The Lead
The Lead In is the copy directly beneath your headline. This is meant to supplement your message. You should be able to just read the headline and the lead in to get the whole idea of your sales message.
This is a test for you to do with any sales letter you’re writing, or reading to see if the sales letter is a good one.
If you were only to read the headline and the lead in would the whole thing make sense to you?
Would you want to read on?’
Don’t overwhelm people with too much information up front. This is a basic selling tactic, and should be applied to your sales letters. Selling in person or with a sales letter is the same concept. You probably wonder how some sales letters can be 20 plus pages, and its because the last ten pages are getting back to the point of your product, yourself, and your company. So, how you do this is You offer the guarantee. You bring up their pain again. You’re basically looping in the last half of the sales letter.
A good way to by giving them all your greatest stuff right from the beginningnd boom, boom,
boom, right up front, ten, fifteen points not only do you overwhelm people and overload them but
you don’t have any great compelling facts to loop with if someone’s on the fence. So if they read
– if they read half your letter and they’re ‘hmmm…seems pretty good’ and then all of a sudden
bam! You hit them with your best thing on page sixteen and they’re like ‘Wow! Then I’ll buy!’
You get it? So that’s really why you want to leave your powder dry.
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The Body Copy
Next the copy, the body copy, and this really is the heart and soul of your sales pitch and it often
starts with ‘Dear’ and then the person’s – ‘Dear John’ or ‘Dear Future Millionaire’ – my sense is
when you say ‘Dear Future Millionaire’ I would always if you can use the person’s name. So if
you can’t and you can come up with a catchy thing like ‘Dear Future Millionaire’ or something
along those lines but again what we want to do here is make this as personal as possible. Okay?
So here are some of the mistakes in the body of the five most common mistakes that people
will make.
So let’s go through these here and number one is having a big, massive paragraph of text.
And again think like a Straight Line sales letter, a Straight Line sales pitch, we don’t have one
whole page where you’re not interacting with the person. So you need stopping off points. The
same thing goes with your sales letters or else your prospects lose interest.
Use sub-headings to guide your reader through the letter like moving someone down the
Straight Line. Again where you say ‘You follow what I am saying here? You see what I am
saying?’ the same thing goes with these little sub-heads to your sales letter where you have like
one thing that’s bigger and bolder then the rest and centered in the middle. That’s your stopping
off point which gives the reader a chance to catch their breath and also a chance almost to
implicitly to agree with what you’ve said so far. So when they get to a stopping off point and they
read another headline they keep reading. What they’ve done is they’ve actually in their own mind
created some consistency ‘Wow! This makes sense. I will read forward.’
So what’s happening is you’re creating this thing of consistency where every time they get to a
stopping off point they move forward again. So you’re going to dramatically increase your
closing rate like that too with these breaks and these little mini leads in the middle. Okay? So
very, very important, the sub-heads.
Next use color in your sales letter and use italics and bolds and what those three things
represent: color, italicizing, all caps and larger fonts – that’s your tonality to emphasize
your very, very important points.
So when you’re writing a sales letter you’ll notice that well written letters some things will be in
red, some things will be italicized, some times there’ll be like three dots after a line where there
should be grammatically there should be a comma but very often in a sales letter you’ll use three
dots. If you try to do that when you’re writing a book like I wrote ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ the
editor will throw it back and they’ll say ‘What are you giving me all these…’ they’re call ellipsis’
they’ll say ‘What are you giving me all these ellipsis for? You know these should be a comma.’
But the difference is in a sales letter where the goal is about them buying your product and you’re
having a one sided conversation the ellipsis offer these sort of breaks and these long pauses that
give the rhythm to the paragraph and allow you to insert your tonality.
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So remember to use color, to use italics, to use ellipsis when you can, and that’s what punctuates
your letter for tonality.
Next, use bullets to stack your benefits. This is very, very important and this is when you get
into certain sections where you’re really going to drive home the benefits. Stack them with bullet
points. Don’t just write – don’t write like ‘Hey, let me tell you that you’re going to get this.
You’re going to get that. You’re going to get this.’ And it’s all like comma this, comma that,
comma that and it’s one big paragraph with nine commas or nine semi-colons. You know ‘you
learn the seven things to do that’, ‘the four ways to do that’ and it’s all one paragraph. No, no,
no! Don’t do that!
What you want to do is put bullet points and each benefit is it’s own separate bullet and they’re
stacked because what happens is that the way the human brain processes information visually it
sees them stacked together and it becomes a bigger – where they’re like ‘Whoa! Look at this big
thing of bullets’ and it’s just like ‘Wow! Look at all that value’ so you’re stacking value. Okay?
The next is three – this is now your two biggest mistakes – is the complete lack of energy in
your sales letter.
Now this is again Straight Line technology – this is bottled enthusiasm I speak about in my
seminars and, of course, in the home study course about that thing in your gut, that chi right?
That has to be in your sales letter, that enthusiasm. Your words need to explode with excitement.
You have to talk it out. Write the way you speak and use your in person sales pitch, use your own
pitch, your Straight Line in person pitch to help you find the right words.
Go through a Straight Line presentation and see what words you use when you’re sounding
enthusiastic and recreate that in your sales letter using the same words and the right punctuation.
And don’t forget to use short sentences like staccato-like beats and an upbeat pace when you’re
writing. Don’t make these long drawn out sentences because people will tune out and remember
don’t think that just in terms of enthusiasm in exclamation points only get you so far. Okay? Yes,
you can use exclamation points but they’re not to be used in substitution for enthusiasm. They’re
as an adjunct. They can sort of take it to another level but you need – the enthusiasm comes from
the tonality. It comes from the language patterns. You see how I am speaking right now? It
comes from tonality and language patterns that we use. That sort of stuff.
So that’s the story with that. I am sorry my phone rang there. We’re going to go a little bit over
here because there’s a lot of information so I am probably going to have to cut the Q&A out for
today. We can do that next week because I still have more I want to talk to you about sales
letters, okay?
So let’s move on to mistake number three here which is focusing on features not on the
benefits.
And this is an old lesson and I am sure – for those of you who have been through my seminar,
any seminar that’s more than a few hours, I go crazy with this whole thing about features versus
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benefits. You’ve got to have the benefits not the features and we’ve heard this before but so often
we still focus on features.
So remember I want you to connect every single thing you say back to your – connect it back to
the customer. How does it improve their life? So if you hand somebody – let’s say it’s a T.V. set.
I am looking at a T.V. here that’s why I said the T.V. set – and I am going to buy a T.V. set and I
go in and they say ‘It has 10,000 – 1080 pixels, a zillion mgs of – megahertz movement thing.
It’s got internet access for this or that’ and ten features of the T.V. I don’t give a shit! I – the
benefit is it makes a beautifully clear picture for extraordinary viewing. It’s so easy to use. One
touch easy to use. That’s connected back to my benefit not that it’s got 10,000 pixels or whatever
that means. That’s not a benefit. That’s a feature. The benefit is the clearest viewing possible,
unbelievably life-like images.
So remember always connect back to benefits and if you can key the benefits in to how it reduces
their pain threshold. So the pain threshold if you were marketing a T.V. set – a high definition
super duper T.V. to a bunch of football fanatics the pain is that they watch T.V. and really have
not been able to feel like they were really on the field and they sort of lose out on that excitement,
that sense of being there and really seeing things unfold. Well, you know, the benefits can be
‘now you’ll feel like you’re there in the field. It’s so clear. You’ll see the sweat pouring off the
football player through his helmet. You’ll hear the grunts and that’. Do you get it? So that’s –
those are your benefits versus the features. Okay?
And then next this is very important on benefits is give them or offer them at least a
glimpse of the solution. In other words, you future pace them! Remember in a sales pitch, in a
Straight Line sales pitch what you do is you actually start saying ‘down the road what I can do for
you’ or ‘Just imagine down the road you’re in your – now you’re in your new car’ or ‘you bought
this product and you’re in business for yourself’ and you future pace their success and allow them
to get those feelings of being right and basically making a good decision and getting what they
want and getting at of pain and into pleasure. Okay?
Now here’s the issue, number five, and this is very important here and depending on what
countries that you’re in the laws are different so let me just – I am going to talk about here
now is testimonials which is social proof. It’s the same thing as social proof or consensus as
it’s sometimes called.
Nothing speaks louder than the words of other people who have actually used your product. Let
me give you an example. I giving a seminar this weekend in LAX the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and I want to
sell more seats to my seminar and I go out there and I give a webinar and I say ‘You’re going to
learn this. You’re going to learn that. You’re going to get this benefit. You’re going to get that
benefit. I am so great at what I do. I inspire people. I motivate people. I’ve written books. I’ve
made money’ all blah, blah, blah. ‘I, I, I, I’.
Well okay, if I can do that in a way that shows some humility with the right tonality and indeed I
have a very good track record so it’s not going to be that far fetched for me to go out there and
say some positive things about myself. That has some level of effectiveness. It’s not nearly as
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effective though as if I had five people who are in my seminars who get on and do video
testimonials or even written testimonials that say ‘I attended Jordan’s seminar and the next day I
went out and made a million dollars’. I am just making these numbers up. Or ‘I went out within a
week and launched my own business and my first year I made $60,000 – in my first month I
made $60,000 and I am on pace to make $1.4 million’. Another guy ‘I left Jordan’s seminar the
next day I went out and closed a $5 million dollar deal using the Straight Line technique’.
Now when you use testimonials wow! It really blows people away! So if you have good
testimonials then use them. Don’t leave them out and if you don’t know how to get testimonials
or you have any confusion I actually on the August 3rd transcript I actually showed you a system
for how you collect testimonials from your clients and in fact, I went through this in my last
seminar in Sydney and I’ve got a testimonial from someone saying ‘Wow! I am giving you a
testimonial about how you showed me how to get testimonials. I never knew I could do it the
way you do it and I ended up getting the two best testimonials of my life.’ You get it? So it was a
testimonial about giving testimonials.
Now let me just caution you on one thing here. Actually a couple of things. Number one,
especially for those of you in the United States, run your testimonials by your attorney. Don’t
take my word for it or your own gut instinct. Make sure that your testimonials are compliant at
the highest standard of FTC. There are certain laws that have been passed that are kind of murky
but they’re really – you can’t really be sure and I think they’re probably purposely written that
way so you don’t really know what you can and can’t do. It’s like more of a guideline. Okay? So
run your testimonials by your attorney. Obviously, of course, the obvious thing is you’ve got to
be fair and accurate. I mean they can’t be lies. They have to be backed up by proof.
But there’s another issue about that your testimonial has to be a typical result. It’s not okay to
show the three best results you’ve ever gotten and have a little fine print saying ‘these aren’t
typical’. So that’s the issue right now in the United States so I would just run your – just don’t
take my word for it. Run this by your attorney. Make sure your testimonials are compliant so you
don’t get yourself in trouble.
The Offer and Close of Your Sales Letter
Next is section three is the offer and the close of your sales letter. This is perhaps your most
crucial section and you need to – the first thing, by the way just so you know – the great thing
about teaching people this stuff is I get to crystallize my own mistakes in public. I make the same
mistakes. I teach you guys stuff that I actually go out and don’t follow my own advice sometimes
and I pay the price for it and that makes me a better teacher because I can go out, admit my
mistakes and never make them again. I’ll find new mistakes to make. But again I always said
‘Being in business for yourself’ and I think all the entrepreneurs on this call know this ‘it’s
almost about learning how to fail elegantly’ and learning how to be wrong sometimes and walk
away with a lot of powerful lessons and not too much financial pain.
So I try as hard as I can and when I make my mistakes and my errors that I minimize the pain and
maximize on the lesson side of things. Okay?
©2010 Global Motivation Inc. All rights reserved.
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So this is one thing here, a mistake that I recently made is I – the distinction here is you
want to present your offer in a clear organized fashion.
Well I did a webinar where I actually didn’t do that. I tried to accomplish too much and I was
having ‘well you could take this product or you can come to the live seminar. You could do this
and do that’ before I knew it it was too much going on and people became confused and
overwhelmed and I noticed on that particular webinar my response rate was dramatically – my
closing rate was dramatically reduced. So I learned a valuable lesson that it doesn’t matter how
good your content is – and I thought by the way when I left this webinar I was like ‘Wow! That
was like the best webinar I ever did, man. I really killed it. I really told these people’ and boom
the closing rate was lower.
Now clearly one reason why is because I changed up my offering structure and I did it kind of ass
backwards. In other words, I sold too many things at once and no one knew what they were really
getting for what so people don’t take action and the true irony of that is that Mike Koenigs had
actually come up with the structure that worked beautifully. The problem was I didn’t follow
Mike Koenigs structure. He came up with the structure for me that worked and converted and I
said – and it wasn’t, by the way, - my heart was in the right place. It wasn’t like I was trying to
reinvent the wheel for the sake of reinventing the wheel. I would say ‘Okay, I have a base line
there of what I got off one webinar. Now let me try to improve on that and change things and
keep changing it and changing it and see which is my best result.’
So I had – there was a method to my madness but the mistake I made though was I – is that
certain – it doesn’t matter how many times you test the same disciplines and rules still apply. So
when you’re testing you still have to test with clear and congruent offers that are organized. You
can’t test – don’t say ‘Hey let me just test this disorganized offer to see if it out performs the
organized offer’. It never will. You need to show – the things you really need show in the offer is
you have to lay out everything they’ll get step by step along with each benefit attached to it and
then you’ve got to show them how – not tell them, show them an example of how the value
dramatically exceeds the actual dollar amount they’re paying and then you ask for the sale and
then you ask for the order and you remind them of the benefits again and it’s a way of looping
back and that’s why you’ve got to be – the sales letter are very long.
It can be 20-30 pages because you’re constantly looping back and going through benefits and
building up certainty and then, of course, you need to build in urgency in your close. Give them a
reason to buy now, which could be for bonuses for immediate action which is what I love to do, a
decrease in price. That’s another really powerful motivator to take action now and also you can
use scarcity when you say ‘Listen, this is only a limited number of’ whatever it is your selling
that’s available.
Just I urge you when you’re using scarcity just make sure that you’re not making shit up. If
you’re saying there’s twelve left then you’ve got to raise your price when the first twelve sell.
You can’t just make it up and just go on because then you might get in trouble just because it’s
legally wrong but also it’s not ethical and just so you know you don’t want to put that shit out in
to the universe. Okay?
©2010 Global Motivation Inc. All rights reserved.
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Also, give them some choices on how to order. Don’t just say ‘Click on this link and fill out the
form’. Let them click here, call now, fax your order in here. Give people three or four different
options how to make an order. It’s about making it easy, easy, easy. Okay?
The P.S. Section
And lastly let’s focus on the P.S. section of things here and ironically and I am sure that some of
you have some experience with sales letters know that this section gets as much attention as the
headline. The P.S. – it’s the headline and the P.S. So for me I like headline, the lead in – the lead
that comes onto the headline, and the P.S. Those are the things that really, really matter. Not to
say that the stuff in between doesn’t close the deal as well but if these three things are off good
luck trying to have an effective sales letter.
So I guess the distinction here I am trying to say is don’t use the P.S. as like an after thought.
Don’t just like ‘It’s a P.S. or whatever’. Pay as much attention to your P.S. as to your headline.
This is your last punch. You’re last chance to get the message across to get people to take action
now and you use it to reinforce a point or add one last important detail to your message and that
is how you structure an effective P.S.
