Welcome to all things Dan Kennedy and his genius. This podcast explores all of Dan’s timeless ‘greatest hits’ over the past 40 years.

What you’re going to get in every episode is the best of Dan taken from recordings of sold-out seminars, conferences, interviews, and speeches that have never been published online. You can’t find them in any archives, you won’t find them online, and you won’t find them on any podcast.

The Magnetic Marketing podcast is a goldmine of the greatest marketing, sales, and business growth strategies you’ll find anywhere…

Strategies that have literally ‘made’ countless entrepreneurs millionaires and multimillionaires over the past 4 decades and counting…

Simply by doing what Dan teaches.

In this premiere episode, you’ll discover…

You DO NOT want to miss Dan’s answers to these critical marketing questions.

Russell Brunson: Hey, I want to officially welcome you to the very first episode of the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. As you can probably tell, this is not Dan Kennedy. But don't worry, this is the only time you'll be hearing from me. In the future, all other episodes will be 100% Dan Kennedy. But my name is actually Russell Brunson. I'm one of the co-founders of a software company called ClickFunnels. And recently, I had a chance to actually acquire Dan Kennedy's company, Magnetic Marketing, along with all of the assets and intellectual property and a whole bunch of other amazing things.

And as part of this project, I had a chance to go through the archives of everything Dan over the last 40 plus years. And inside his archives, I found hundreds and hundreds of speeches and interviews and things that he did that had never been published online. You can't find them in any course. You can't find them on a podcast. You can't find them anywhere except in these archives. Literally, boxes of CDs and DVDs over the last 30 or 40 years. And I wanted to bring these back from the dead for people like me to study, people like you, small business owners who are trying to grow their marketing, who maybe you've heard of Dan Kennedy, maybe you've studied him in the past, but you want to figure out the best ways to grow your company. And that is by learning directly from Dan.

And so this podcast, moving forward, is going to be like the greatest hits of Dan Kennedy, things that most people have never seen before, they've never heard before. And we're bringing them back. We're dusting them off, and we're bringing them to you guys here through the podcast. I'm so excited for that.

Now, what a lot of people don't know is that our company, ClickFunnels, was actually built off of the back of Dan and his teachings. When I started my business almost 20 years ago, I was struggling. I was trying to figure out how to grow it. And somehow I bumped into Dan Kennedy, and I started reading his books. I started attending his seminars. I started learning. And it became the entire foundation for my business as I started to grow it. And fast forward, 15 years later, when we built ClickFunnels the software, the platform was literally built on the back of Dan's teachings. Things he was teaching us about lead magnets and how to grow a list became software inside of ClickFunnels. He talks about multi-step campaigns and a whole bunch, like everything we learned from Dan, we turned it into software.

And so really the foundation of my business and the software company we have today, if you look back and you trace it back, it's all leading back to Dan Kennedy. And so, for all of you guys, it doesn't matter where you are in your business, if you're a brand new beginner or just starting like I was 20 years ago, or you're an advanced marketer who has grown a company to seven figures and beyond, these strategies are timeless. They're principles that will help you in ways that you can't even imagine. So that's what this podcast is all about. It's a free resource we want to give to you to be able to give you this opportunity to learn directly from Dan.

And on top of that, we've also recently relaunched his No B.S Newsletter, which if you were not a subscriber, literally I was a subscriber for the first, man, 15 years of my business. Every single month I would get this newsletter in the mail. And it was literally like having a personal seminar hand delivered by the mailman to me to learn from Dan directly. And we've recently relaunched his newsletter. And if you want to go get, first off, what we call the most incredible free gift ever, you can go to nobsletter.com to get that. You're literally getting almost $20,000 with of marketing material and training information for free just by going there. And on top of that, you'll get a subscription to the Magnetic Marketing Newsletter where each month, just like I used to get in the mail, you'll be getting direct information from Dan downloaded from his head into your hands. And so, make sure you go to nobsletter.com to go subscribe today.

With that said, this very first episode, I actually want to show you part of an interview that I did with Dan Kennedy at a recent Funnel Hacking Live event. This isn't the entire interview. The entire interview is about two hours long. In fact, after you become a No B.S Newsletter member, you'll get the entire interview there for free inside the members area. But I wanted to give you guys a sample of it, because it's going to help you understand some very core Dan Kennedy Magnetic Marketing principles. You have a chance to hear me interviewing him. And that's how we're going to kick off episode number one. Episode number two, you're going to have a chance to listen to an old interview between two of the marketing legends, Jay Abraham and Dan Kennedy, two people I studied the most, you have a chance to learn from both of them in that episode, which you're going to love and a whole bunch more things. So with that said, I'm going to go directly into a portion of my interview with me and Dan Kennedy on stage at Funnel Hacking Live.

That actually reminds me of one of the stories I think you wrote about it, I don't know, originally. The first time I read it was in the Ultimate Sales Letter, I think. The story about the welcome guest versus the annoying pest. Would you be willing to tell that story? Because I think it kind of ties into that, and the marketing messages that people are putting out.

Dan Kennedy: Yeah. So people show up as annoying pests precisely because they don't get message to market match going in. So this is actually true. I was living in Phoenix. I stayed home, I never went to the office. And I didn't want to be there, they didn't want me to be there. You kind of know this gig, right? So I worked at home. And it was a weekday, middle of the day, and we had big wood, double doors. And there's this monstrous banging on the wood double doors, ringing the doorbell and then banging on the doors. And this was a recession. So the Avon ladies and the Jehovah Witnesses were carpooling.

I've told that joke for 35 years, I've only ever got one complaint, and it was not from the Jehovah Witness. It was from an Avon sales manager who I had just destroyed or Salesforce and self-esteem, and they'll never work again. And you know, just completely humorless. Today you'd, of course, be banned from Facebook. But so, because I know no one invited is coming over, I know this is an annoying pest. And I'm busy, I think I was on the phone. So I ignore it confident that if you ignore a pest, generally it will go away, right? It will tire of trying to get you to pay attention and move on to the next house.

So this goes on for a while, but I'm pretty stubborn so I can ignore a lot. And next thing I know this person has climbed over the back wall of my property, which by the way, has shards of glass on top, to discourage this idea. And they are in the backyard, they've come past the pool and the hot tub and stuff. And they are now banging on the sliding glass door, which they can see me through. So now you're kind of a, if you don't. So the message is, all of the shrubbery in your front yard is on fire. And the flames are licking at the stuff. And of course, not everybody was walking around with a cell phone then. So his message was, you call the fire department and I'll go back out there and work the hose. Now, at that second in time, he went from being a most annoying pest to a most welcome guest. And the only thing that changed was right message, right time. That's it.

So in our world there's been a, what, I don't know, a decade long insanity of email delivery drops, open rates go down. So marketer who was sending one a day, sends two. Then his open rates go down further, so he sends four. Then his open rates go down further. So he sends eight until his open rate is zero and he's sending one every five minutes. You can't really amp up being an annoying pest and get results. It's hard work. A super salesman could do it.

I have a friend who I always say you could give him a crate to stand on and put him in the bus station. And he will walk out of there having sold $5,000 coaching programs to every vagrant who's in the place. But he's are pretty rare fellow. Most people, they don't have the combination of that skill. I say I could get a check out of a rock. I'm that capable. But I don't want to, I want people to want to give me checks. And that's about this dynamic change of always asking yourself, is everything I'm doing here organized so that I'm showing up as a welcome guest? That's why we use FedEx a lot instead of direct mail because interest level automatically goes up because it's FedEx.

Russell Brunson: Very cool. The next question I have for you, and it's funny, because I quoted you in all of my books saying this. And then I think three times in the last two days I've quoted you. This is like the quote that had probably the biggest impact.

Dan Kennedy: We actually had a member who made, What Would Dan Do bracelets. Which I was really uncomfortable with having these bracelets. Which I was really uncomfortable with having these handed out. I didn't stop them, but I was uncomfortable.

Russell Brunson: That's awesome. The quote is, "Whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins." And especially in our world right now, I don't know how much you follow the recent like Facebook and Apple fights, costs to acquire customers has gone up across the internet. And I think that a lot of people-

Dan Kennedy: It's headed towards like real acquisition costs.

Russell Brunson: Because I think people in this room are good at making good funnels. A lot of times the economics don't work at the end of the day. I'd love if you'd talk a little more about that.

Dan Kennedy: Yeah. So math is the gravity of the direct marketing business. And outright defined gravity is just not an intelligent thing to do. During my rich family stage, I had a very big bedroom on the second story of the house. And I had my own balcony, which really was the carport roof over the back driveway. And I got a Superman Halloween costume. And I was young enough to think the secret was the cape. And so I took a running start and flew ever so briefly. And I tried it a second time in case I had screwed it up somehow. But it turns out gravity kind of is a real thing.

And so marketing is about behavioral psych and math. That's what it's about. And most people love the behavioral psych part and they hate the math part. And they will often try and overcome bad math with some compensating idea. I've got a product that the whole world needs. I've got a product that these people need. I've got the best doodad ever invented. I've got the best copywriter that's ever walked the face of the earth, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Nothing overcomes bad economics. Nothing. Ever. And if you're a copywriter and somebody tries to tempt you into this, which happened to me once every three or four years, you should resist the temptation if you don't want to screw up your scorecard because you are not going to win. It's like the graveyard of marketing is bad economics. And if you can temporarily live with bad math because you're only using cheap media, it's only a matter of time before you'll be in trouble. So you want to kind of get that right from the beginning.

Beyond that. So to your quotation, it has to do with cost per lead. And it has to do with cost per sale. First of all, in any competitive environment, whoever figures out how to spend the most for their lead and their sale wins. They buy speed. They buy scale. They buy discouragement of competition. And they buy sustainability. You got to figure that out without it putting you in bankruptcy court. If you're not like Uber, where you can go 12 years before you make a profit, you've got to figure out a little shorter runway than that. So this is why, and as acquisition cost goes up, which it does all the time.

See, there's always been cheap media early. Always. When I started working in the infomercial business, TV stations still didn't understand what we were doing. In a local market, like in Phoenix, you could buy all the half hours you wanted from midnight until eight in the morning for like 200 bucks a half hour. They actually turned the TV off, like after Johnny Carson and the Tom Snyder show on NBC, they played the national Anthem and there was nothing on the TV until eight o'clock the next morning. So when we walked in and said, "We'll buy that dead time." The station guy says, "What do you give us for it?" "How about 200 bucks?" Station guy says to himself, these people are crazy. "Will you agree to do it for six weeks?" "Sure." "Great. Here's the keys to the building. You come in, flip the switch."

Well, you could have some pretty crappy marketing and you could win with the first transaction. That's when you saw a lot of seminar move to TV kind of infomercials. You saw that Dave Del Dottos of the world, we just took him out of the free preview room. We stuck him in a TV studio with a rented audience and a camera and a light, and we let him do his thing. Because if you sold one course, you were home free. Well, five years later, that half hour is $20,000. Well, now you got to get good. Now you got to figure out a business. You got to be able to mitigate that cost. You can't miss any opportunity for money. But if you do, now you win big because everybody else kind of surrenders. So in TV, for example, my client Guthy-Renker, I worked on Proactiv, the acne glop, from show number one until the last show, and wrote copy for everything but TV. Because at peak, we were using 22 different media, including yellow pages, which is an interesting side story in and of itself.

And there's no magic to that. There's only three FDA approved ingredients you could make an active claim for. So every glop has one, two or three of those, has its chief active ingredients. And then the other stuff varies a little bit. But candidly, glop is pretty much glop. Some of it's a little better than others. Some of it's a little worse than others. Glop is glop. Same thing, ladies, with skincare products. I know you don't like to hear it. It's just like house paint. I'm serious. There's four levels of it. And that's all there is. There's the level made for Walmart and the CBS store. And there's the level made for the departments. And 90% of it is the same glop.

So there was no magic to the glop. There's no magic to the show. If you sat there with a pad, a pen and a stopwatch, all the secrets of the show are visible. Just like when I saw Zig speak when I was 15, I said, if I just get a tape of this, I got the blueprint. And then, who else is doing this? Tom Hopkins. Great. Who else is doing this? Brian Tracy. Great. So if I go get tapes of all three of them pitching and I transcribe them, I got the blueprint. Well, same thing with infomercials, there's not that much variable capability. So you could duplicate the show, which you couldn't necessarily duplicate, which is why there never was a serious competitor in all the years that Proactiv was built to a company that sold for a billion dollars to Nestle, who is busily destroying it. They couldn't wait.

Well, it happens all the time, you know? Well, the entrepreneur got it this far, the moron. Now, we'll bring in professional management and imagine what we can do to it. Yeah, Afghanistan. I mean, seriously, could your dog have screwed? My dog would not have screwed it up as bad. Dog would've gone, "Civilians? Last?" So we never had a serious competitor. Why? Because they couldn't figure out the economics. How the hell do we spend an ever increasing amount to acquire our customer? So for $39, we were spending 300. Then we were spending 600. Then we were spending 900. Well, people would duplicate the show, run it for a weekend, see the numbers and commit suicide. You don't have to outcompete them.

So the first truth about all this is, there really is no bad number. Once you get a number and you know what it is, your challenge now is how do I bridge the gap to a number I can afford, and then go out and acquire all the good customers I want if I could figure out that far? I was on the air for nine years with a little show called Gold by the Inch. It sold a business opportunity where you got these spools of gold stuff and you went out to the [inaudible 00:21:35]. We were on the air for nine consecutive years nonstop every day, every night. Built a fabulous business with a really cheap show.

And I don't know, 5, 6, 7, 8 attempts right at copycatting it, but they didn't copycat the math. So for example, we had to add a phone room. We didn't have a phone room to start with. We generated leads. We sent out packages. Orders came in. Beautiful. Now, the cost of acquisition goes up. Oh crap. We can't afford to waste these leads. Now, he didn't even have a follow up sequence. I said, "Lynn, we can't afford to waste these leads anymore. We got to have a 12 step follow sequence." Oh, okay. Now we got that. Now the cost of acquisition is still going up, I said, "Lynn, you're not going to be able to stay on the air. Unless we got telemarketers calling the non-responsive schmucks who won't respond to the 16 steps." So now we got a phone room with all the ugliness that comes with it, every car in the parking lot with the clothes pole in the backseat, with the clothes hanging on it. People on the breaks out smoking. Everything that comes with having a phone room.

Then the costs are still going up. So now we're collaborating. We're lead swapping with other opportunity marketers. "Hey, you're generating leads. We're generating leads. They're saying no to our thing, that doesn't mean they're done looking for opportunity. It just means they don't like our thing. We'll swap you our leads after we've used them for a month and you give us your leads after you've used them for a month. Cuts each of our costs in half." By the time I was done, we were sharing our leads with nine other marketers in order to stay on the air. And consequently, we could spend more money than any other opportunity marketer ever figured out how to do, because they kept working on the creative. Oh, we need a better show.

I did a lot of work for Weight Watchers at one point. I was in their phone room for a day. At the time they were handling one million inbound calls a year. 80% fat women, 20% fat guys who wanted to lose weight. The conversations were all the same, "I got a wedding coming up, beach vacation. I got to drop some weight." Or post divorce, three months after the divorce. By the way, that's the susceptibility mark for cosmetic surgery, cosmetic dentistry. It's a big marker, the three to six month number, which goes all the way back to Rick Warren. And by the way, you can get that information.

You know, women by five times the rate skincare products by direct marketing if you arrive the month of their birthday during the year, as opposed to any other month. Same marketing, you don't have change anything. You just have to be there in the birthday month because they look in the mirror more, and they're obsessing more, which guys don't. Pretty much, we don't, especially if we're married. It's like really, I'm looking to see if I got more bags under my eyes, but she is. And God bless her, by the way. And by the way, that doubles again in benchmark birthdays.

Russell Brunson: Oh, like 40?

Dan Kennedy: 50. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So there's these weird little susceptibility factors everything that you can manipulate if you know them. But the math is really important. So kind of the rule of thumb for direct marketing is you need an eight to one markup. And if you got less than that, you're starting out in trouble. You're not going to be able to use all the media that's available to you once you have a winner. You're going to be handicapped. And if you can't get eight to one, but you're close, then you got to start figuring out this ancillary and backend stuff of mitigating these costs so that you are always the one with the spend power in the marketplace.

Now this is the exact opposite of what most marketers do. So most marketers, first of all, try and spend as little as humanly possible to get a customer. All those guarantees they get crappy customers and they don't get enough of them. Then if they've fooled around with, let's say eight media, they take the two that are cheapest. They'll never use the three over here that are the most expensive. They never dollar cost average them together. I mean, if you got a website that works for like stop smoking, lose weight, every door of direct mail will work for you. The economics aren't exactly the same, but close. Valpak will work for you. You can Google it. It's a thing. Still exists. So you can have the best funnel in the world presenting the best product. But if you got bad math and you don't do something about that math, you may be okay in the early going, but you're going to get bit.

Russell Brunson: Okay, I'm going to stop you right there. I hope you enjoyed that portion of the interview with me and Dan Kennedy at Funnel Hacking Live. I had so much fun interviewing him. And I want you to see the entire interview, the video version of it. And again, you get that for free when you become a No B.S Newsletter subscriber. So all you got to do is go to nobsletter.com, go subscribe to the newsletter and you'll be immediately taken the members area you can watch the entire video of that interview, the entire presentation, which I think you are going to love. With that said, if you enjoyed this podcast, please tell other people. The more people you tell about the Magnetic Marketing Podcast and Dan Kennedy, the more of these episodes I can put out.

Again, I've been going through the archives and finding so much gold that I want to share with you guys. In fact, the next episode, episode number two, is going to be an interview with the two legends of direct response marketing. If you were to ask anybody, who are the two that paved the foundation for direct response today? It's Dan Kennedy and Jay Abraham. How would you like to hear Dan actually interviewing Jay about some of his strategies? Well, if so, you're lucky because I found the CD. I don't know how it hasn't been published before. I'm so excited to share it with you. Episode number two is going to be Dan and Jay. I hope you enjoy it. Again, go to NOBSLEtter.com, get subscribed so you can get a seminar hand delivered to you every single month in the mail from Dan Kennedy, plus a whole bunch of other amazing gifts. Again, go to NOBSLetter.com. Thanks so much. And we'll see you on the next episode.