Writing your book is a big step, but using it to start a conversation with a potential customer is the most important part.

Today, I'm talking with Dean about the ways your book can help set up a compelling conversation that draws out your five-star prospects from the crowd.

By thinking a few steps ahead, knowing who your readers are and the ideal step you'd like your best readers (customers) to take, you can create a follow up sequence that starts the relationship in the best way. By offering information that helps.

All leading toward getting that 'love letter' reply.

You'll definitely want to check out the show note to see this.

 

Links:
Previous podcast with Dean: Ep028: Starting Conversations
Email Mastery Book: EmailMastery.com
Titles Workshop: 90MinuteBooks.com/Workshops
Ready to get started: Get Started
Interview Shows: 90-Minute Books Author Interviews
Questions/Feedback: Send us an email
Extra Credit Listening: MoreCheeseLessWhiskers.com

 

Transcript: Book More Show 034

Stuart: Mr. Jackson.

Dean: Mr. Bell.

Stuart: How are you doing?

Dean: I'm fantastic. What do you have for us today?

Stuart: So in the last show, which I'll link in the show notes if people have missed it, we were talking about the kind of difference between leads and sales. So we were looking at the structure of a setting up the book, which is a fantastic episode, so this time, I thought we'd look at another acronym that we've got that we use internally, so it's SPEAR emails, so we talk quite a lot with people about that follow on sequence. There's a lot of time and attention on writing a book, but obviously if you don't do nothing with it, it's a bit of a waste of time, so I want to grab your thoughts on how people can best use the book after it's been created, and then engaging people, engage readers in a dialogue and conversation after that.

Dean: Well, that's really the thing. That's the most important thing. When I look at this, and I've always said it and I have to really take the time often in conversations with people about the concept of the 90-Minute Book to continually reinforce that the purpose of the 90-Minute Book is to give you the opportunity to be in a conversation with somebody who by the very act of them asking for your book has indicated that they are somebody that you want to be in a conversation with, and so we talked a lot about that with the book titles. That's why it's so important to title the book something that your ideal prospect would definitely want to have in their library, that they would say "that's the book for me."

And so just to kind of reiterate my position on the way we look at these things is that the purpose of a 90 minute book is not to write the definitive book of everything you know about and have carefully researched and cross checked and fact checked and all of the efforts people go to create a Book book, the big capital B book, it's to really understand the fact that ... what triggers the mechanism in somebody to want your book is the title of the book and the fact that you're offering it to them, the fact that you've exposed them to it, that they see that there's a book available and that they can get it by leaving their name and their email address.

And the only purpose that I look at it for the book is to trigger that mechanism. And we can trigger that mechanism of somebody taking an action to get possession of this book. And it's not really about getting possession of this book. It's about anchoring or identifying with the title, the concept, the idea of this book for them to say "That's for me" and to leave their name and email that now that gives us the opportunity to engage in a dialogue with these people and you mentioned one of our acronyms that we use is our SPEAR emails, which are short, personable, expecting a reply, S-P-E-A-R, spear. So that's one of our most effective marketing abilities, is to engage with people one on one.

Now there's nothing better than a book to identify somebody who would largely be an invisible prospect. If we don't know ... I'll use and I'll continue to use as an example some of the things that best illustrate this, that we talk about the adult acne cure as a clear example of this. That's a book that the only reason and the only person who would be interested in that is somebody who is experiencing the thing that the book is about, that's experiencing adult acne.

We had a podiatrist who's just joined us in the email mastery program and is coming to the breakthrough blueprint in Orlando, and he has a book about heel pain that is particularly interesting to me right now because as I was explaining to him on our email mastery call this week, I've been experiencing some Achilles heel tightness things, and so I am very interested in that.

So by me, there's no way to get a list of people who are experiencing adult acne or who are experiencing acute onset Achilles heel pain, and so the very best thing that we can do, the thing that a 90 minute book allows us to do is to build our own list of these people by getting the book title and the fact that you've got a book in front of the general population of people so that the ones that have that, that identify with that, want that kind of information, will raise their hand, self select, and by asking for your book, essentially tell you that they're an ideal candidate for what it is that you do.

As a podiatrist, if you're looking for people who have heel pain, and it's interesting because we talked on the email mastery call that heel pain is certainly probably the most popular or common type of foot pain that people have, but when you think about all of the different possibilities there, like ankle pain or Achilles heel pain or plantar fasciitis or bunions or ingrown toenails or toe joint pain, you know, all of those things, the only thing that I'm not interested in a book about ingrown toenails right now because I don't have ingrown toenails. I have acute onset heel pain. And so I'm very fascinated by that and I'm very interested in that and by signing up for it, that gives Dr. Milke the opportunity to engage in a dialogue with me. That's what we were talking about.

Stuart: Exactly. That specificity and starting the conversation, I know you've used the example of writing in general, whether it's books or emails or any other type of communication, that putting yourself in the mindset of someone who had just walked through the door, so if Dr.Milke had written a book called, trying to get a clever title, called "Flex, the Nonsurgical Solution to Foot Problems," even though there's a subheading that tries to capture the attention a little bit, by trying to be too clever in the title and not just say the words in your head as someone who has heel pain, that specificity, it may not sound as clever, it may not be a book you would typically associate with being on a bestseller list on Amazon, but not only is this the job of work, the job of work is the first sentence in a conversation hopefully leads to some business further down the track.

Dean: Yeah, and there's the thing. And the fact that when you're thinking about it that the book has to be focused on your audience, focused on what is it that they would want. Like so one of the mistakes that people make is that they want to make the book about them, which certainly ... it would be like Dr.Milke writing a book called "Confessions of a Sole Man" or something like that, right, S-O-L-E. Like trying to be clever and put a little soul in it.

Stuart: Yeah, it's doing a different job, isn't it? If you want to write that type of book, that's fine, but don't mistakenly think it would be as effective as writing it in the language that resonates with the audience that you're trying to engage with.

Dean: Right. And that's the thing. And I look at it that my intentions, my purpose, the way that we set this all up, when we set up the whole operation, the whole organization, the whole 90 minute books team is geared to just get people the best possible tool to grow their business, right, using a book as a presuader and in a lot of ways, it's not even about the book being the presuader, per se, but the fact that it's titled and it's offered to the people who would be your ideal candidates, that they raise their hands, that that in itself has value in how you're able to then engage with people in a dialogue.

So I'll use the example of what happened with Dr.Milke. So we had the conversation, and I'll say to people "imagine that your book and the landing page that we set up for you for the book so that people can leave their name and email to get it, that that is a portal to your office, and as soon as somebody fills in their information, they press the 'send me my book' button and they are magically and immediately transported into your office, your physical office. And they open the door and they poke their head in and they say 'I'm here about the heel pain book?' And what would you say to those people? What would you actually physically say to them?"

And that is the basis of these short, personal, expecting a reply messages, because if somebody came into your office like that, you might say "Well, welcome. How long have you had the heel pain?" That might be how you'd start it out, right? Or you might offer them a choice: "did it just start or have you been experiencing it for a while? Oh, is it more on the bottom of your heel or the back of your heel?" You start diagnosing or having some conversation with somebody to get some clarity about the scope of it and about what the actual issue is and start formulating an idea of how you're going to be able to help people.

Stuart: I think there's a lot of concern that people have, very unfounded concern, that entering into an email dialogue, there is more one on one based, there's a concern that they won't be able to get back to people, that it will be overwhelming, but I think so often the case people overestimate how effective any one campaign is going to be, and on the flipside, if it is overwhelming and there is a lot of people entering into this dialogue, it's a dialogue with five star prospects. The example you had of people teleporting into the office, I can't imagine someone sitting there and thinking "Well, you know what, the doors open at 9, but if we have more than two people come in the door, we're going to have to shut for an hour or two until we get through them." There's no way in the physical world people would have the same concerns, but it's surprising how often people use it as a barrier, and I always wonder if it is a legitimate concern or whether that's just kind of a manifestation of…

Dean: We can tell from experience like running high volume lead generation and getting lots of replies on a daily basis is a manageable thing. Once you know what's going to happen. That would never ... if you look at it, if somebody's running a book offer, a book campaign and they're getting hundreds of opt-ins at a time, what you're really looking at is you set all this up to be semi-automated in a way, where we get the book done, then the landing page, that's completely automated, the auto-responder that is set up initially is automated, and even then the message that we can send that initiates the conversation can be automated so that it's not ...

Wen you're advertising or you're sending postcards or you're doing Facebook ads or print ads or whatever it is, you're getting 100 people to come to a website, you're getting 50 or 60 of them to leave their name and their email address, or maybe it's even 30 or 40 of them, whatever it is, and then you're getting maybe 30 or 40% of those to respond to your initial email, but they've already jumped through a lot of steps to get to that point, if you think about they're a person who saw an ad or got a postcard, they decided that "I want that," they click on the link or went to the website, they saw "this is where you can get it," they voluntarily typed in their name and their email address right away, and they received an email, opened it, read it, and responded to it, that's a person who's moving forward in many different ways. There's not a ... I would look at boy, that'd be a great problem to have is that we've got too many people asking and moving forward, wanting to engage in a dialogue, and it's a problem that is a sophisticated, good problem to have.

Stuart: It's like, in a real world situation it's like suggesting the problem of people queuing up, cash in hand, at the checkouts, it's almost people are saying we don't like that.

Dean: Mm-hmm (affirmative). We're too busy.

Stuart: Yeah, if you go away and come back later that'd be very helpful to us.

Dean: Right, rather than thinking let's open up another register.

Stuart: There's two things that come to mind as you were talking about that. One is that concept of five star prospects and not necessarily letting non five star prospects derail the conversation that you would otherwise be having with five star prospects, so I've heard a number of times before, treat everyone as if they were five star prospects until they evidence themselves that they're not, and the other example was, and I'm not sure whether we've talked about this on the show before or not, or whether it was one of the other podcasts, but the subservient chicken example of people thinking that they may get overwhelmed with the responses, but actually the responses, 80 or 90% fall into the same very small group that it's easy to deal with.

Dean: Yeah, yeah. You're right. So I'll have just a couple of loops to close there. So just for people wondering what are we talking about, subservient chicken? Burger King ... I mean, it was a very popular campaign, but I'm not assuming that everybody knows what that is, the ad agency for Burger King several years ago created an amazing viral campaign and a website called Subservient Chicken and it was a play on the thought that Burger King's slogan of course is "Have it your way" so that's the subservient chicken came in that thing, and it was to announce their new chicken sandwich that you can have it your way.

And when you would go to the website--and I think it's still online, actually, if you do a Google search for subservient chicken, I think you can still see this--but essentially, it was a very, very simple website with a big live video looking picture of a guy in a chicken suit in an apartment, and like a Google search bar that said "Welcome to subservient chicken. Have it your way." And you could command the chicken what to do. And you type in "jump up and down" and the chicken would jump up and down. And you would say "chase your tail" and the chicken would chase its tail or do the chicken dance, or you know you start to think about all the different things that you could command the chicken to do.

And the way that they created the database of these was to make up a flier that had a picture of the subservient chicken on there with ten lines below it and said "Command the chicken to do ten things" and they did 1000 of these was all they needed to do. They did 1000 of these, had people fill them out, and what they found was that largely, people ran out of steam, like we all collectively think of the same things. Jump up and down. Spin in a circle. All these things. But even the long tail things, they got most of the things that people would do, and they shot the video for it and then seamlessly programmed it all together so that it looked like it was happening really in live time.

And so this is not much different than that in that you can, when somebody asks for your book, by asking somebody a question with a narrow band of responses, it makes it very easy to automate the process of somebody managing the dialogues with these people. And so I always use the word automate to include things that are not done by me. So anything that's not done by me is under my definition of automation, automated. Even if it requires other people. So you start to think about that, as long as somebody knows what to do, it creates lots of options.

So if I ask, if I'm offering the book called "The Adult Acne Cure" and somebody comes and downloads it and we immediately offer or send them an email that asks a short person expecting reply message of "Hey, Stuart, welcome aboard, how often do you get breakouts?" That is a short personal expecting reply message with a very limited field of options. So there's going to be on some range from "Oh, I never get breakouts, I was just curious about the book" or whatever or something, to "I constantly have breakouts," those are the two end things, and everything in between is just some varying degree. People could say "well, occasionally I get breakouts when I eat fatty foods" or thinking that they're related. Or "a couple of times a month I'll get periodic breakthroughs."

But somebody who is looking for the cure for adult acne is probably someone who has it more on the latter half of that scale, that they're probably more frequently getting breakouts. And so when you ask a question like that, which is a completely reasonable question, and the same thing would go for Dr. Milke if we're offering the heel pain cure or the heel pain book, heel pain secret, heel pain relief, it would be reasonable to ask somebody "Did the pain just come on or have you been experiencing it for a while?" That would be a very short personal expecting reply, sort of conversational way of imagining the dialogue between you and somebody who has shown up at your office and asked for your book.

Welcome. Certainly, let me get you a copy of the book, here it is. How often are you getting breakouts? Or have you just started having heel pain or has it been going on for a while? Then, when they respond, and it's going to be smaller and smaller, not everybody's going to, if you send out 1000 postcards to your ideal prospects, not everybody's going to respond, but some people will. And of the people who respond, when you send that initial short personal expecting reply email, not everybody's going to respond, but some people will, so you have a smaller group for that. And then when you engage and you send out another follow-up question, like with acne, if they said "I constantly get breakouts," then the next step might be "Well, what have you tried so far? What are you doing right now?"

That would be a wonderful question to find out the state of where somebody is, what the incumbent solution that they're using for whatever the issue is for your situation, but you get that sense that as these progress, the more steps that somebody has, once somebody's responded to two of your emails, you're engaged in a dialogue now with a real person who probably after two or three of these exchanges is going to write you what I call the love letter. And the love letter will just lay it all out for you. That is the person that we're looking to be in relationship with, and that relationship starts with being in conversation with them, and that conversation starts with being able to identify the person that we want to be in that conversation with in a way that makes it easy for them to start it without even knowing that they're really starting the conversation.

Stuart: The elements of persuasion that you mentioned, both in terms of helping people to self-identify because it's language that identifies with them, but also knowing like with the chest pain example, knowing the three or four moves ahead and then working back from that end point, in that little steps that are conversational, engaging, by the time someone's reached the point that it has to become manually automated versus machine automated, you've sifted and sorted so many of the previous steps whilst at every stage still building rapport with the people where the time's not quite right for them, and then switching people into more of a flagship broadcast type follow-up is such a straightforward way, I think the love letter example, that might not necessarily resonate with some people might not understand what it is, I think we've got a couple examples of those we use in email mastery, so I'll grab one of those and put it into the show notes.

I'm conscious of your time, we're just coming up on half an hour, so I think we've hit a good place to draw a line under it, but I'll make sure on the show notes of this episode, so if people head across to 90minutebooks.com/podcasts and this is episode 34, in the show notes I'll make sure we've got an example of the love letter that we were talking about, a link across to the email mastery book because that's a great resource for anyone who's thinking about taking the follow on for their book, how to start an engaging conversation, and we'll just close then on the titles, the importance of picking great titles, so we have a great titles workshop that we did that I'll make sure there's a link to that in the show notes as well.

Dean: Perfect. I love it.

Stuart: Fantastic.

Dean: So much good stuff.

Stuart: It is, and it's such an amazing opportunity for people listening in now who've maybe heard Betsy and I talk on the last couple of podcasts have heard some of the interviews that we've done with authors. It's always great to get you on and listen to your perspective, doing it together, kind of stitching all those elements together, because it really is all about that opportunity to engage the five star prospects that are out there but invisible.

Dean: I love it.

Stuart: Fantastic. Well, the only thing left then is for anyone who hasn't started yet to head across to 90minutebooks.com and follow the Get Started links, great to help you get the title dialed in, the book written, and out there starting these conversations. So thanks again Dean.

Dean: Always fun.

Stuart: I will catch you soon.

Dean: Thanks, Stuart. Bye.

Stuart: Cheers. Bye.