A few years back, I was contracted to do a weekly 2 minute radio feature on a local talk radio station. The feature that I christened, Timepiece covered a multiude of topics – but mostly with things that had happened in my life.

Timepiece ran for well over a year before the station format was changed and I was replaced.

Recently a good friend of mine suggested that these recordings might be an interesting addition to my blog. It is with that backstory in mind that I present to you now the first of those recordings.

my-mothers-birthday

About twenty years ago I subscribed to a marketing newsletter written by the late Gary Halbert.  For those of you who may not know, Gary was a self-made copywriter whose claim to fame was that he wrote what turned out to be the biggest direct mail sales letter of all time.

At one point, over 7,300,000 copies of the letter were mailed.  And although the exact profits for the letter are unobtainable, it reportedly generated well over twenty million dollars in sales. And built a company that launched Halbert’s career as a copywriter extraordinaire.

What’s astonishing about all this is that the letter was written and mailed by a man who was nearly bankrupt at the time of the mailing.  Gary himself said that the letter worked because “it had to”.  He used his last few dollars to mail the first few letters.

When I think about this letter, I think about all the failed attempts Gary made before he wrote what was destined to make him famous. He had read all of the copywriting books. He had studied all of the masters.  He had done everything that he could do to write a successful letter.  But it was only when his back was to the wall that he finally succeeded.

I think there’s a lesson here for all of us who aspire to marketing greatness.   And the lesson is that we sometimes have to reach a point of desperation before we finally hit that sweet spot that takes us over the top.

I’m enclosing a copy of the letter for you to study.  As you can see, it was a simple one page letter that sold a simple product (a copy of a coat of arms printed on parchment paper) for a token price – $2.00.

But also notice that it makes a very persuasive case.  A case so persuasive that it made Halbert a millionaire and ultimately one of the most respected copywriters in the history of the business.

What does it mean to be perfect?  Well, when I think of perfection I always begin by thinking about the 1972 Miami Dolphins football team.  Can you imagine it? A 17-0 season including a victory in the AFC Eastern Division, an AFC Championship and finally a 14-7 victory in Super Bowl VII against the Washington Redskins. Perfection.

But wait a minute.  Although the Dolphins went the entire season without a loss, there were still plenty of points scored against them.  So even though their record was perfect, they weren’t always perfect on the field.

Splitting hairs you say? Maybe.

But then there’s the 1959 East Pennsboro high school football team to consider.  They also had a perfect season.  But in the case of the Panthers – no one scored a single point against them for the entire campaign.  No one.  Not a single point.  Perfection.

In a recent article in the Harrisburg Patriot News, team members recalled that perfect season and shared various theories about how it happened:

• Eleven of the 15 team members had played under the same Pee Wee coach.
• Two of the team members were best friends.
• The coach of the team had already won a high school championship.
• The coach’s beloved mentor had died just before the season began.
• The team benefited from the close-knit atmosphere of a post World War Two community.
• The school had just purchased new uniforms.

But the truth is any small town high school football team could have boasted of similar attributes.  So how did they do it?

One team member explained that the whole town of Enola, PA was emotionally invested in their team. The town was part of the team.

Another team member pointed out that they really were not perfect.  In one game, they were only ahead by 14 points at half time.  In another, an opponent’s field goal attempt from the 25-yard line went wide to the left for no apparent reason.

And of course, they did give up hundreds of yards to the competition, although no points were ever conceded.

So maybe perfection isn’t really perfection.  If we say it’s all wins and no losses – someone else says it’s never giving up a point.  And if we say it’s no points conceded – then someone else says it’s never giving up a yard.

All right.  So maybe perfection is something we pursue but never reach?

That sounds reasonable.  Reasonable – but not perfect.

It’s one of those huge color-coded maps that you see at the mall.  There are two hundred and fifty one stores on that map – but the truth is – you only need to know where the new Apple store is located.

So what do you need to know?  Well, you need to know where the Apple store is – the destination.   But it would also help if you knew where you are now – the starting point.  It’s almost like that game that you play with your children – Where’s Waldo?

And that’s the way it is with marketing.  You have to have a definite destination in mind.  But you also have to know where you are to get where you want to be.  I’ve had this conversation at least ten thousand times in the last thirty years.  But I don’t recall a single prospect in all those years that knew both pieces of the puzzle – where he was – where he wanted to be.

Obviously, we do need to know both variables in order to be successful.   But the simple truth is – too many businesses have no clue about which way to go next.  Is yours one of them?  Then, what you need is a clear picture of your destination. You need A VISION.

It’s the vision of one day crossing the finish line at Daytona that drives the young person in his homemade go-kart.  It was vision that drove Olympic gymnast Kerry Strug to perform that final vault in the 1996 – knowing that her ankle was seriously injured.  And when Michael Phelps touched the end of the pool in the race that finally gave him his 8th Gold Medal – you can rest assured that he had already successfully run that race in his head ten thousand times before. It’s Vision.  Don’t leave home without it!

If you work with advertising clients everyday like I do you may get frustrated with the phrase “word of mouth”.  As in, “the best advertising you can get is word of mouth”.  Or “nothing works as well as word of mouth advertising”.  The problem is that word of mouth advertising is not something that most of us can control.  We have to wait until someone says something nice about us – and sometimes we can lose our businesses waiting for that to happen.

When a client or a prospect tells me that “word of mouth” is the best form of advertising I ask them to tell me about their formal referral system.  “We both agree that word of mouth advertising works better than any other concept,” I say to them. “So tell me, how you use it.  Describe your word of mouth business building system in detail.”

That question usually leads to the confession that they don’t really have a word of mouth business building system in place.  And that usually leads to my offering to build one for them.

What about you?  Do you just give lip service to word of mouth advertising?  Or do you actually have a formal referral system in place?

While you’re thinking about your answer, consider this statistic.  When I cold call a new prospect I have about a 1 in 12 chance of getting an appointment.  Yikes!  But, when I call a prospect that has been referred to me by an existing client, I cut those odds to 1 in 2.  One more interesting statistic – about 85% of my current clients came as a result of referrals.

When I was a teenager, the most interesting show on television was Star Trek.  “To boldly go where no man has gone before”.  That was the mantra that excited us all.  And by the look of things – it still excites a lot of folks who populate the world of marketing.

Here’s the problem.  Most folks who decide for one reason or another to “boldly go where no man has gone before”, never come back.  To compound things, they not only lose a lot of money on some leading edge marketing ploy – they sometimes take down solid companies in the process.

The fact is that risk for the sake of risk has never been a good thing.   And as much as I like to romanticize the idea of risk in cocktail party conversation – it’s something I stopped engaging in more than two decades ago.

The truth is that most marketing risk is unnecessary because of the existence of testing.  Long ago an old mentor told me something that I will never forget.  He said, “If you’re wondering what the consumer will do in any particular set of circumstances, the best policy is to come right out and ask the consumer. And the way you ask is to test.”

If it’s a mailing list – mail one thousand names before you roll it out to one million. If it’s print, run two different headlines in the same publication.  If it’s a radio campaign, try a small inexpensive AM before you send it to the 50,000-watt monster. If it’s TV – try local cable before you buy the Super Bowl.

Testing today is a lot easier than it used to be.  Now, for less than one hundred dollars,  you can run a small ad on the Internet and find out in hours what used to take weeks or even months.  So there’s really no excuse to waste a small fortune on some untested speculation.

I know.  It’s not as sexy as betting the farm on a single pass of the roulette wheel.  On the other hand, being able to feed your family also has a certain appeal.

Years ago, I had a client who was in the silk flower business.

There came a time when he needed to find a new retail location.  One day we were walking through a local shopping center that someone had suggested as a possible retail outlet.  The first thing we noticed was that traffic seemed to be on the low side.  I suggested that maybe we had simply picked a bad time for our visit.  Perhaps traffic would be higher at a different time of day.

My client replied that maybe that was true.  He then walked up to a mixed nut vendor and ordered a bag of cashews.  After eating a few of the nuts, he mumbled, “There’s your answer.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, totally bewildered by the idea that he could figure out anything by simply munching on a few cashews.

“The nuts are stale,” he explained.  “The nuts are stale because there is no one ordering them.  And no one is ordering them because there is no one here.”

I have to admit that I was somewhat astonished by this piece of fine detective work.  And as it turned out, my client was right.  After several more visits to the center at different times of the day – we found the traffic to always be less than desirable.  And thus we knew that in terms of a good retail location, we had to keep on looking.

The takeaway?  When you’re trying to make an important marketing decision – make sure you pay attention to what’s going on around you.  Many questions can be answered by little clues.  Clues that more often than not go unnoticed.

A few nights ago, I was watching WITF (our local public broadcasting station) and they were featuring a filmed tribute to Roy Orbinson that was performed about 2 years before his death.  What made this particular show so interesting, beyond the staggering talent of Roy Orbinson himself, was the band that evening was made up of a “who’s who” of rock and roll legends.

Under the direction of producer T-Bone Burnett, the stage band included Jackson Browne, Burnett, Elvis Costello, k.d. Lang, Bonnie Raitt, J.D. Souther, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits, and Jennifer Warnes, along with the rhythm section from Elvis Presley’s fabled late ’60s and early ’70s touring band.

What I noticed about this lineup of stars is something I’ve also noticed with great doctors, great novelists, great actors and yes, even great marketing minds.  And that is the apparent ease with which these people are able to “deliver the goods”.

Now I’m aware of the argument that says what we’re seeing is the result of decades of preparation and practice.  But the problem with the argument is that I’ve seen too many of these people perform in their teens – and I’m telling you here and now that ability of this magnitude can’t be reduced to something as simple as hard work.

It’s something I’ve been aware of almost all of my life.  The man or woman who makes it look too easy.  The one who suddenly stands up or steps forward and delivers a performance or a solution that sends the rest of us back to the drawing board.  Whether it’s an evening of song and music, an ad that persuades us to part with our hard earned money, or a paragraph of words arranged in such a manner as to make all of us weep like children – the common denominator, in my view, is pure talent.

It makes you laugh, it makes you cry, it makes you jump out of your seat and applaud.  It creates a moment where even the most guarded of us simply give up control and are reduced to child-like awe.

I am not smart enough to tell you what “it” is, or where “it” comes from, or even what “it” says about us humans.  What I do know is sometimes there is something present that we can’t reduce to a formula.   Sometimes there are gods who live among us.

When Swimmer Michael Phelps won the sixth race at the recent Olympic games in Beijing, it was by a hundredth of a second. But my question is, what was the name of the swimmer in second place?

If you have no idea, don’t feel bad – because I’m certain that 99% of the population could not answer that question.  (It was Miloard Cavic)

But my point is this.  The loser didn’t lose by much.  The winner didn’t win by much.  In point of fact, the loser in this instance was just a microsecond away from being the winner.

In any event, the coach of the loser certainly didn’t throw him off the team.  He just went back to the drawing board and worked on ways to shave that hundredth of a second off the final score.

Now let’s apply these same facts to the world of marketing. In 100% of the cases a marketing tactic either works or it doesn’t work.  And the way most clients judge the outcome is by seeing if the tactic makes money or loses money.  But there’s more here than meets the eye. The truth is the transaction – win or lose – didn’t do either in totality.  If it was a winner, it may have been a winner by only a few hundred dollars.  Or if it was loser, it may have been a loser by only a few hundred dollars.

But most people judge the tactic in totality.  It was either a winner or it was a loser.  And looking at tactics this way is absurd.

What if instead, we looked at only the difference.  What if instead of winning or losing, we were more concerned with managing that part of the transaction that made the difference.  Now instead of proclaiming victory or accepting defeat – we simply get to work making up the difference.   I like to call this “Managing the Middle” because it’s usually only five or ten percentage points here or there that determine the success or failure of any marketing tactic.

Here’s an example of what I mean.  I recently did a post card mailing for a client that failed to return a profit.  The client was despondent.  For him, it was just one reason to abandon marketing all together.  But a closer look revealed that the mailing only missed the profitability mark by three hundred and fifty dollars.  I convinced him that instead of going on to the next tactic (and the next), that we make the necessary adjustments and run the campaign again.

What did I do? I concentrated on ways to take the $350 out of the equation.  What this boiled down to was finding a printer who printed postcards for less, and having his staff do the mailing instead of depending on an expensive outside automation process.  Sure enough, the next mailing made a nice profit.  And now this particular client looks at postcard mailings as something that “works”.

And what about you?  Look over your last few marketing tactics and pay close attention to the “middle”.  What you’re likely to find is a bunch of “losers” that can be turned into winners.  And a bunch of winners that can be made into super stars.  Meanwhile, you develop a whole new mindset that doesn’t see everything in terms of black or white.

In late summer 1999, I was enjoying a wonderful lunch at a local pub when I overheard a conversation that was going on in the booth behind me.  A man was lamenting to his companion that he had lost a very large sum of money on a technology stock.

As he described the fiasco in graphic detail, it became more and more apparent that the situation was serious.  This man had not only gambled a huge sum of money on this particular speculation, he had apparently done so with funds that he could ill afford to lose.

As I listened to his ramblings, I wondered what stock he was talking about – determined never to go near that particular equity if I could help it.  It took a while, but he eventually named his nemesis and I remembered being shocked when I heard the pronouncement.

What surprised me about that stock was not so much the name as was the fact that I had just closed out a position on that particular offering myself.  But unlike my unfortunate friend in the adjoining booth – I had watched with great fascination and glee as that same stock had tripled in value from my original purchase price.

As I left the restaurant that summer afternoon, I began to reflect on the conversation I had been party to.  I also started to think about the contrast between the man’s story and my own.  Remember, we had both owned the same stock – and yet our feelings about this equity were polar opposites.

As I sat there in the parking lot, I was reminded of the opening paragraph of Dicken’s Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”.  What I did not realize, what I could not have known at that moment was that I was about to discover something profound in the haze of that surely accidental experience.  Something that would eventually lead me to a startling conclusion about the world of business.  Something that would start a chain of events that would ultimately change the direction and the focus of my entire business life.

This is not the appropriate forum to get into the totality of that life changing event.  But I can summarize my discovery with this statement.  All profit is made on the day you buy – not the day you sell.  This is true in investing.  And it’s also true in just about every phase of business.

Let me give you an example in the world of marketing.  I create an advertising campaign for a client.  We decide that the best way to advertise is to buy a radio schedule on a popular AM Talk Radio station.  If the schedule costs $5,000 and it generates $4,000 in sales, you lose money.  And the client proclaims the advertising to be a dismal failure.

If, on the other hand, I’m able to buy the same schedule for $2,500 and it generates the same $4,000 in sales, you make money.  And suddenly you’re an advertising genius.  Now think about it. In the one instance you’re an incompetent.  And in the other instance you’re a wizard.   But all that has really changed is the price of the schedule.  I remember some guru saying once, “It’s not creative unless it sells.”  I would like to change that to read “It’s not creative unless it sells at a profit”.

Common sense?  Yes. But the truth is that common sense is not all that common.