The Most Underutilized Asset for Driving Exponential Growth with Jay Abraham

– [Chris Mechanic] Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Three Minute Marketing. I’m your main man, Chris Mechanic, your host. Three Minute Marketing is all about micro, bite-sized, snackable content from marketing leaders around the world. We’re super duper excited today, we have Jay Abraham. Now, if you’re in direct marketing circles, Jay Abraham really needs no introductions. He’s widely recognized as one of the most successful and impactful marketing strategists, business innovators and entrepreneurs in the entire world. He’s a bestselling author of multiple books, he speaks all around the world to captivated audiences. We’ve got a special session today, Jay was just dropping some really big knowledge bombs. We didn’t do a proper introduction so we’re just going to get right into it. If you like this, if you want more stuff like this, please drop us a like or a comment, or share with one of your friends. These types of things help us build our audience and help us deliver this content to more folks. So without further ado, let’s get into it. There’s leverage principles, I know you’re a big fan of leverage, good leverage. Almost every business has hidden value, hidden assets.

– [Jay Abraham] Yeah.

– [Chris Mechanic] You expounded on this many, many years ago, and probably were the first person to bring up things like relational capital, and other ways to creatively leverage other people’s assets and resources in a win-win way. I loved your ABC’s of how to do other people’s money. You were like here’s, in “Sticking Point Solution”, you were like, here’s the ABCs of how you can, things you can leverage. And of course, that was many years ago. What are you, as you’re working now with your current clients, what are you seeing is the most frequently underutilized assets?

– [Jay Abraham] Well, the most underutilized assets for most people would be, you hit in on it. It’s probably the realization that there’s tons of other people, influencers, media, indirect competitors, complimentary providers, that already have worked hard and spent a fortune, time, effort, money, creating goodwill, trust, to identify and have a very, very tight relationship with the same audience you want, and that most people spend all their time, effort, money, trying to create outer periphery of trust with a market that doesn’t know them, whereas you can bypass it, go to a market, go to an influencer, go to any kind of a relationship that already exists with them, that knows them, and you can shortcut that by years or totally, and you can get business overnight. We’ve been able to double, redouble, redouble again, people’s businesses, literally, by figuring out who already has the relationship. Particularly, you do a lot of technology companies, a lot of SaaS companies, that have a very long residual LTV, whatever you call it, a high, whatever you call it, they sustain the relationship for years and years, which means you got an enormous capability on the front-end to acquire the buyer through a strategic relationship by generously sharing enough with the other side who could endorse you, introduce you, partner, collaborate, strategically align with you in ways nobody else has ever thought. I think also, one of the big mistakes is most people spend either too much or too little in the acquisition of the first transaction. The first transaction can be the lead, can be the buyer, and when you realize that, unless you realize what it either, is worth to you over forever, or what it could be worth by adding some other elements to the sales and the revenue transaction, you can’t really optimize it. I create so many things that I forget to talk about. I’ve got a new concept called, revenue system optimization, that takes up to 61 impact leverage points in a revenue system and systematically questions every way that you do something and how it’s doing, looking for incremental improvements in each one that combine to give you geometric improvements. We look at where fixed can be moved to variable or performance-based, we look always, who’s already got the audience? Who had the audience and left a job and has a relationship with everybody that has just being going idle, and you could find him or her? They don’t have a competitive, a non-compete restrictive covenant from their last job, they’ve spent years in their job, building trust with a decision maker that another company would give their left you-know-what to try to reach, and you find these people and you convince them of the value of your product, service, company.

– [Chris Mechanic] So that’s all the time we have. If you’re listening right now, there should be links to the show notes, which will be either above, to the side of this video. Jay, you had, thank you so much for coming by the way. You’re a living legend, literally in circles. And I tell people that I know you, and they immediately just roll out the red carpet for me. What was that, the framework that you were working on, or what would you like to say to folks–

– [Jay Abraham] The newest thing around. It’s pretty cool, it’s called, taking your business profits beyond the exponential. And it’s very, in a nutshell, I’ve got, I thought I had 50 but we recalculated, 98 ways separately to take performance on the revenue system geometric. And I always wondered what geometry over geometry over geometry would be, but I never looked it up, I’m not very mathematical. I did look it up and mathematically, there are, surprisingly Chris, five gradients of performance that are above exponentiation; tetration, heptation, hexation, pentation, octation and they’re just zeros that are off the chart. But I realized if you can take performance that high, a company should never operate their revenue system in the incremental zone at the same effort, time, access to the market, resources, capital, human capital, could basically be operating in the exponentials zone and that’s our fixation now and we’re just trying to, we’re on a mission to try to show people how ludicrous it is to accept a nominal yield from anything when you can make the same everything, produce a lot more now and on a residual basis. So that’s my mission now, at this point in my career.

– [Chris Mechanic] Love it, love it. Well, thank you so much, Jay, stay on for just another couple of minutes. If you’re listening to this and if you liked it, please drop us a like, a thumbs up, a comment. We do read every one and it helps us grow our listenership. So thank you very much, and we’ll see you in, and Jay, will you come back one time for us?

– [Jay Abraham] Anytime Chris, I adore you and I adore your business and your cousin.

– [Chris Mechanic] Thank you man, thank you. Oh, I know that you are an intellectual. You’re constantly like playing with these different ideas, it’s almost like string theory for business, kind of sometimes talking to you, but what are you hot on right now? Like what are you obsessed? I know you go through these like different phases. What’s your current obsession?

– [Jay Abraham] Yeah, I have as a client, literally the number one Honda Acura dealer in the world. And this guy is so evolved in his thinking because he recognizes a couple of decisions, I’ll be very quick that the barbarians are at the gate, relative to the traditional automobile industry. Meaning you’ve got the Carvanas, you’ve got Amazon, you got Warren Buffet who just decided arbitrarily to buy 73 dealerships, you’ve got all these technology people. Then you’ve got these old style dealers who are doing the same thing, pretty much the same way and they don’t really understand it. Plus you got the current chip shortage, which has produced an anomaly. The dealerships are making money hand over fist because even though they don’t have cars, they can charge way over for what they’ve got, make people stand in line and give them deposits. And it’s a surreal environment. My guy is very evolved and he says, “You either, basically, “you’re a victim or you are a victor.” And so they’re doing all kinds of wonderful things that I’m benefiting from ’cause we’re collaborating together and I have to learn what their thinking is to execute more inventively, but their old concept, and I think they’ve actually trademarked it is, “Frictionless customer service.” They were the first ones to do pickup and delivery of service, no charge. And now they do, I think three to 5,000 cars a month. They were one of the first ones to do the whole transaction and go to you. They’ve got an app that’s just like Uber when your car is being serviced, where you never have to call. If you’ve ever tried to check on the status of a car in service, it’s the most tormenting because you can’t get in, you’re on hold and you get somebody else, you tell them your name, they can’t find you, they can’t find the car, they’re going to call you back, will they tell you the status of it? And everything about it is cooler than that and I’m very excited because it means, you know this about me, I have had the good fortune to transition and translate a thousand industries, but I’m not renowned as being technologically sophisticated, but I’m fortunate ’cause I get with all these very technologically sophisticated people, like today I was on the phone for an hour and a half with the guy that ran all of Google’s Automotive Division. And now he started his own and I’ve got and Google works with my client direct because of his status so I get to work with Google direct so I mean I’m in like heaven.

– [Chris Mechanic] Let me ask you another question. In my mind, you’re like the master of offers and of sort of inventing value or even perceived value out of thin air. And in my world, a good offer does wonders because you could put a lot of ad dollars behind it, it converts, it’s profitable on the front-end and the back-end, et cetera. So like, let’s take a typical, but the problem is, almost every business has a boring offer that sounds almost exactly the same. So what is a way that your typical, say advertisers, say it’s a B2B, say it’s like a B2B logistics company, something really boring.

-[Jay Abraham] Yeah.

– [Chris Mechanic] Like what is a way that you could bolster that value or be the one and only, be that go-to provider in your market?

– [Jay Abraham] Well, I can give you a real life example because my client last night, I have a SaaS client that does, they do CRM and all kinds of operational management for restaurants and bars. And we were on the phone for three hours with their team talking about how to better denominate their value proposition. And the first thing was to create an impact analysis, where I was able to show them, not just all the different denominators that would either produce savings, efficiencies, productivities, profit, however you looked at it, but then take what that would mean over the probable lifetime of the relationship, 10 years, and denominate it and this is for an individual bar owner or a few restaurant, they do the smaller businesses, but the concept was, we realized they could put a kid through college every year. They and their spouse or significant other could both have a brand new leased Mercedes every year, either one could have the convertible and one could have S550 or whatever the new version is. They could buy a rental property every year. And we showed all the ways to denominate this seemingly, innocuous and boring SaaS system and make it comparably incomparable to everything else.

– [Chris Mechanic] Comparatively incomparable to everything else, I think that’s the key.

– [Jay Abraham] Yes.

– [Chris Mechanic] Now, how do you go about, when you’re structuring an offer, how do you go about understanding the big, hidden fears of that buyer and addressing them?

– [Jay Abraham] Okay, well, it’s a great question. I’ve been trained over my whole career to be the advocate of the audience, not the company I’m helping. So I start by saying, if I were on the receiving end, knowing whatever I know or whatever I need to learn about that perspective client, buyer, patient, whatever they are, what would be the tangible, what would be the intangible fears, concerns, apprehensions, I would have in terms of saying yes, in terms of making a bad decision, in terms of looking bad, in terms of my allocation of the opportunity costs being incorrect and putting it with you in the wrong place if you’re the client? And I look at everything there, and then I value rank it in my mind, instantly on a priority basis, tangible and intangible, because you’ve got to deal with both and both, I mean, whatever people express is only one part of the puzzle. They might say, “Well, I don’t really have the budget.” Well, if you can show somebody that, I also, I try to look at a reality most people don’t understand. In business, theoretically, every investment you make, every commitment you make should be an investment and you theoretically wouldn’t write a check unless you’re going to get a return on that investment. And so I try to make sure that everybody that I’m dealing with on behalf of a client is able to see the correlation of they are an investor, maybe a good one, maybe a bad one, and that the better their return on that investment and more they can de-risk that investment, the more logical it is to take the action.

– [Chris Mechanic] So when you go into a business, obviously you’ve seen thousands of businesses and probably tens of thousands of different individuals or situations, what’s like, what are your go-to things, like one of the first things you’re going to ask when you walk in the door?

– [Jay Abraham] Yeah, I want to know, “Okay, tell me this.” I ask a couple of questions, “Tell me what the business stands for, “why it stands for, who it stands for, “what’s standing for it is supposed to mean “as far as how you express it in your marketing, “your value proposition, your positioning, “and what validation of that expression “is supposed to look like “as far as response from the audience.”

– [Chris Mechanic] Yep, and then, so in my world, I’ll look at websites or funnels and I kind of know, and I have in my back pocket a couple of things that most likely they’re not doing, or they’re not doing well. And in the event that I find a really nicely done funnel, there’s a couple things, couple just like little tricks that I have up my sleeve that almost nobody is doing. Do you have any of those, just like go-to like?

– [Jay Abraham] I do, but I think I start at a more macro level. I’m always looking at, I’m looking for correlations, implications, anomalies, relationships, and associative connections that either make sense or don’t, and it differs on the business, but I start with, okay, what are you selling? Who you’re selling it to, how are you selling it? How’s everybody else selling it? What is it about what you’re doing? It’s either better, worse, neutral than everybody else. How’s it doing? What are the implications after the sale? In other words, is there a lot of ancillary, residual lifetime value? How are you allocating your resource as? And I start with that and then I start basically doing Socratic interview and it sort of, it reveals itself through those kinds of questions.