on, so we’ve got like about 10, 15 minutes left. Mm-hmm I wanna just understand a little bit more about you as a person. Like, how did you become you? Take me back to Dennis, you, the kid, and just like, gimme a little chronology of your life. Like, how did you become

– who you are? I was a shy Asian kid who didn’t speak English, who I was six and I didn’t know any words in English and the kids would tell me if you really like somebody tell them this. And I would go to the principal’s office and I learned a lot of words that probably weren’t your first words, cuz I just didn’t know. And so I ate my meals by myself. I didn’t have any friends. I was a total loser and I thought, man, I wanna be cool. I want to be the ones the other kids wanna hang out with. And I didn’t wanna be just like some math, Asian piano playing stereotype geek, cuz that’s what my parents were pushing me to. I played the piano and I was good at math. I traveled to math competitions, but I had a mentor who was a CEO of American airlines, just kind of randomly, he kind of adopted me. He was old and he said, I had a great smile, such that I could sell toothpaste. And he introduced me to the chairman of Allstate insurance. I once had dinner with George H w Bush and Margaret Thatcher and other people that are. Miles and miles, like I have no business dealing with any of these people, much less having an intimate sit down dinner with just like a few of us, like Al will say, Hey Dennis, you know, tonight I’m gonna have dinner with so, and so who’s the CEO of Goldman Sachs. You wanna come join me? What would you say to that? Sure. The CEO of Goldman Sachs. Um, yeah, I mean, I’m kind of scared because I know if I open my mouth, I’m gonna look like an idiot. Right. So I’m just gonna sit there and listen to those two talk. Right. And just try to absorb as much as I can and smile politely. And hopefully if they ask me a question, oh, so Al who’s, who’s his friend you brought, oh, this my, this is my, you know, protege Dennis, Hey Dennis, tell him what you do. You know, not like I’m a pet or anything, but I love going around to these different meetings. And I learned about relationships. I learned how to communicate and I picked up on as you know, how do you talk to executives and how do you speak. A encouraged me to go to Toastmasters. So I did that. I learned how to speak there without ums and OS. That’s why you don’t hear ums and OS outta me, I did public speaking when I was at American airlines, cuz he was the CEO of the company. So that was kind of nice. I had some people said, well, yeah, you had the CEO of the company as your mentor. So you kind of cheated your way through. Well, yeah, that’s how I got in, but I had to actually do the work too, right? Yeah. I made a lot of mistakes and because of American airlines, I was able to speak@allthesedifferentconferencescuzyourememberbackonthewholecr azy.com stuff like in 97 company stock prices were just going through the roof. So a company would announce American airlines chooses kna communication for their backend CRM or chooses epiphany software for, you know, multichannel marketing or chooses Oracle for their database or whatnot. Their stock price would shoot up and. That was worth so much money to these other companies that they would wine and dine me now, I was nobody special, but I just, I was American airlines. So I was the keynote speaker at a bunch of conferences because then like epiphany, I remember they invited me to be the closing keynote at their conference and they had 2000 people in the crowd and it wasn’t because of me, but it, it was the closing. The headline was something like for the closing keynote, which is me, American airlines shares what the future of multichannel, CRM and email and web and retail is like how we combine all these different channels, which the, the whole like omnichannel thing was really, really big 25 years ago. Mm. So I spoke on stage and the more I spoke on stage, I was really lucky. The more other conferences wanted to see me speak on stage. I got a Yahoo back in 2000 and I built the analytics there 20 something years ago. And ever since then, I’ve viewed myself as an engineer that has somehow snuck into this marketing sales kind of world. And I’ve wanted to pay back other people or pay back the mentors that have done great things for me. So I’ve, I’ve done mentoring all the way along the way, but I wanted to scale it. So there’s no better way than learning management systems than building courses than using social media. As the ultimate classroom. I have a group that has 20,000 Pakistanis and these folks are all learning. They’re looking at webinars like what you and I are talking about, and it’s a great way to learn how to communicate, learn how to gain skills and I’ve come full circle from being this shy math. Geek Chinese kid to a public speaker that is now like a teacher and a figurehead in some ways. And I, I never would’ve thought I would make that sort of transition because I’m not the kind of person who wants to be on TV. I don’t want to be famous. I don’t want be on video. I’m just naturally a good engineer. Good at math. Good at optimizing large data sets. So it just shows you that if these techniques work and if an engineer, so that, that’s why like you see the way I, I look at systems and like inception really is just a way of building systems around things that are working instead of just like dial for dollars, always be closing. Mm-hmm , I’m just applying an engineer’s view of the world to marketing. And I think that’s an interesting approach because most people in sales and marketing are bro entrepreneurs where they have tattoos and they work out and they’re really tough and all that. And that’s not who I am. I don’t have any Lamborghini or things like that.

– Yeah. Well, you’ve got a remarkable story. I’ll tell you that. And from shy aging kid to having spoken now in, I think over probably 800 times nearly you’ve taken stage yeah. In over 25 countries, spanning five continents or maybe six at this point.

– Haven’t, there’s, there’s no conference in Antarctica as far as I know, but , there is, I’ll be there.

– That’s amazing, dude. That’s amazing. And I love, uh, your mission of creating a million jobs. And I love even more now that I know that it’s a way to kind of give back and pay homage to the mentors that you’ve had growing up. Yeah. Which were clearly, clearly life changing for you.

– Everything I’ve ever had was because mentors opened doors for me. And I think the more all of us realize that that’s the case for us too, instead of like, because we worked hard and because we were really smart, look, we all work hard and we’re all really smart, right. But when we give credit to the mentors that builds our brand at the same time, and it honors the people that are doing great things, and I think that’s the way forward. I think that’s the key to the secret that we talked about here, which is have your customers do the talking for you honor your customers and they honor you, which sounds simple, but people don’t do that.

– That’s true, man. Well, hopefully your parents are proud of you. I know Asian par, my parents are Persian and I know they wanted me to be a doctor and a, you know, en or an engineer, or basically I was a failure. So hopefully your parents are proud

– of. Yeah, my mom and dad are awesome. I saw my mom just three days ago. We celebrated the 4th of July. We watched the fireworks. Nice. Saw the Tom cruise movie, which was awesome.

– Nice. cool. Well, Hey, I’m gonna grab a copy of your new book. Uh, the definitive guide to TikTok ads. We’ve been running TikTok ads more and more for ourselves and for clients Uhhuh . Uh, and it’s interesting. And, uh, definitely I think probably the next wave of, of growth for a lot of our clients. Amen. Dude, I could talk with you for hours and hours. Come back to the show, please sometime. Uh, and I’ll be on your pod again too. If you like,

– anytime, as long as there’s fried chicken involved, we’re there. Definitely,

– man. Yeah. Let me know next time you’re in the neighborhood. Uh, but for now you have a great rest of the day. Uh, enjoy the, uh, the Vegas weather. I know it’s probably super hot there at this point. It’s warm but, uh, but thank you for coming on today. This was awesome.

– Thank you, Chris. Always a pleasure, my friend. All right. We’ll

– talk soon. Peace out. All right.