“Direct Response Marketing” w/ Dean Jackson 278

In today’s podcast episode Jim and Tyson dive into marketing with Dean Jackson . Dean fell in love with Marketing as a young boy when he first realized that selling stuff on commission was way easier than renting himself out by the hour for a regular job… and he’s never looked back. He carried that distaste for real work into adult life and has focused on a lifestyle centered approach to business using marketing as the ultimate lever to a life of freedom and fun.

Listen to the podcast here.

5:00 speak to create a response
7:15 never make a cold call again
8:10 why you should try direct response marketing
11:40 you’re not trying to convince people to choose you
17:20 establish a brand
20:45 a brand shapes behavior
35:00 now and not now lead conversion
38:00 importance of email
43:13 more cheese less whiskers

Jim’s Hack: Listen in to Dean’s podcast More Cheese, Less Whiskers.

Dean’s Tip: Look back in your phone, your email or calendars and make contact with people you spoke with 90 days ago.

Tyson’s Tip: Book: The 90-Minute Book by Dean Jackson 

Subscribe to our YouTube channel so you never miss an interview, presentation or training!

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Run your law firm the right way.

This is The Maximum Lawyer Podcast.

Your hosts, Jim Hacking and Tyson Mutrux.

Let's partner up and maximize your firm.

Welcome to the show.

Jim: Welcome back to The Maximum Lawyer Podcast. I'm Jim Hacking.

Tyson: And I'm Tyson Mutrux. What's up, Jimmy?

Jim: Oh, Tyson, it is an auspicious day. It's the day that I've been looking forward to for quite some time. Many of our listeners know our next guest by reputation. We talk about him on the show, just about every other week. Every time any issues come up around marketing, we always mentioned his name. His name is Dean Jackson. He started the I Love Marketing podcast with Joe Polish. He's also the host of several other podcasts like The Joy of Procrastination, Listing Agent Lifestyle, and More Cheese Less Whiskers. He's the author of several books. He has several companies that we're going to talk about and courses that our members can take. And we'll get into all that stuff.

Dean, welcome to the show.

Dean: Wow! This is all very exciting.

Tyson: So, Dean, I can just hear the excitement oozing out of Jim right now because this has been like something we've been excited about doing for a really, really long time.

Before we get to all that, we always start the show by asking our guests to really talk about their journey and how they got to where they are today. So, I want to ask the same thing of you. And I know it's a long journey but tell us how you got to where you are right now.

Dean: Yeah. This is crazy but I've been-- now, it's hard to believe that I'm 54 years old. Now, I look back and it's been-- 1988, I started out as a real estate agent and young, 21, and I'd loved the idea of being a real estate agent and being kind of in the results economy, as our friend Dan Sullivan would call it, being an entrepreneur, being, you know, self-directed and no limit on what you can do.

And so, in order to really facilitate that, I had to figure out how do I get business. And it was such a great like laboratory for me to learn. Started out doing cold calling and talked to people on the phone and quickly realized that’s a hamster wheel. And so, I started thinking, “How can I use some of my money now to-- as I started making money, I was finding it difficult to both service the business that I was generating and keep up the level of prospecting. So, I started thinking, “How can I use some of my money to do this?” So, that took me down a path of kind of experimenting with personal promotion, and getting my name out there, branding, and all that stuff before I discovered direct response marketing. And that ignited, in me, a passion that has been running now for over 30 years of marketing. Once I realized, “Wow! I can put words on a postcard or on paper as an ad and get people to call me.” That just changed my whole life. And so, it's been kind of a mission for me to kind of spread the word and help other people get off the hamster wheel and the uncertainty of not knowing where their next piece of business is coming from.

Jim: So, Dean, I think a lot of lawyers might not even understand the concept of direct marketing. And I think, in the real estate context, they see a lot of real estate agents who have sort of like branded content. You know, you always talk about the real estate agent standing on top of a roof of a building and that kind of stuff. Talk to us about what direct response marketing is and sort of how you taught yourself direct response.

Dean: Yep. So, part of the thing that I initially thought was that awareness was the key. That was part of the thing that I thought that, if I could brand myself and get famous, that people would call me, that would be the thing. And so, I started doing that. I was spending a lot of money on ads. I had the front page of the real estate section in my town. I grew up outside of Toronto, in Halton Hills. And so, I was running full-page ads. Everybody was recognizing me wherever I went, kind of thing, but it wasn't really translating into people calling me. And when I realized that the key is to really speak to something that there would be a reason for somebody to respond to the ad, that's where we call it direct response advertising, to run an ad or send a postcard to somebody that you think might have an interest in something. And the ones who are interested in it, kind of raise their hand and tell you that they are interested. 

The very first thing that I did was a postcard to apartment complexes. And I was mailing business reply postcard. So, when people-- there was two-- a folding postcard. So, I was offering a book on-- the company that I worked for was a big real estate company in Canada and we had a guide for first-time homebuyers. And so, I was offering this guide on how to buy a house. So, this was prior to the internet. So, all you had to do was fill in your name, and your address, and telephone number, and drop this reply card in the mail.

And I remember the first time I pulled into my office, and you could see into the office from the parking lot, and Joanne, our receptionist, saw me and she was waving something over her head. And I walked in. And she like presented me this little stack of cards with a rubber band around it. And there were 11 cards in there of people who had responded for my offer for the book. 

And I remember-- I still get the same feeling now, whenever I tell this story, I get the feeling of kind of this warm giddiness that comes over me because I knew, in that moment, that I would never make another cold call again. And I haven't. And it's been-- you know, I went in, instead of making the cold calls, I started calling people who had responded with the postcard. And every one of them knew why I was calling. They wanted the guide. They were happy to talk. And most of them were ready to start looking for a home. And it was such an amazing thing. So, it's been now the pursuit, for me, of learning and applying direct response to all kinds of businesses. So, it's been a fun adventure.

Tyson: So, Dean, we talk to a lot of attorneys. And it's really kind of interesting whenever we talk to them about direct response marketing. Some of them, sort of, they raised their nose at it, right, like they're too good for direct response marketing. So, I guess, what is your advice to those people that just are like, “No. I'm an attorney. I shouldn't do this. This is a service and we're a profession.” I guess, what do you have to say to those people? 

Dean: Well, they want to help people, right? I mean, that's really the thing, is I look at it that we're not trying to convince people to do something that they don't want to do. I mean, you're offering, often, as a beacon of hope, something that's going to help people do something that they desperately want to do or don't know how to do. And here's an opportunity for them to start the process. It's very easy to, when you get over this idea that you're doing it for you, and you realize that you're doing it for them, you know.

Jim: So, in that scenario, I mean, how does that then infuse your marketing? Like, how does that affect your message?

Dean: Well, let’s give a sense that the thing about doing advertising like that is that we're not running ads for your own benefit, right? We're doing it in a way to connect with people who have a need or a desire. It's not about just for the sake of getting your name out there. We're talking about starting from being outwardly focused on serving people in advance. That's really a good way of thinking of it, right, like you know.

Do you want to give me an example of a kind of business or a kind of attorney who might have aversion to advertising like that and we can turn into how they might think about it?

Jim: Sure. So, let's think about a nursing home plaintiff's lawyer, someone who represents when grandma gets sick or injured at the nursing home. And so, those-- 

Dean: How would those people-- typically, how would they find someone now? What would be kind of the-- are they thinking that they wouldn't do advertising like that, or how would they go about finding somebody? What would be the method that they would use now?

Jim: Well, I think they’d probably buy Google ads. They'd probably have a Facebook account and probably wouldn't spend much time on email, but they probably need to. And, I guess, they probably look for referrals from other lawyers.

Dean: Mm-hmm. And so, there's part of it, right? At all multi-faceted things, no matter who you're trying to influence, who you're trying to get your message in front of, you need to think about what's in it from their perspective. So, if you've got somebody who's searching on Google AdWords for something, the main thing that we look for is, “How can we offer somebody something that would be a baby step or the first step, something that we can just get engaged in a dialogue? It would turn an invisible prospect into a visible prospect, right?”

So, that often means focusing, not to convince people to choose you as their lawyer which is what a lot of any businesses do. They run ads trying to convince you to use them. But to think about it as, “How can we compel somebody who has a situation, where somebody’s been injured in a nursing home, or have been neglected, or abused, or whatever the situation is and think about what would be the information that they would be seeking, if they were looking for this?” It's not about me as this specialist in this kind of law, or it's not me, as the beneficiary, but me as a provider of information that that person is going to be seeking and probably having a hard time finding.

Like, I think if you if you were to-- I love-- 

My go-to thing for things like this is using a book as a lead generator, right? Now, because of this, you've got-- it's kind of a moving sidewalk. People who are seeking information revere the fact that there is a book that has information exactly on the topic they're looking for. So, for that to be available to them. Now, you've turned an invisible prospect, someone who you may not know-- you can't get a list of people who you suspect or have evidence that their loved one has been neglected or harmed in some way, but you've got the opportunity to identify that person by providing the information that somebody in that situation might be seeking. Does that make sense?

Jim: Yeah. And, Tyson, feel free to jump in. But, along the way, I was thinking maybe like, could you do a report like grading each nursing home and what to look out for? I mean, I don't know how far how far back into the past or how preemptively you want to do the book. Like, where do you want to set the book? Do you want to have the book like--

Dean: Right.

Jim: --A Son’s Guide to Picking A Nursing Home For His Mother, or is it--

Dean: Well, that’s a good--

But I think that if you're an attorney and you are looking to help, you help people who have a relative or loved one that has been damaged, or harmed, or abused, or whatever the situation is, I think you pick up there with what's the minimum thing, because starting way back like that, I'm starting at the beginning of, you know, how to pick the right one to avoid that is certainly a noble and a good thing to do as part of your educational marketing, things that you're going to do to communicate with people, but starting the process where your ideal prospect. So, we'll start with that person in mind, right? So, we talk about selecting a single target market. Meaning, the person who lives in this geographic area who has a loved one that-- you know, you start thinking about the scenarios of how you would articulate what's happened to them.

Like, most famously, a national one that's been going on for a long time now is the mesothelioma book. I never know how you pronounce it, misothelioma? Mesothelioma? You know, the big class action lawsuit that's ongoing all the time. They're offering now, over the years, it's been, if you think that you've been affected by asbestos or whatever it was, call now. You could be entitled to compensation.

But, now they start with the offer is a book. Now, you can get a free mesothelioma book with answers about it. That is a smart way of thinking about it.

Tyson: So, Dean, I want to ask you about this because-- I mean, if we're comparing it to like nursing home negligence cases and mesothelioma cases. Honestly, I don't know how to say it either, whether it’s mesothelium or miso-- but I do feel like those sales cycles are a little bit longer, so a book is sufficient.

Dean: Right.

Tyson: I think that's fantastic.

But let's compare that to like something like a car crash. Like, my firm does personal injury. So, we do a lot of car crashes. Where the after sales cycles to actually getting the client through the door and getting them to sign the contract is a fairly limited window. So, I'm not sure a book is the best way of doing it. So, are there other things that you might recommend?

Dean: Well, those are things that are--

Yeah, absolutely. And the reason that those-- like if you noticed, especially personal injury, those tend to be the-- you know, you can't get a list of someone who's going to be in a car accident next Tuesday. You can't buy a list of that. But, by the same token, anybody could be in an accident next Tuesday. Nobody needs a lawyer until they need a lawyer, right?

So, what the personal injury, that mindset, what they want to do is establish a brand in the minds of a population of people so that, when they are in a car accident, that their first choice-- I look at-- whenever I do things like this, I'm hyper aware of it, but I don't even know whether these guys are in Canada or in Florida, but my initial thought when you said that was my brain started immediately searching, who holds that position in my mind, and it said, “Hurt in a car? Call William Mattar.” That's where my brain went. And, you know, those things are there. That's the first time I've ever revealed that to anyone, ever. But it got triggered. Because you asked me or you said the words, “What do you do if somebody has been injured in a car?” So, my brain, the way it works is to do that.

I had something startling and amazing, at the same time, happen two years ago. I have a community of real estate agents that we coach and work with. And somebody in the forum said, “Does anybody know where I can get carpet replaced today because we've got a closing tomorrow and the painters just spilled paint on the carpet? It's ruined.” And my brain, without even thinking about it, started singing, “800-588-2300 Empire.” And I realized, kind of, as a marketer, I'm hyper vigilant about when marketing is working on me.

And so, I started thinking immediately, “Wow! That is something.” Like I realized, in that moment, that that message and that jingle had been smuggled into my brain without my permission and had been living there rent-free for my entire adult life. I know that was going on in the ‘80s for Empire Flooring. So, waiting for the moment that is triggered by somebody asking me where can I get carpet today.

And you start to pay attention to those things. Like when you just asked me about hurt in a car. Hurt in a car? Call William Mattar. Now, I know what to do. We brand it.

And so, this led me to my definition of brand now because everybody says, “Well, how important is a brand?” And a brand is important, if you use what I'm what I'm defining it as. What we want to establish, is we want to establish a brand in the mind of your potential clients. And the acronym that I use for brand is we want to establish a buying reflex affecting now-decisions. That's what a brand is. And it’s the only time that it matters.

The only time a brand matters, is to the extent that it shapes behavior in the moment that we want it to shape the behavior. And this is really-- I mean, when you start looking at the way these things play out. I look at Coca Cola, as an example. Somebody always points to Coca Cola as the shining example of the highest level of branding, most valuable brand. And it reminded me of something that I heard from Ray Dalio, the guy that wrote Principles, the big hedge fund billionaire. And he had a video that was explaining the markets, right? What is the market? And his explanation was that when somebody talks about the auto market, for instance, what they're really talking about is the aggregate, the total, of all of the microtransactions of one person selling one car to one other person, right? And the number of times that that happens, cumulatively, makes up the size of the auto market. So, we say, the US auto market, annually, is-- I don't know how many billions of dollars, whatever it is. And it's the same thing on a scaled down version as well.

Like when you look at Coca Cola. When we talk about what they've done is the scope of their brand is the widest of any other brand in the world, right? They have established that brand in the minds of billions of people all over the world. But that doesn't mean that, individually, there's not room for somebody else to establish a brand in a situation. Like Budweiser has established itself as the king of beers. They're the Coca Cola of beers in the US. 

But, I imagine-- and I don't know this to be true, but I imagine that somewhere like Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, there is a microbrewery that makes a Punxsutawney Pale Ale that, if you ask somebody, “What would you like to drink?” They'll say, “I'll have a Punxsutawney Pale.” And so, Punxsutawney Pale has established a buying reflex in the minds of many people in the limited region of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, where they are, that the same principles are in play. 

You know, we're all around the country. It's the scope of the brand but it's a win or lose game. There's no second place in this. You have to win the game. You can't be the third place personal injury or accident attorney.

Jim: So, I definitely want to get to the eight profit activators. I don't want to miss out on that. And I also want to make sure that we talk about the concept that you taught me which is that so many people focus on the now buyer that they forget about the people that decide six months later. But before we get, can you talk a little bit about how can one little lawyer, in one little town, build that brand so they are number one?

Dean: That's it. Is that, right now, Facebook is giving us the gift of being able to get yourself what I call 10-mile famous, right, where you can pick a 10 mile radius and you can broadcast television to that 10-mile radius population. Everybody in that population, they can know who you are. And what would be a good thing to do is to start and get yourself where you're educating people all about everything. You'd be entertaining and educating about what to do, if they're ever in an accident, or what kind of questions would people have about that. What would they want to know? How can you establish that brand - that buying reflex?

Do you guys have-- who holds that spot? Do you have situations in your mind that that reminded you of that? Like, if you were to think about-- 

Jim: Yeah. Every city has what people call the 800-pound gorilla, the lawyer like--

Dean: Yeah.

Jim: --in St. Louis, it's this firm called Brown & Crouppen. And they advertise everywhere. They're on every bus. They're on every web page. They do re-targeting. They have a YouTube channel. They're everywhere.

Dean: Yeah. Yes. And so, they're doing it at the scale, right, of the biggest-- they’re doing the entire area. So, there's something where part of the challenge, when you're doing things like that, is you have to pick your lane, right, that you can narrow to an audience that you can affordably build that, establish that brand.

So, that means one of the greatest things that I heard about this type of approach is that you have to make a choice of whether you want to convince 100% of the people 10% percent of the way, or convince 10% of the people 100% of the way. And so, it's a very expensive game to do something in a big city, to shout louder and be the most top of mind like that. But, if you're narrowing it to specific niches, or specific segments of the market, or specific geography, it's much easier for you.

Tyson: So, I'm so glad you said that, Dean, because I mean, doing the things like that Brown and Crouppen do, it's just a different business model, right? Like there are a lot of firms that don't want to be that because it just doesn't make sense, profit wise, because you--

Dean: Right.

Tyson: --don't make as much money. I don't even want to talk about that. I actually want to talk about something else.

Dean: Okay. 

Tyson: I want to shift gears for a second because--

Dean: Sure.

Tyson: --I want to get to the eight profit activators. But I want to ask you about-- I have a specific question.

Dean: Okay. 

Tyson: I'm going to go through them really quickly.

Dean: Okay. 

Tyson: So, I was about to rattle them off. Then, I'm going to ask you a question. So, here they are. And if I get them wrong, just tell me.

Dean: Okay. 

Tyson: But single target market, compel prospects to call. Number three is educate and motivate. Number four is present your unique offer. Five, dream-come-true experiences. Six, after sales service. Seven is lifetime relationships. And eight is orchestrate referrals.

So, here's my question and maybe you've gotten this before, but I don't know. But, which of these is the most important? And if they're all equally important, my follow up to that is, which one of those is your favorite?

Dean: Okay.

Well, the great thing is to put some kind of shape to them. So, the useful framework is to think of your business as three separate businesses which we call the before unit, the during unit, and the after unit. And the during unit is the part of your business that does the work. The part that, from the moment somebody says, “Can you help me with this matter?” and you open it up, you take them through the process, you resolve the matter, and they pay, and everything. You go on the way. And then, the next person comes. That's the during unit.

The before unit is, as a separate unit of your business, you want to think about it as a separate division whose only responsibility is to be a supplier to the during unit. So, you think about it as a separate business whose whole mission is to find people who want to do whatever it is you do and deliver them to the door saying, “I'd like you to help me with this.”

And then, your after unit is the unit of business that maintains a lifetime relationship with the people that you've already helped that already know you, like you, and trust you to continue to be their attorney or their whatever business relationship you have with them and to orchestrate referrals. 

So, basically, that divides those eight profit activators into the three units. So, the first four are all the before unit. Profit activator five and six, the deliver-a-dream-come-true experience provide after sales service. Those are the during unit. And profit activator seven and eight are all about the after unit. So that's how we kind of put a wrapper around them.

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Jim: So, talk about selecting a single target market. I think that's one thing that-- I mean, Tyson and I talk a lot about here, about niching down. Talk a little bit about that one.

Dean: Yeah, the biggest thing that I have to encourage people to do is to get out of this mindset that, most of the time, when you talk about selecting a single target market, people are resistant to limiting themselves because they want to keep the doors open but the thinking on that is that so they are selected. That's really the difference. 

What I'm talking about is you doing the selecting. You select a single target market. And I would say, at a time, because I want you to have as many as you can handle, right. I point to Procter & Gamble, as the best example of that, as a company that has 23 individual billion dollar plus brands, all operating independently under the Procter & Gamble umbrella, right? So, you think about your law firm, as the Procter & Gamble, that your nursing home litigation practice is one single target market, that you have your personal injury section, your business litigation, your immigration - whatever brands, whatever you want to serve, we select one of those and that immediately makes things clearer. 

All of these profit activators work in concert. They work in harmony. They kind of all are sequential. So, once you've selected a single target market of whatever your approach is. Then, profit activator two is, ”How do we get the people who have a need here to raise their hand? What's the minimum viable commitment that we can get somebody to make?”

So, seeking information is usually the best start, right? That's the starting point that everybody kind of begins with. And so, if you can get in front of somebody who's researching a situation, without trying to convince them, that they need to take a certain action, you're going to now be in position to help them because you've turned an invisible prospect into a visible prospect.

Tyson: So, Dean, sometimes these people that call you, sometimes they turn into dead leads, and Jim sort of hinted at this before. Sometimes the sales process takes a little bit of time. And you came up with this 9-word email. So, will you talk a little bit about that because for those of you who haven’t heard about it, it's an amazing thing. It's so simple. But will you talk about that?

Dean: Yeah. Well, so often, I bet any business, any situation, it really comes down to the fact that there are only two timeframes. There is now and not now. Those are the only two timeframes that we deal with when you're talking about lead conversion. And if somebody inquires about something, but they're not ready to take action on it yet, it's not now. And that's okay. It doesn't matter whether it's 60 days from now, or 90 days from now, or six months from now, or two years from now. It's, at some point, going to cross a line and be now. 

And so, I came up with this idea to send an email to-- if we take anybody who's been in business for more than 90 days now, if you go back and you look in your diaries, in your phone logs, in your emails, wherever people have inquired initially about something that didn't end up going anywhere, you've got the opportunity to reach back out to that person 90 days later and ask them, “Are you still interested in this? Or, are you still looking for this? Or, are you still--“ whatever it is that they've inquired about, for you? 

So, the one we’ve discovered it with or we started using it with was in a real estate situation. So, we sent out, “Are you still looking for a house in Georgetown?” And what's amazing, is that there's so much going on there because saying, “Are you still interested?” implies, rightly, that I know that you were interested at some point because we talked about it, or you inquired about it, or you downloaded my book about it. And it's hard to deny those things in their mind, right. That's who we're really talking to. So, when you send a message that is short, personal, and expecting a reply, difficult for people not to reply because our minds love to solve mysteries.

Jim: And that brings up the topic of just email, generally. And, you know, I've been lucky enough to take your email mastery course which I highly recommend to anybody thinking about getting into email marketing. I have a hard time being in our group convincing people that email is important still. Can you talk a little bit about the concept of the flagship email, and the PS, and why email’s still important? 

Dean: Sure.

Well, part of the thing is that we email here, we use email every day where it's not going anywhere. All the things that purport to be the replacement for email, funnily enough, when you go there-- I've start collecting things in my collection of all these ads that say, “email is dead,” and you go to click to find out what's the new thing. And it says, without any irony, “What's your email address and your name?” They want your name and your email so that they can send you information. And it's so funny that that's the way it works.

But we definitely have, as the sort of baseline through line of our online communications is our email address. We don't flip around from email address, to email address, to email address like we may jump around from whatever social media is in favor. But it's always this-- like, you're not going to change your cellphone number all the time. So, as a means of communicating, it's the killer app. I mean, you can send an email to someone, individually, and they can reply back and you can engage in the dialogue that way.

Now, we get a lot of email that is not personal, right? That's not important email. And the way that everybody gets email now, you know, 90% of us on our phones now is the primary inbox. The first time that people see emails that they have are usually on their iPhone or on their-- I don't even know who else make phones but iPhone. Do they still make other phones than iPhone? The-- 

Jim: Yeah. 

Tyson: It doesn’t matter.

Dean: Yeah, it doesn't matter. Yeah, that's the thing. I can't even think of the word. Sure, the Android phone. Yeah, yeah.

But the inbox is now a stream, right? We're just constantly streaming things into our inbox. I think most people have given up on the idea of inbox zero, where we're personally addressing every email that comes in. We're scrolling through and selecting the ones that we want to pay attention to. And I say to people, “Your mom has 100% open rate on her emails.” There's no deliverability problem. There's not anything like that. Your mom's emails are getting through and you're opening them. And if you look at how she communicates, your mom, and your friends, and your spouse, and your kids, whatever it is - people who you want them to email you, you see it and you reply, right. That's the way it is.

And so, the idea is to use email more for what it really is for, which is a very intimate form of personal communication. And so, that starts with the subject line. Most marketers are trying to use the email subject line as a headline. But if you look at-- you know, I always do this little exercise where I have people go to your phone and just scroll till you get to the last email that was just intended for you. And what you'll find is that the subject line of those emails are very different than the subject lines above, and below, and surrounding, from all the marketers who are trying to entice you, to tease you, cajole you, excite you into opening the email. But your mom is sending an email that says, “Dinner Thursday?”, with a question mark, something that is just overtly clear about what the inside of the email is.

And if you can get your emails to mirror, what we really want to use email for, which is one-to-one communication that's where the big breakthroughs are, right, is that nobody knows or cares that they're on a list. People read their email alone. And so, if you can communicate to them like you're only sending an email to them, that's the reel. That's the opportunity.

Tyson: So, Dean, this is a really good segue because I did not want to end this show without talking about More Cheese Less Whiskers.

Dean: Aha.

Tyson: And I think a lot of attorneys, whenever they're sending an email to a prospective client, they would probably want to lead with, “You know, I've got 50 years of experience. I've won so many jury trials. I've done that” which is the wrong way of doing it. So, will you talk about More Cheese Less Whiskers?

Dean: Yeah.

So that came from a conversation that Joe Polish and I had on the I Love Marketing podcast that I had read an article about why mice are used in all these psychological tests, right. And the answer is because they basically, motivationally, the same brain as we have. If you strip away all our cognitive stuff, the bigger bands of our brain, deep down, we basically have a mouse brain. 

And when I thought about that as a way of thinking about it that a mouse, if you really think about it, has a pretty simple life. They've got two prime directives. Number one, get cheese. And number two, avoid cats. That's really the whole game if you're a mouse - get cheese, avoid cats. So, it's wired in them.

Metaphorically, the cheese is the good stuff. We're seeking good stuff - the things we want and desire. And avoiding cats is about avoiding the bad things, right. We don't want to get ripped off. We don't want to lose money. We don't want to be embarrassed. We don't want to have anything bad happen to us - all the negative things.

And so, when we can tailor our approach to things, when we're communicating with people, is we want to steer our communications to be more cheese and less whiskers. And whiskers being any of the bad stuff, right, the things. We want to make sure that everything about them is conveying that this is the good thing that you want and that people feel safe in communicating with us.

Jim: All right, Dean, so we're getting close to the end of our time. And like I said, at the start of the show, I've been really lucky. You know, I learned about marketing by listening to the first 50 episodes of I Love Marketing. I think it's like a masterclass in marketing, so I totally encourage people to do that.

I also took your email mastery course. I've also done two books, two of your 90-minute books. So, that's a great resource for people if you want to have a good lead magnet. And Dean can probably talk a little bit about his theory on books, and book covers, and titles. 

But I also have the distinction of being the first guest ever on the More Cheese Less Whiskers Podcast. So, if you want to--

Dean: That’s right, episode number one.

Jim: Yeah, if you want to listen to Dean dish out advice to a lawyer who's sort of finding his way, that's a great episode and a great resource.

Here's a question that I've never thought of though, what's the best way to start off if somebody wants to get guidance or to work with you, Dean? What's the best thing for people to do?

Dean: Well, the best thing to do would be to just go to deanjackson.com. And the first thing on the top of the page is an opportunity to download the 8-Profit Activators book, the Breakthrough DNA book, that explains the eight profit activators that we talked about, and that will put somebody in my world and will be able to connect with them. I send out every week, emails that are educational, all short 300- to 500-word articles that all come from things that we've said on our podcast. So, it's a good place to start the process and to observe-- just to even just observe what happens, how email can make a difference in the way you feel kind of thing because what you're going to notice about the emails that I send is that you're going to look forward to getting them and you know that, when you open it up, it's more cheese.

It's just a different way of thinking about something. It's an educational piece about something. It's to stimulate a thought about something marketing-wise. And that's a good way to start the relationship. That's how I always look at it. 

I've been doing this for a long, long time and I send out-- I forget how many. I think we're closing in or just over 200 episodes of More Cheese Less Whiskers now. So, lots of examples, lots of different types of businesses that we've been able to help. And happy to have anybody as a guest on that podcast. That's the whole point of it is helping one business at a time apply the eight profit activators to their business.

Tyson: I absolutely love it, Dean. This has just been amazing for both me and Jim. So, thank you so much.

I do need to wrap things up. And before I do though I want to remind everyone to go to the Facebook group, get involved there. Join us at Maximum Lawyer Guild. Go to maximumlawyer.com/theguild.

Jimmy, what's your hack of the week?

Jim: So, Gary Vaynerchuk talks all the time about don't create content, just document what you're doing. And what Dean does with the More Cheese Less Whiskers Podcast is exactly what he does in his consulting. So, I forgot to mention that I'm also a consulting client of Dean's and I've gotten time to spend with Dean going over how to improve things at the Hacking Law Practice. 

So, if you listen to More Cheese Less Whiskers, you'll thereby see how Dean's mind works. And I think that point he made about observing is good because it's definitely a different way of looking at things. And the one thing I really like about working with Dean, too, is when you call him, he's sitting on his comfy chair with his notebook. And he says it's for hatching evil schemes.

Dean: That’s right.

Jim: And, as strange as it sounds, lawyers don't spend enough time sitting around thinking about hatching evil schemes. They don't pause enough. We're just rushing so much. So, the thing that Dean's taught me, I think, more than anything, is just taking a step back and looking at things in sort of a slightly different way. So, my hack would be to get on the More Cheese Less Whiskers, listen in, so you can figure out how Dean works.

Dean: That's good. I just realized. Hacking, your name is a great name for the hack of the day. I've been slow but I just got that now, yeah. 

Tyson: I think it caused some problems with SEO-wise. Didn't it, Jimmy, earlier in your career, trying to get your website to run, wasn’t that a problem?

Jim: Yeah, criminals think that I can help them when they've been arrested for computer hacking? 

Dean: Oh, my goodness. The Hacking Law Practice. It’s all in the inflection.

Tyson: I love it.

Dean: It's all in the inflection. That's it. Yeah. 

Tyson: So, Dean, we always ask our guests to give a tip or a hack. So, do you have a tip or a hack for us?

Dean: Wow. I'm going to give a directive because we’ve talked about the 9-word email and I think that anybody-- don't just listen and think about that as something. I'm going to challenge everybody to look back, literally, look in your phone, look in your email, look in your desk drawers, look in the notebooks or calendars that you had from 90 days or more away, gather everybody up and just send out an email that says, “Are you still interested in--" whatever it is and don't say anything else, just send that, and watch what happens. That's going to be my directive.

Jim: It'll work. I've gotten cases out of that. And Dean has a buddy who sold a yacht that way. So, it's definitely--

Dean: That’s right. The largest to date, $120-million yacht. That's right.

Tyson: And I got to benefit from Jim because he keeps telling me everything he learns whenever he takes one of your courses, and I sent one out on automated email to a bunch of traffic ticket clients that I got and I got cases out of that, too. So, very, very simple to do. It’s fantastic.

Dean: Awesome.

Tyson: I'm going to give you another pitch because we had Stuart Bell on the podcast as well. And I know that you have 90 minutes. It's the 90minutebooks.com. I just want to make sure we do everything we can to help promote you. So, if you're interested in creating a book, they've got a very streamlined way of doing it. If you don't know anything about it, check out our podcast with Stuart Bell. He talked about 90 minute books quite a bit. But, if you want to write your own book, check out 90minutebooks.com and they can help you out.

Dean, thank you so much for coming on, man. This is so fantastic.

Dean: This is so great.

Tyson: We really, really appreciate it.

Dean: Thank you, guys.

Jim: Thanks, Dean.

Tyson: We really appreciate it.

Dean: Okay, we'll talk to you soon.

Tyson: See you, guys.

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