“How I Got $300,000 More Sales From A Slight Improvement To My Bossed Ad"

If you want to listen to a recording that will make you smile, then you need to listen to this interview I did with Eric D. Eric is a seasoned Marketing Consultant who was interested in the HMA System. During our conversation, he told me some of his history in Marketing, specifically while he was on staff with a company that provided computer training. He articulates the stories so well that you will not be able to help but smile, or even chuckle, at the great success he brought to the company he worked for through implementing some simple but effective Marketing and Advertising techniques. I know you’ll enjoy it!

Eric: How have you been Michael?

Michael: I’ve been real good, real busy, and I can’t complain. I’m doing well. How about yourself?

Eric: Okay, I’m trying to get this thing rolling as far as the consultancy. I like what I heard on the site.

Michael: I’m going to give you more free content. I’m going to give you an education for nothing, and if you still really want the real deal, you can certainly get it from me. Where are you located again?

Eric: I’m in New Jersey.

Michael: And, what do you do now?

Eric: Marketing consulting.

Michael: You’re just kind of winging that on your own.

Eric: Yeah, just winging it.

Michael: How’s it going?

Eric: Touch and go.

Michael: Okay. Do you have any clients now?

Eric: Not presently, but I’ve got testimonials.

Michael: Is this your full-time gig? Or do you have another job?

Eric: I’m doing it full time now.

Michael: You’re doing it full-time. What were you doing before?

Eric: Well, I was doing it in-house for a corporation, and this was a small computing facility.

Michael: Did you make them some money?

Eric: There was a guy there prior to me coming, and he was the VP of Marketing and was totally clueless. So, when I went in there and starting doing editorial type ads for them in the newspaper, the phones just blew off the hook.

Michael: What were they selling?

Eric: They were selling the courses – the MCSE, remember those type? The Microsoft Certified System Engineer courses for ten grand a pop.

Michael: Okay.

Eric: Plus they were doing the A+ technology which is for a hardware technician.

Michael: Okay.

Eric: And, that was at four grand a piece.

Michael: All right. So, you did some editorial ads in the newspapers. Their phone blew out. So, how much money did you make them with your ideas?

Eric: $380,000.

Michael: You changed it. You made them $380,000. How appreciate were they?

Eric: Don’t worry.

Michael: Give me an example. What did they say?

Eric: Well, first of all, they would look at me and compare me to the other guy that was doing all these other things in there. It’s like night and day.

Michael: A full-time marketing guy?

Eric: He was their VP of Marketing, and when I took a look at the stuff that he was doing – once you know this stuff, you could look at things and tell the mistakes people do.

Michael: Oh, absolutely.

Eric: So, I’d look at it and I could tell that this guy was totally off base. He’d use a little rinky dink flier. He was trying, but he just didn’t know what to do.

Michael: He just wasn’t exposed to this stuff.

Eric: Exactly, exactly.

Michael: All right.

Eric: Then, when you looked the ads that he had in the paper, they were unfocused. They were just slight ads which can be all right. The way I took it is I took it to editorial route. And, what’s so funny about it is that the owner came with the same reply that I was taught from reading Jay Abraham’s stuff years ago as far as the editorial. He said, “Who’s going to read all this?”

Michael: There you go.

Eric: He says, “Who is going to read all this?” I told him, “Only the people that are genuinely interested.”

Michael: What did he say to that?

Eric: Okay, he was a little reluctant. He was a little standoffish. Mike, this is the funny part. He had a cook-out at his house on a Sunday. The Sunday that the ad dropped.

Michael: Yeah.

Eric: He lots of his well heeled, professional friends there, other business people, at his house for the little get together, and when the ad dropped, he showed it to everybody and most of these people were business people. They were business people or doctors or professionals, all well heeled individuals, and he showed them the ad, and they ripped it to shreds. “Who is going to read all this?”

So, the next day, which was Monday, I got with him. He was a little upset, perturbed, naturally because his friends had torn the ad apart. However, the phones began to ring off the hook.

Michael: Where was it placed? What section of the paper?

Eric: It was in the front of the paper. It was maybe the fourth page in, and it was bad positioning. It wasn’t upper right hand corner. It wasn’t above the fold. It was below the fold on the left hand side.

Michael: What was the headline?

Eric: I really don’t have it with me.

Michael: All right, just a real benefit hitting headline.

Eric: Yeah, it was definitely a benefit.

Michael: What paper was it going out to?

Eric: It was going out in the regular circulation paper in Trenton, New Jersey.

Michael: How much did the ad cost? Do you know?

Eric: It was $1,200.

Michael: $1,200, do you know how big it was?

Eric: It was about a little less than a quarter page.

Michael: Okay.

Eric: It was $1,200 for Sunday and Monday.

Michael: Okay, this was a display, right?

Eric: Display ad, editorial size with a heavy benefit headline. Then, we had a story type analogy in there, then benefits, then in addition to that, testimonials that I put in there.

Michael: What was the ad to do? Just to get them to call?

Eric: Just get them to call and come in to a free seminar. Before I got there, they were calling it the Open House. I made them add a little information to it, and call it a seminar.

Michael: Great.

Eric: So, they came out and we got 130-something calls off of that ad in like a day and a half.

Michael: And, how many did he get before?

Eric: {laughs!} Twelve.

Michael: Twelve? Okay, so you’ve got to tell me. The ad hit Sunday. You came in Monday. The phone was ringing off the hook. What did he say to you?

Eric: Now, mind you, he’s a little upset because of what his friends had ripped the ad apart, but the phone was starting to ring.

Michael: All right.

Eric: The phone was starting to ring off. So, now he has to bring in extra people to man the phones. So, the phones are going crazy. We pulled in people from different offices to have them answer the phone. Then, we set up the seminar that people coming for the seminar. And, before, as I said, we’d get maybe 12 calls, maybe four people might attend, maybe eight people might attend.

Now, you’ve got the entire room flooded. It’s like a convention room where you have the divider. We had to open up the divider to have an extended room. Inside of that room, there must have been about maybe eighty people – somewhere in that category.

We just at that time had the one product which was the $10,000 MCSE Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer course along with another product that was a $10,000 web development course.

Michael: So, these people call in from the newspaper, people looking for an opportunity trying to learn programming and stuff like that, and they’re paying for an education.

Eric: Exactly.

Michael: And, how long was the training for?

Eric: The training was six months.

Michael: So, how many trainings did you sell because of that one ad?

Eric: Because of that one ad, he did about eighteen.

Michael: Eighteen, and that put about 180 grand in his pocket?

Eric: Exactly. A little lower than that because what I had him do was he just had that one product which was $10,000, but what I had him do was add the A+ course which is like computer hardware course for $4,000. This way, if the person could not afford the $10,000, you could downsell them.

Michael: Right.

Eric: You can upsell them or downsell them.

Michael: And, did that work?

Eric: Yes, it did.

Michael: And, how many of those did he sell?

Eric: On that particular, he sold about six.

Michael: So, this guy really wasn’t prepared for the growth.

Eric: He wasn’t. That’s another thing that I want to stress is that many times people don’t realize how phenomenally these techniques will work, and many times they’re caught offguard by the phone just blowing up.

Michael: How many companies are selling the same type stuff, certification, around the country?

Eric: Well, now, I don’t know what it is because there’s been a shake-up in the industry, and a lot of them have gone under. But, at one time, everywhere you turned there was someone who was selling MCSE courses or computer courses and things like that. I don’t know exactly what it is now because I’m not really focused on that.

Michael: So, you made him about 300 grand. What did you get out of that?

Eric: Well, at that time I was going salary. I blew that, right?

Michael: Yeah.

Eric: I was getting close to 50 a year.

Michael: Okay.

Eric: Whereas it would’ve been very sweet to get a piece of that.

Michael: What are some of the other things you did for him?

Eric: We put up some telemarketing scripts. We got in contact with a telemarketing firm. The guy had plenty of money because he ended up buying the telemarketing firm. What I mainly did was doing things with these display ads, with the editorial ads, doing radio ads.

Michael: And, you wrote the copy for that.

Eric: Yeah, I wrote the copy for the radio ads, and pinpointing what particular newspapers we were going to run the ads in, and everything was keyed. What happened was that this particular newspaper, they might be instructed to call in and ask for Barbara. Another newspaper, they might be, “Ask for Shirley.” Of course, there were no Barbara and Shirley there. That was a keyed ad so that we would know what ad was producing what response, and we could cut loose the one or minimize the ones that weren’t producing.

Now, another side is that when I did leave them, and I still did some things for them, I did an ad and we used Shirley, but they had hired a new receptionist, and people were calling there and she was saying, “There’s no Shirley here.”

Michael: That’s hilarious.

Eric: So, I always call in and fake like I’m someone just to see what the response of the receptionist is.

Michael: Good, yeah.

Eric: But, luckily I had called in and asked for Shirley and normally she’s supposed to say, “Well, Shirley isn’t here or Shirley’s out to lunch, let me put you with Bobby.” And, she would steer me to someone else, but she was totally out of the loop, and said, “There’s no Shirley here.”

Michael: That’s funny. That’s a great story. Okay, I’ve sent you to a link. It’s going to take you to the section of all the recordings with Richard all in one place. Now, you may have seen some of them on my audio recordings. They’re kind of sprinkled throughout. But, this section will take you through all of them.

Before I tell you too much, I want you to go ahead and listen to this guy because there’s tremendous value in the recordings alone. There’s a PowerPoint presentation that outlines the entire system that’s an automatic presentation that I teach the consultants to use to just put their consulting on remote control. If you want long distance clients, you can put them in front of this thing. It’s really powerful, and we customize for the HMA consultants.

Before I send you to another special link of recordings which really gets into the meat of the program, you’ve got some stuff to listen to and read and go through, and by the time you go through this, you’re going to know if it’s right for you.

Eric: Okay, cool.

Michael: And, that should do it. So, just go through the stuff, call me back, and let me know how I can help you.

Eric: Thanks, Mike.

Michael: Okay, Eric, take care.