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EP77: B2B or B2C: It’s All About Gaining Trust

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תוכן מסופק על ידי ConnectAndSell. כל תוכן הפודקאסטים כולל פרקים, גרפיקה ותיאורי פודקאסטים מועלים ומסופקים ישירות על ידי ConnectAndSell או שותף פלטפורמת הפודקאסט שלו. אם אתה מאמין שמישהו משתמש ביצירה שלך המוגנת בזכויות יוצרים ללא רשותך, אתה יכול לעקוב אחר התהליך המתואר כאן https://he.player.fm/legal.

Up to now, our Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank, have used this podcast as a platform addressing the topic of how to dominate B2B markets. But today, the guys are interviewing Jeff Lerner, founder, and CEO of Entre Institute, about the process he employs to dominate a B2C market. By placing daily video messages on social media about himself, his life, and his goal to help people improve their lives, Jeff proves to his prospects that he is a person they can identify with and, eventually, a person they can trust. It’s not as quick as a cold call: Jeff says it takes about six months of exposure to his messages before skepticism is diminished in his prospects’ minds and they trust him enough to be open to what his company offers.

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Chris compares the arc of Jeff’s social media campaign with that of a salesperson who makes cold calls, including the ambush of catching a prospect unaware with an unscheduled call — which is very much like what Jeff does when his videos pop up on social media, essentially ambushing his potential buyers and creating instant mistrust. Jeff explains that the more complex the problem is that you’re trying to solve for your prospects, the more mistrust there is for you to overcome. And, as he says, “You don’t build trust with knowledge or technical competence. You build it emotionally, empathetically.” Listen in while Chris, Corey, and Jeff discover more similarities between dominating business and consumer markets in this Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “B2B or B2C: It’s All About Gaining Trust.”

About Our Guest

Jeff Lerner is CEO and founder of Entre Institute, which provides business training, inspiration, and personal support through videos, messaging, online workshops, and one-on-one interaction for entrepreneurs who want to create online businesses and awesome lives.

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This is the full transcript for this episode:

https://mcdn.podbean.com/mf/web/jsn8u2/mdg-20210422-lerner-2-time-50-15.mp3

Chris Beall (02:18):

All right, everybody. We got to overcome the shock of it being me, Chris Beall on Market Dominance Guys. I'm CEO of ConnectAndSell. I'm here with Jeff Lerner, who is the founder CEO of Entre Learning Systems. Broke jazz musicians done $250 million in sales. I don't know, I can't keep track and things go up into the [inaudible 00:02:42] all you can do is just kind of whip your head up and see if you can keep your eyes going. Jeff, welcome to the show.

Jeff Lerner (02:46):

Thanks Chris. Excited to be here. We can parse those numbers, but I'm grateful for the intro for sure.

Chris Beall (02:52):

Well, I tell you what, every once in a while I tell people about a deal I did back in the day and I know it was a hundred and twenty million, but when other people tell the story, it becomes 150, 180. Sometimes you just got to go with it. Just got to go with it.

Jeff Lerner (03:06):

I just have to say exits, run rates. They're basically all fishing stories.

Chris Beall (03:11):

Yeah. Oh God. Yes, yes, yes, yes. I caught a fish that was this big. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, Jeff was kind enough to have me on his podcast and it was spectacular. It was a ton of fun. We kept finding out all these bizarre things that we had in common. It got weirder and weirder and weirder in a good way. I mean, it really did. After a while, we're like, "Really? Not one more thing? You got to be kidding me." Right? So he's done me now, a double kindness coming on and let's let Corey in the room here. Here comes Corey Frank. Corey Frank is in the room. He's looking good. He's he's running a real business to. Corey, we're already on. We're already running. So I want to introduce you to Jeff Lerner.

Corey Frank (03:59):

Jeff, how are you?

Jeff Lerner (04:00):

Hey Corey. Nice to meet you, man. How are you?

Corey Frank (04:02):

Fantastic. Last day of the month. Last day of the quarter. Always good.

Jeff Lerner (04:05):

Yes, that's right. Yeah. We're all trying to break records, right?

Corey Frank (04:09):

Indeed.

Chris Beall (04:10):

So Jeff founded and runs Entre education services? I can never remember things.

Jeff Lerner (04:17):

Entre Institute.

Chris Beall (04:18):

Entre Institute. I love it. Entre Institute. And Corey runs something called Youngblood. I can't even say it because when I get to the word blood, I realize everybody's listening. Youngblood Works and it's one of those names you have to parse it and go, is it that the Youngblood Works or that the Youngblood Works or whatever, but he is bringing a whole new way of making new business happen for companies, especially in cybersecurity, but for others. And it's pretty magical stuff. So Corey is, I believe in Phoenix right now it's our Scottsdale. It looks familiar.

Corey Frank (04:54):

We have another store's Location in Phoenix, Arizona. That's correct.

Chris Beall (04:57):

An undisclosed location.

Corey Frank (04:58):

[inaudible 00:04:58].

Chris Beall (05:00):

So what we're going to talk about today is Corey, believe it or not, we always talk about B2B. And we talk about how to dominate B2B markets by using a conversation first approach. And I talk to people about this regularly, as do you. And usually we get this raised eyebrow, like what do you mean conversation first approach? And then when we talk about building trust through conversations and harvesting the trust as you go to market in order to create massive competitive advantage and lower the friction and cost of acquiring customers until finally you're dominating that market.

Chris Beall (05:31):

When we talk about that, people think that's even weirder because they think you've got to talk value in order to get trust. But we believe that you should offer value and in a cold call, that value is, "I'll go away, if you let me say 27 seconds worth of stuff." In order to instantly get trust and then go from trust toward curiosity and from curiosity, ultimately to the opportunity to offer somebody value. We have here with us today somebody, in the form of Jeff, who's done this and B2C. You don't know anything about B2C, right?

Corey Frank (06:05):

I've purchased something on the internet in my past, at least once. Yes. That's about it.

Chris Beall (06:10):

Okay. All right. All right. Well I know-

Corey Frank (06:12):

[inaudible 00:06:12].

Chris Beall (06:15):

I don't know a great deal about it either. If you asked me to run a B2C business, I would figure out a second letter, other than C. I'd run B to F or B to Q or something like that because I'm a clueless consumer. And I watched Jeff as we were getting ready for the show, go in and remake the credentials for an e-commerce site so somebody who's helping him with it could do her job. And I would just look at it like a cow looks at an oncoming train. So I got an opening question for Jeff and then Corey, we're going to let you take it away because this is about as much prep as you ever get.

Chris Beall (06:51):

So Jeff just high level you told me that you use conversation first approach to dominate a B2C market. I would contend that's impossible because how could you get all the conversations and wouldn't you go broke in the meantime and all that. So first of all, did that idea come to you? Like I'm going to do it this way or I'm so brilliant. I figured out this way to do it, or was it something that you started doing and then went, "Holy moly, this actually is the right way to do it." Or what? How'd you get going with this incorrect model?

Jeff Lerner (07:25):

It was kind of a combination of all three options. So I'll say D all of the above, but I have to focus on the fact that there was an element of presupposition that this approach would work, how it would work, how it would unfold, what it would even end up working for that kind of evolved through the process and through the conversations and through the intelligence and feedback gathering of the conversations. So for example, when it started, it wasn't Entre Institute, it was just Jeff knowing that he knew some stuff. And then at some point he wanted to figure out how to A, get what he knew to a large number of people. And obviously to do that in any sustainable way, it means to build a for-profit business out of it so that it can keep going and keep reaching more people.

Jeff Lerner (08:14):

So it started as just like, "Hey, I know some things that a lot of people could benefit from, and I want to scale the message and monetize the message so that I can keep scaling the message over time." And I know that the best way to start that is just start talking. And start sharing and start giving value. Obviously, when you're talking conversations B2C on mass, it's different than B2B conversations where you think of having a dialogue with a purchasing manager at a big logistics company, or I guess logistics companies don't do purchasing so that was a bad example, but you know what I mean. A LinkedIn chat. For me, a conversation was Facebook video, comment thread, 600 comments, me taking the time to respond to every comment that was worth responding to, and maybe having 35 conversations in a feed where everybody can see it.

Jeff Lerner (09:05):

So indirectly, it becomes a conversation with a hundred thousand people that have all seen the video by proxy of the 35 people in the comments. So I did that. Basically, I knew that I knew how to go build real businesses on the internet. I'd been doing it at that time for 10 years. And I have a good story which helps drive conversations. I had gone from 10 years prior to that 2008, I was a broke out of work, jazz musician, half a million dollars in debt from a couple sales restaurant businesses that we're all on borrowed money that they never should have given me the loan in the first place, except it was 2006 and the banks were insane. They'd loan, a 27 year old kid, 400 grand to hang himself with, but I had paid off all that debt. I'd gone online in 2008. I paid off all that debt.

Jeff Lerner (09:54):

At that point, I had generated close to about 50 million bucks just with total online businesses, working from home on a laptop or whatever. And they were all businesses you can start with relatively low startup capital. And I'm like, "I know that this stuff would change most people's lives." Most people are stuck in a job. They toil. They don't get what they love. They don't love what they get. What if everybody knew what I knew? So I started putting information out to market about the business side of it, but also I didn't want to get caught up in the perception of being another one of these talking head, internet business, make money online, scammy guru, people that have rented Lamborghini's and Airbnb mansions that they stay in for three days while they shoot their ad video. And I didn't want to be one of those guys.

Jeff Lerner (10:41):

So I really wanted to focus on a more holistic conversation and I'm married. I'm a dad. I coach kids basketball team. My favorite thing in the world is just to play with my kids. And I work out a lot, I'm really into health and fitness. I go to a lot of therapies. So I'm real into communication dynamics and healthy relationships. And I wanted to fold all of that into a conversation about the new digital economy and these business models and these business tools that are available to everyone, where you can learn how to build a funnel, create a decent offer, find a target audience, pair those three things together, throw some money at it, grow your brand and your message inside of it.

Jeff Lerner (11:23):

If you have something to say, and you have value to offer, you can build a hell of a business. That model is out there. There's 7.7 billion people in the world. And I think four billion of them have internet access. And that model is available to all four billion of those. And yet 96% of people self report dissatisfaction in their job. 86% of people report dissatisfaction in their lives. And I'm like, "Well, screw the doctors. I'm the one with the prescription. They can fix all these problems." So I just started giving the value. Here's how I built my online business. Here's how having an online business allows me to go to therapy at two o'clock in the afternoon with my wife so we can learn to communicate better because I don't have to ask for time off or be in trouble because I left work. And here's how my online business allows me to pay for healthy prepared meals. Facilitates a whole life, a whole quality of life, not just a big fat bank account.

Jeff Lerner (12:13):

And that's the conversation that I struck up on the internet. And I was just putting out video after video, after video saying, "Hey, my name's Jeff Lerner. You can look me up online. Here's a picture of my house. I'm a real guy. I'm not trying to sell you anything. I just truly believe that what I know can change the world and it can change your world. Let me know if you have any questions." And over the course of the year, I put out between Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, I put out probably close to a thousand videos or re edited videos for the different platforms and stuff. Probably about three or 400 source videos of just me giving away free value. After a year of doing that, I had thousands of conversations. I had millions of people engage with my content, a re-targetable audience on Facebook of two million people that were like, "Man, I like this Jeff guy. He's really trying to help. He's not trying to sell me anything."

Speaker 5 (13:36):

Before ConnectAndSell, we had to deal with everything that everybody else has to deal with. Cold calls, gatekeepers, automated phone trees, dial by name directories. So using ConnectAndSell, instead of having two conversations an hour, we're having 10 conversations an hour, everybody's making money. So with that, we sell our lives cut easier, helped us increase our production by 70% because I don't have to do all this manual work.

Speaker 6 (14:04):

Now my reps can actually speak to more real conversations, more real customer calls and more real money. Yeah, we made money. We made seven figures off of that test drive. A sales rep, uploads the list, presses play they're connected to the customer. It is completely easy, effortless with no dialing. Do yourself a favor call ConnectAndSell and watch the magic happen.

Announcer (14:36):

And we're back with Corey and Chris.

Jeff Lerner (14:38):

They're like, "Hey, do you have a course I can by." Or like, "Hey, is there any way I can give you money to get more from you?" And it's like-

Corey Frank (14:48):

How long-

Jeff Lerner (14:48):

Well, speak of the devil. Yeah? Go ahead.

Corey Frank (14:48):

How long does that process take do you see to build that trust and ameliorate that fear?

Jeff Lerner (14:58):

It took me-

Corey Frank (14:59):

Because in the B2B world, we know what it is, but in your B2C experience, how long does that take?

Jeff Lerner (15:03):

It took me six months I would say of showing up every day to go from people ignoring me to people being annoyed by me, to people being intrigued by me, to people listening, but skeptical of me and eventually people listening to me and wanting it to be true. And then eventually winning them over that I'm not going to go away and I'm too transparent to be made up. So now you can finally trust and that was six steps I just gave you it was probably about one per month. I spent a month in obscurity and then the next month I just spent annoying people, but I kept going.

Corey Frank (15:46):

So once you capture that name or that prospect or that ICP, that you identify, you build a relationship, whatever your cadence is, weekly or monthly in this case.

Jeff Lerner (16:00):

Daily. Daily was mine.

Corey Frank (16:01):

Daily, daily. And a lot of it is growing value up front to go through those six steps of annoyance and acceptance and trust.

Jeff Lerner (16:11):

And it's got to be daily. I think probably one of the differences between B2C is B2C could also be called business the chaos or business declutter or business to crowd. If you want to stand out in the crowd, you're going to have a high quantity of content for the average person that you're trying to reach to see you the seven times in their Facebook feed, that it takes to create a memorable imprint there's probably a hundred million impressions that have gone through that feed that you have to pop up into. It just takes a lot more quantity. I used to do inbound marketing for B2B clients when I had an agency. And that was much more quality over quantity. I think with B2C I don't want to say quantity over quality, but I would say quality without quantity is almost useless.

Corey Frank (16:59):

Have you discovered any data or the biophysiology of why it takes that long on that process? Obviously some of them when you're trying to cast a wide net and I absolutely want a better life. Absolutely, I want to be better looking and thinner and more in shape and have a relationship and financial independence. So you may get folks where just the intersectionality of pay opportunity and preparedness like you got me at the right time. My boss just pissed on me. My cat pissed on everything, but for a person who's at rest, who you need to stimulate in a direction of moving toward your ultimate call to action, is it because it's just a by-product of so much noise in the universe now? And so many folks adopting this, but from a data perspective, why should it take so long on that B2C process?

Jeff Lerner (17:53):

It's a function of a few things. One, it is just the pure volume of content and messaging. I mean, I forget the statistics, but I think people are exposed four million marketing messages a day now something like completely mind blowing. And so for you to claim any tiny, memorable fraction of those total messages, those total impressions, you just got to show up a lot. Plus skepticism is at an all time high. And this goes with the high volume of marketing messages, the barrier to entry to getting your message out to someone online. And I would create one of these videos and this is an important part of the process to understand.

Jeff Lerner (18:32):

I wouldn't just post it on my profile or even just post it on my page because in late 2018, when I was doing this, the organic reach of Facebook page content had already started to fall dramatically. Facebook isn't going to do you any favors just distributing your business related content for free. So I would throw anywhere from 25 to maybe a hundred, occasionally 200 if I felt really confident in the video, dollars' worth of what they call a boost on each of these videos so that I could target a segment of the cold market to make sure they saw my videos. And so this was further data. Let's say I shot four videos that were roughly on the same subject or even the same video. I could boost it four different times. I could say target Tony Robbins audience, target Gary Vaynerchuks audience, target men over 45, target women under 35, whatever combination of demographics and interests I wanted to target I could, that was part of the intelligence gathering.

Jeff Lerner (19:28):

But it's just hard and skepticisms at all time highs so you got to win them over. And a lot of it is just the confidence. If you think about statistics, the more time something occurs, the more confidence you place in it as not just an anomaly. And there's kind of a similar effect online where not just the more times they see you, but the more different messages they see from you, the more backgrounds they see you in, the more locations they see you in, the more other people they see you with. Here's a video with me and my daughter. Here's a video of me and my wife out driving in the car. Here's me at the gym. It builds this case of, "Okay, this must be real." Nobody has the budget to fabricate an entire life with all these different facets.

Corey Frank (20:14):

Well, there's a great book, Culture Code by Daniel Coyle.

Jeff Lerner (20:17):

I just bought it. I haven't read it, but I just bought it.

Corey Frank (20:19):

It's phenomenal. And I think certainly talking with you, I think you'd agree Chris with Jeff is that there's certain folks who are just unconscious competence who probably do a lot of these things by their nature, by their intuitiveness, by their kind of at rest net we'll say, I think you probably fit into that. But Coyle talks about what are the imprints of a great organization, a great team, it could be a great family, marriage, et cetera. And you identified a couple of them probably. And as you said you didn't read the book yet, right? Number one is it's usually this concept of building safety. Can you build safety that it's safe to talk to me? And Chris we'll talk about this a little bit when we get your impression of the intro and how we ameliorate fear but also throw enough intrigue and humor and curiosity intention in there because they got to make a tough decision, but building safety and bearing vulnerability, which snuffs out the skepticism.

Corey Frank (21:16):

The more vulnerable and open I am, "Hey, listen, I'm just a real guy, flesh and blood looking at, I don't have a six pack, but I'm getting there." My life's not perfect, but it's getting there. And then the third is establishing purpose, a mission, a drive, versus a lot of folks being in this, maybe home of complacency in their life, drifting from port to port, as Uncle Zig would say like a life without a rudder and you just hope that you drift into a port of prosperity.

Corey Frank (21:42):

So with that, and again, probably because you've had so many repetitions doing this in a B2C world different than Chris and I come from where we don't have as big of as you do, [inaudible 00:21:55] certainly with many of the clients that Chris and I deal with, we have [inaudible 00:22:00] in the hundreds or thousands, not in the millions or so. But isn't that fascinating, Chris, with that there are some similarities with Jeff is doing even unconsciously to kind of build these great teams. But in your case, you are the brand and they're buying you and what you're about. What do you think about that Chris what Jeff has shared with us?

Chris Beall (22:23):

Well, it's interesting. I mean, Jeff, what you described that six step process is oddly analogous to a process that takes about 30, 40 seconds that we teach people to do on a cold call. You had to do it over six months because of the nature of the beast, because you're cold calls so to speak is to your whole audience. It's not to one person or another person, another person you're cold calling your entire audience and you need to get them-

Jeff Lerner (22:51):

I'm interrupting them as bad as any vocal, for sure.

Chris Beall (22:54):

Exactly. And it's interesting that interrupt thing, you're really ambushing, and I'll even go beyond that. They didn't agree in advance that they were going to see your video pop-up or whatever, right? So there's this ambush and the ambush psychology the way you played it forward is like a six month long cold call and it makes sense it would be six months long because you're doing it with millions of people whereas when we teach cold calling, we go, "Okay, I'll provide you with the ambush capabilities. Your Facebook is our connect and sell." So on Facebook, you get something to jump up in front of somebody. Your boost is like somebody paying us in order to push a button and talk to somebody, that's their boost. And then your opening move that you're making ends up being inevitable annoyance first, you're just showing up and then being ignored.

Chris Beall (23:51):

And then annoyance happens, right? Why are they annoyed? Well, they're kind of afraid of you because they think you're going to sell them something. So it's annoyance that a guy who I'm afraid of he's going to sell me something. I can see him but is he real, he could be fake. He's a visible stranger, but he might as well be invisible because I am not sure he ain't fake. It could be something else. And so, this is really a shock to me. You're taking them down a path. So we take folks down this journey, when you ambush somebody, you immediately establish trust because they start in a place of fear. So the way you establish trust is basically you own up to not just annoying them, but scaring them.

Chris Beall (24:35):

I know I'm an interruption. Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called? And that's where I'm going to solve a problem that you have. And you're solving a problem they have, which is a problem of hope. Their problem is 98% down to 87% of too whatever it is, depending on how you look at it. I've kind of given up, but they don't want to give up. They don't want to not like their job. They don't want to not like their life. They want hope. So you're offering them hope. And from that, I think they're going to get some trust. We're offering them a way out of their current trap. Their current trap is I just ambushed you and you want me to go away and I'm going to offer you certainty that I'll go away.

Chris Beall (25:21):

That's my offer. I will go away. Certainly. And I'll tell you how certain. I'll go away in 27 seconds. All you have to do is let me tell you why I called. And then I'm gone. And by going so early to trust in your case two months and our case seven seconds, and it probably [inaudible 00:25:41]. Here's a guess. Corey, if you were to take just him divided by your Tam or my Tam and count, and then multiply it by seven seconds, I think you get two months.

Jeff Lerner (25:55):

It's probably right.

Chris Beall (25:59):

I'm killing myself here. This is the unified field theory of business. It just happened.

Jeff Lerner (26:06):

Yeah. The other nuance I want to add to what you said I think it's important for everyone to understand, because I think it would apply B2B or B2C is the more complex the problem is that you're trying to solve the more mistrust there is for you to overcome, which means the longer the opening salvo to build it needs to take. And here's what I mean. If you're calling a business and their problem is they have dirty water in the holding tank because they have a [inaudible 00:26:42] installed that's made of the wrong material. You can call. And in like three seconds, you can build trust by saying, "Hey, I heard you have dirty water in your tank. Let me guess you have one of those porous silicone netting wraps. And I'm here to tell you about the non porous silicone netting wrap that'll eliminate dirt in your groundwater."

Jeff Lerner (27:03):

Well, boom, you got them because it was such a specific problem with such a specific solution. For me, I'm going out to millions of people saying, "So you're not totally stoked about your life." Could be your marriage, could be your health, could be your job, could be your money, turned out it could have been COVID, could be your boss is an asshole, it's such a vague and multifaceted problem that it would take me a month to even demonstrate that I have enough multi-dimensional competence to even speak to them and potentially relate to whatever their particular subset of all those issues actually is. And half the time the reason people think they're not happy, isn't even why they're really unhappy. You see what I mean? It's just a way completely different obstacles set to overcome.

Jeff Lerner (27:53):

And you nailed it though. This is, I think goes to a lot of sales mistakes. You don't build trust with knowledge or technical competence. You build it emotional. You build it limbically and empathetically with people. You can build more trust in a conversation with a guy commiserating with them about how his kid wants to play little league, but is scared because he doesn't think he's good at sports. And you have a shared experience and you can speak to that experience as a father, that's going to build more trust with some high level CEO, than expounding on the technical issue he's dealing with in his business.

Corey Frank (28:35):

Do you find Jeff that as you've tested these messages, because you are selling, you're selling a better life. And as you had said, when you asked 10 people, what is a better life mean? They may have different answers. So you have to sell kind of abstractly, but also big enough and specific enough where there's enough of a honeypot to want to learn more, walk us through that journey of how you tested different messages, because you can't go, "Hey, 10X man." Right? Sometimes that works for some folks, but some are like, "10X? That's too concentrated. I'm happy with 1.5X." How do you go through that in a B2C world? Because you're dealing with so much more volume and your data probably comes at you much faster than it would for Chris or I in the B2B world.

Jeff Lerner (29:27):

Yeah. And I didn't think about it in these terms in the beginning, but I can say based on how it unfolded and now looking back, this is exactly what I think the right answer is. B2C is all about controlling language and creating meaning in words, words that mean something to you. You need those words to become memes, packets of information, to convey complex ideas. And somebody at some point had to create the word streaming. Now if we go on and we say, "We're the world's fastest streaming service." That's a whole set of information bundled in the word streaming. But somebody had to create that understanding across culture.

Jeff Lerner (30:12):

So for me, I had to, and this happened again organically because at first I was. I was jumping all around trying to find my messaging, trying to find my consistent group, because I'm talking relationship dynamics and all these theories that I'm pulling from things I've studied. Positive discipline with my kids, responsive listening with my wife, things I learned from Gottman at The Love Lab things I learned from Tony Robbins and Unleash the Power Within things I learned from Zig Ziglar on old YouTube videos. And it becomes this hodgepodge of accumulated wisdom, the Six Principles of Persuasion from Robert Cialdini so from that cloud had to emerge my vernacular, my vocabulary that people could start to attach to just like a logo or a brand conjures up feelings and a robust understanding of something.

Jeff Lerner (31:00):

When you're just a guy talking on the internet, you're not a logo. You're not a brand. You have to find words that can accomplish the same thing. And what I ultimately honed in on and this is it. If somebody said, Jeff, to what would you attribute the fact that in the last three years, you've sold over 130,000 paying courses, paid students enrolled into your school. That's not really a school, but Entre Institute. You're the fastest growing. And one of the largest private education companies in the world, and less than three years ago, you were an unknown dad in a small town in Southern Utah, driving around in your car, shooting videos on your cell phone. How did you do that? I would say, it's this. I found one really powerful mnemonic theme that everybody resonated with, which is if you want to have an awesome life. My first brand wasn't Entre Institute, it was actually School of Awesome. Basically I honed in on a set of words, the key to an awesome life is a commitment to excellence.

Jeff Lerner (32:04):

It's not about money. It's not about love. It's not about good luck, it's not about a six pack. It's about excellence because progress is happiness and excellence will drive human system progress So you want to have an awesome life. You have to be committed to excellence, but excellence is a big, scary word for a lot of people. So what we're going to do is we're going to chunk it into the three PS of excellence. And this becomes a heuristic that you can apply to every second of your life to make sure that you're either doing something that serves you or you're doing something that subtracts from your goals and there shall never again be a middle ground between those two poles.

Jeff Lerner (32:41):

The three P's are, is what I'm doing right now, productive of physical excellence, personal excellence, or professional excellence in my life. If yes, keep doing it. Do more of it. If no, stop doing it, do something that is. Period at the end. Do that now you'll have a better life a year from now. You can thank me later. I didn't even try to sell you anything. And again, it took me probably 200 conversations before I converged around that core idea. But once I had it, then I could start riffing in variations on a theme from there. Every conversation I've had since then, maybe two and a half years ago, it's been a variation on that same beam. And now I have people posting, "Yo, yo, my three Ps [inaudible 00:33:22]. I worked out this morning. I took my daughter out for lunch and I made $4,500 in my online business." Three Ps, woo-hoo. It just created a rallying cry around that concept. But without that, you're just noise.

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תוכן מסופק על ידי ConnectAndSell. כל תוכן הפודקאסטים כולל פרקים, גרפיקה ותיאורי פודקאסטים מועלים ומסופקים ישירות על ידי ConnectAndSell או שותף פלטפורמת הפודקאסט שלו. אם אתה מאמין שמישהו משתמש ביצירה שלך המוגנת בזכויות יוצרים ללא רשותך, אתה יכול לעקוב אחר התהליך המתואר כאן https://he.player.fm/legal.

Up to now, our Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank, have used this podcast as a platform addressing the topic of how to dominate B2B markets. But today, the guys are interviewing Jeff Lerner, founder, and CEO of Entre Institute, about the process he employs to dominate a B2C market. By placing daily video messages on social media about himself, his life, and his goal to help people improve their lives, Jeff proves to his prospects that he is a person they can identify with and, eventually, a person they can trust. It’s not as quick as a cold call: Jeff says it takes about six months of exposure to his messages before skepticism is diminished in his prospects’ minds and they trust him enough to be open to what his company offers.

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Chris compares the arc of Jeff’s social media campaign with that of a salesperson who makes cold calls, including the ambush of catching a prospect unaware with an unscheduled call — which is very much like what Jeff does when his videos pop up on social media, essentially ambushing his potential buyers and creating instant mistrust. Jeff explains that the more complex the problem is that you’re trying to solve for your prospects, the more mistrust there is for you to overcome. And, as he says, “You don’t build trust with knowledge or technical competence. You build it emotionally, empathetically.” Listen in while Chris, Corey, and Jeff discover more similarities between dominating business and consumer markets in this Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “B2B or B2C: It’s All About Gaining Trust.”

About Our Guest

Jeff Lerner is CEO and founder of Entre Institute, which provides business training, inspiration, and personal support through videos, messaging, online workshops, and one-on-one interaction for entrepreneurs who want to create online businesses and awesome lives.

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This is the full transcript for this episode:

https://mcdn.podbean.com/mf/web/jsn8u2/mdg-20210422-lerner-2-time-50-15.mp3

Chris Beall (02:18):

All right, everybody. We got to overcome the shock of it being me, Chris Beall on Market Dominance Guys. I'm CEO of ConnectAndSell. I'm here with Jeff Lerner, who is the founder CEO of Entre Learning Systems. Broke jazz musicians done $250 million in sales. I don't know, I can't keep track and things go up into the [inaudible 00:02:42] all you can do is just kind of whip your head up and see if you can keep your eyes going. Jeff, welcome to the show.

Jeff Lerner (02:46):

Thanks Chris. Excited to be here. We can parse those numbers, but I'm grateful for the intro for sure.

Chris Beall (02:52):

Well, I tell you what, every once in a while I tell people about a deal I did back in the day and I know it was a hundred and twenty million, but when other people tell the story, it becomes 150, 180. Sometimes you just got to go with it. Just got to go with it.

Jeff Lerner (03:06):

I just have to say exits, run rates. They're basically all fishing stories.

Chris Beall (03:11):

Yeah. Oh God. Yes, yes, yes, yes. I caught a fish that was this big. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, Jeff was kind enough to have me on his podcast and it was spectacular. It was a ton of fun. We kept finding out all these bizarre things that we had in common. It got weirder and weirder and weirder in a good way. I mean, it really did. After a while, we're like, "Really? Not one more thing? You got to be kidding me." Right? So he's done me now, a double kindness coming on and let's let Corey in the room here. Here comes Corey Frank. Corey Frank is in the room. He's looking good. He's he's running a real business to. Corey, we're already on. We're already running. So I want to introduce you to Jeff Lerner.

Corey Frank (03:59):

Jeff, how are you?

Jeff Lerner (04:00):

Hey Corey. Nice to meet you, man. How are you?

Corey Frank (04:02):

Fantastic. Last day of the month. Last day of the quarter. Always good.

Jeff Lerner (04:05):

Yes, that's right. Yeah. We're all trying to break records, right?

Corey Frank (04:09):

Indeed.

Chris Beall (04:10):

So Jeff founded and runs Entre education services? I can never remember things.

Jeff Lerner (04:17):

Entre Institute.

Chris Beall (04:18):

Entre Institute. I love it. Entre Institute. And Corey runs something called Youngblood. I can't even say it because when I get to the word blood, I realize everybody's listening. Youngblood Works and it's one of those names you have to parse it and go, is it that the Youngblood Works or that the Youngblood Works or whatever, but he is bringing a whole new way of making new business happen for companies, especially in cybersecurity, but for others. And it's pretty magical stuff. So Corey is, I believe in Phoenix right now it's our Scottsdale. It looks familiar.

Corey Frank (04:54):

We have another store's Location in Phoenix, Arizona. That's correct.

Chris Beall (04:57):

An undisclosed location.

Corey Frank (04:58):

[inaudible 00:04:58].

Chris Beall (05:00):

So what we're going to talk about today is Corey, believe it or not, we always talk about B2B. And we talk about how to dominate B2B markets by using a conversation first approach. And I talk to people about this regularly, as do you. And usually we get this raised eyebrow, like what do you mean conversation first approach? And then when we talk about building trust through conversations and harvesting the trust as you go to market in order to create massive competitive advantage and lower the friction and cost of acquiring customers until finally you're dominating that market.

Chris Beall (05:31):

When we talk about that, people think that's even weirder because they think you've got to talk value in order to get trust. But we believe that you should offer value and in a cold call, that value is, "I'll go away, if you let me say 27 seconds worth of stuff." In order to instantly get trust and then go from trust toward curiosity and from curiosity, ultimately to the opportunity to offer somebody value. We have here with us today somebody, in the form of Jeff, who's done this and B2C. You don't know anything about B2C, right?

Corey Frank (06:05):

I've purchased something on the internet in my past, at least once. Yes. That's about it.

Chris Beall (06:10):

Okay. All right. All right. Well I know-

Corey Frank (06:12):

[inaudible 00:06:12].

Chris Beall (06:15):

I don't know a great deal about it either. If you asked me to run a B2C business, I would figure out a second letter, other than C. I'd run B to F or B to Q or something like that because I'm a clueless consumer. And I watched Jeff as we were getting ready for the show, go in and remake the credentials for an e-commerce site so somebody who's helping him with it could do her job. And I would just look at it like a cow looks at an oncoming train. So I got an opening question for Jeff and then Corey, we're going to let you take it away because this is about as much prep as you ever get.

Chris Beall (06:51):

So Jeff just high level you told me that you use conversation first approach to dominate a B2C market. I would contend that's impossible because how could you get all the conversations and wouldn't you go broke in the meantime and all that. So first of all, did that idea come to you? Like I'm going to do it this way or I'm so brilliant. I figured out this way to do it, or was it something that you started doing and then went, "Holy moly, this actually is the right way to do it." Or what? How'd you get going with this incorrect model?

Jeff Lerner (07:25):

It was kind of a combination of all three options. So I'll say D all of the above, but I have to focus on the fact that there was an element of presupposition that this approach would work, how it would work, how it would unfold, what it would even end up working for that kind of evolved through the process and through the conversations and through the intelligence and feedback gathering of the conversations. So for example, when it started, it wasn't Entre Institute, it was just Jeff knowing that he knew some stuff. And then at some point he wanted to figure out how to A, get what he knew to a large number of people. And obviously to do that in any sustainable way, it means to build a for-profit business out of it so that it can keep going and keep reaching more people.

Jeff Lerner (08:14):

So it started as just like, "Hey, I know some things that a lot of people could benefit from, and I want to scale the message and monetize the message so that I can keep scaling the message over time." And I know that the best way to start that is just start talking. And start sharing and start giving value. Obviously, when you're talking conversations B2C on mass, it's different than B2B conversations where you think of having a dialogue with a purchasing manager at a big logistics company, or I guess logistics companies don't do purchasing so that was a bad example, but you know what I mean. A LinkedIn chat. For me, a conversation was Facebook video, comment thread, 600 comments, me taking the time to respond to every comment that was worth responding to, and maybe having 35 conversations in a feed where everybody can see it.

Jeff Lerner (09:05):

So indirectly, it becomes a conversation with a hundred thousand people that have all seen the video by proxy of the 35 people in the comments. So I did that. Basically, I knew that I knew how to go build real businesses on the internet. I'd been doing it at that time for 10 years. And I have a good story which helps drive conversations. I had gone from 10 years prior to that 2008, I was a broke out of work, jazz musician, half a million dollars in debt from a couple sales restaurant businesses that we're all on borrowed money that they never should have given me the loan in the first place, except it was 2006 and the banks were insane. They'd loan, a 27 year old kid, 400 grand to hang himself with, but I had paid off all that debt. I'd gone online in 2008. I paid off all that debt.

Jeff Lerner (09:54):

At that point, I had generated close to about 50 million bucks just with total online businesses, working from home on a laptop or whatever. And they were all businesses you can start with relatively low startup capital. And I'm like, "I know that this stuff would change most people's lives." Most people are stuck in a job. They toil. They don't get what they love. They don't love what they get. What if everybody knew what I knew? So I started putting information out to market about the business side of it, but also I didn't want to get caught up in the perception of being another one of these talking head, internet business, make money online, scammy guru, people that have rented Lamborghini's and Airbnb mansions that they stay in for three days while they shoot their ad video. And I didn't want to be one of those guys.

Jeff Lerner (10:41):

So I really wanted to focus on a more holistic conversation and I'm married. I'm a dad. I coach kids basketball team. My favorite thing in the world is just to play with my kids. And I work out a lot, I'm really into health and fitness. I go to a lot of therapies. So I'm real into communication dynamics and healthy relationships. And I wanted to fold all of that into a conversation about the new digital economy and these business models and these business tools that are available to everyone, where you can learn how to build a funnel, create a decent offer, find a target audience, pair those three things together, throw some money at it, grow your brand and your message inside of it.

Jeff Lerner (11:23):

If you have something to say, and you have value to offer, you can build a hell of a business. That model is out there. There's 7.7 billion people in the world. And I think four billion of them have internet access. And that model is available to all four billion of those. And yet 96% of people self report dissatisfaction in their job. 86% of people report dissatisfaction in their lives. And I'm like, "Well, screw the doctors. I'm the one with the prescription. They can fix all these problems." So I just started giving the value. Here's how I built my online business. Here's how having an online business allows me to go to therapy at two o'clock in the afternoon with my wife so we can learn to communicate better because I don't have to ask for time off or be in trouble because I left work. And here's how my online business allows me to pay for healthy prepared meals. Facilitates a whole life, a whole quality of life, not just a big fat bank account.

Jeff Lerner (12:13):

And that's the conversation that I struck up on the internet. And I was just putting out video after video, after video saying, "Hey, my name's Jeff Lerner. You can look me up online. Here's a picture of my house. I'm a real guy. I'm not trying to sell you anything. I just truly believe that what I know can change the world and it can change your world. Let me know if you have any questions." And over the course of the year, I put out between Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, I put out probably close to a thousand videos or re edited videos for the different platforms and stuff. Probably about three or 400 source videos of just me giving away free value. After a year of doing that, I had thousands of conversations. I had millions of people engage with my content, a re-targetable audience on Facebook of two million people that were like, "Man, I like this Jeff guy. He's really trying to help. He's not trying to sell me anything."

Speaker 5 (13:36):

Before ConnectAndSell, we had to deal with everything that everybody else has to deal with. Cold calls, gatekeepers, automated phone trees, dial by name directories. So using ConnectAndSell, instead of having two conversations an hour, we're having 10 conversations an hour, everybody's making money. So with that, we sell our lives cut easier, helped us increase our production by 70% because I don't have to do all this manual work.

Speaker 6 (14:04):

Now my reps can actually speak to more real conversations, more real customer calls and more real money. Yeah, we made money. We made seven figures off of that test drive. A sales rep, uploads the list, presses play they're connected to the customer. It is completely easy, effortless with no dialing. Do yourself a favor call ConnectAndSell and watch the magic happen.

Announcer (14:36):

And we're back with Corey and Chris.

Jeff Lerner (14:38):

They're like, "Hey, do you have a course I can by." Or like, "Hey, is there any way I can give you money to get more from you?" And it's like-

Corey Frank (14:48):

How long-

Jeff Lerner (14:48):

Well, speak of the devil. Yeah? Go ahead.

Corey Frank (14:48):

How long does that process take do you see to build that trust and ameliorate that fear?

Jeff Lerner (14:58):

It took me-

Corey Frank (14:59):

Because in the B2B world, we know what it is, but in your B2C experience, how long does that take?

Jeff Lerner (15:03):

It took me six months I would say of showing up every day to go from people ignoring me to people being annoyed by me, to people being intrigued by me, to people listening, but skeptical of me and eventually people listening to me and wanting it to be true. And then eventually winning them over that I'm not going to go away and I'm too transparent to be made up. So now you can finally trust and that was six steps I just gave you it was probably about one per month. I spent a month in obscurity and then the next month I just spent annoying people, but I kept going.

Corey Frank (15:46):

So once you capture that name or that prospect or that ICP, that you identify, you build a relationship, whatever your cadence is, weekly or monthly in this case.

Jeff Lerner (16:00):

Daily. Daily was mine.

Corey Frank (16:01):

Daily, daily. And a lot of it is growing value up front to go through those six steps of annoyance and acceptance and trust.

Jeff Lerner (16:11):

And it's got to be daily. I think probably one of the differences between B2C is B2C could also be called business the chaos or business declutter or business to crowd. If you want to stand out in the crowd, you're going to have a high quantity of content for the average person that you're trying to reach to see you the seven times in their Facebook feed, that it takes to create a memorable imprint there's probably a hundred million impressions that have gone through that feed that you have to pop up into. It just takes a lot more quantity. I used to do inbound marketing for B2B clients when I had an agency. And that was much more quality over quantity. I think with B2C I don't want to say quantity over quality, but I would say quality without quantity is almost useless.

Corey Frank (16:59):

Have you discovered any data or the biophysiology of why it takes that long on that process? Obviously some of them when you're trying to cast a wide net and I absolutely want a better life. Absolutely, I want to be better looking and thinner and more in shape and have a relationship and financial independence. So you may get folks where just the intersectionality of pay opportunity and preparedness like you got me at the right time. My boss just pissed on me. My cat pissed on everything, but for a person who's at rest, who you need to stimulate in a direction of moving toward your ultimate call to action, is it because it's just a by-product of so much noise in the universe now? And so many folks adopting this, but from a data perspective, why should it take so long on that B2C process?

Jeff Lerner (17:53):

It's a function of a few things. One, it is just the pure volume of content and messaging. I mean, I forget the statistics, but I think people are exposed four million marketing messages a day now something like completely mind blowing. And so for you to claim any tiny, memorable fraction of those total messages, those total impressions, you just got to show up a lot. Plus skepticism is at an all time high. And this goes with the high volume of marketing messages, the barrier to entry to getting your message out to someone online. And I would create one of these videos and this is an important part of the process to understand.

Jeff Lerner (18:32):

I wouldn't just post it on my profile or even just post it on my page because in late 2018, when I was doing this, the organic reach of Facebook page content had already started to fall dramatically. Facebook isn't going to do you any favors just distributing your business related content for free. So I would throw anywhere from 25 to maybe a hundred, occasionally 200 if I felt really confident in the video, dollars' worth of what they call a boost on each of these videos so that I could target a segment of the cold market to make sure they saw my videos. And so this was further data. Let's say I shot four videos that were roughly on the same subject or even the same video. I could boost it four different times. I could say target Tony Robbins audience, target Gary Vaynerchuks audience, target men over 45, target women under 35, whatever combination of demographics and interests I wanted to target I could, that was part of the intelligence gathering.

Jeff Lerner (19:28):

But it's just hard and skepticisms at all time highs so you got to win them over. And a lot of it is just the confidence. If you think about statistics, the more time something occurs, the more confidence you place in it as not just an anomaly. And there's kind of a similar effect online where not just the more times they see you, but the more different messages they see from you, the more backgrounds they see you in, the more locations they see you in, the more other people they see you with. Here's a video with me and my daughter. Here's a video of me and my wife out driving in the car. Here's me at the gym. It builds this case of, "Okay, this must be real." Nobody has the budget to fabricate an entire life with all these different facets.

Corey Frank (20:14):

Well, there's a great book, Culture Code by Daniel Coyle.

Jeff Lerner (20:17):

I just bought it. I haven't read it, but I just bought it.

Corey Frank (20:19):

It's phenomenal. And I think certainly talking with you, I think you'd agree Chris with Jeff is that there's certain folks who are just unconscious competence who probably do a lot of these things by their nature, by their intuitiveness, by their kind of at rest net we'll say, I think you probably fit into that. But Coyle talks about what are the imprints of a great organization, a great team, it could be a great family, marriage, et cetera. And you identified a couple of them probably. And as you said you didn't read the book yet, right? Number one is it's usually this concept of building safety. Can you build safety that it's safe to talk to me? And Chris we'll talk about this a little bit when we get your impression of the intro and how we ameliorate fear but also throw enough intrigue and humor and curiosity intention in there because they got to make a tough decision, but building safety and bearing vulnerability, which snuffs out the skepticism.

Corey Frank (21:16):

The more vulnerable and open I am, "Hey, listen, I'm just a real guy, flesh and blood looking at, I don't have a six pack, but I'm getting there." My life's not perfect, but it's getting there. And then the third is establishing purpose, a mission, a drive, versus a lot of folks being in this, maybe home of complacency in their life, drifting from port to port, as Uncle Zig would say like a life without a rudder and you just hope that you drift into a port of prosperity.

Corey Frank (21:42):

So with that, and again, probably because you've had so many repetitions doing this in a B2C world different than Chris and I come from where we don't have as big of as you do, [inaudible 00:21:55] certainly with many of the clients that Chris and I deal with, we have [inaudible 00:22:00] in the hundreds or thousands, not in the millions or so. But isn't that fascinating, Chris, with that there are some similarities with Jeff is doing even unconsciously to kind of build these great teams. But in your case, you are the brand and they're buying you and what you're about. What do you think about that Chris what Jeff has shared with us?

Chris Beall (22:23):

Well, it's interesting. I mean, Jeff, what you described that six step process is oddly analogous to a process that takes about 30, 40 seconds that we teach people to do on a cold call. You had to do it over six months because of the nature of the beast, because you're cold calls so to speak is to your whole audience. It's not to one person or another person, another person you're cold calling your entire audience and you need to get them-

Jeff Lerner (22:51):

I'm interrupting them as bad as any vocal, for sure.

Chris Beall (22:54):

Exactly. And it's interesting that interrupt thing, you're really ambushing, and I'll even go beyond that. They didn't agree in advance that they were going to see your video pop-up or whatever, right? So there's this ambush and the ambush psychology the way you played it forward is like a six month long cold call and it makes sense it would be six months long because you're doing it with millions of people whereas when we teach cold calling, we go, "Okay, I'll provide you with the ambush capabilities. Your Facebook is our connect and sell." So on Facebook, you get something to jump up in front of somebody. Your boost is like somebody paying us in order to push a button and talk to somebody, that's their boost. And then your opening move that you're making ends up being inevitable annoyance first, you're just showing up and then being ignored.

Chris Beall (23:51):

And then annoyance happens, right? Why are they annoyed? Well, they're kind of afraid of you because they think you're going to sell them something. So it's annoyance that a guy who I'm afraid of he's going to sell me something. I can see him but is he real, he could be fake. He's a visible stranger, but he might as well be invisible because I am not sure he ain't fake. It could be something else. And so, this is really a shock to me. You're taking them down a path. So we take folks down this journey, when you ambush somebody, you immediately establish trust because they start in a place of fear. So the way you establish trust is basically you own up to not just annoying them, but scaring them.

Chris Beall (24:35):

I know I'm an interruption. Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called? And that's where I'm going to solve a problem that you have. And you're solving a problem they have, which is a problem of hope. Their problem is 98% down to 87% of too whatever it is, depending on how you look at it. I've kind of given up, but they don't want to give up. They don't want to not like their job. They don't want to not like their life. They want hope. So you're offering them hope. And from that, I think they're going to get some trust. We're offering them a way out of their current trap. Their current trap is I just ambushed you and you want me to go away and I'm going to offer you certainty that I'll go away.

Chris Beall (25:21):

That's my offer. I will go away. Certainly. And I'll tell you how certain. I'll go away in 27 seconds. All you have to do is let me tell you why I called. And then I'm gone. And by going so early to trust in your case two months and our case seven seconds, and it probably [inaudible 00:25:41]. Here's a guess. Corey, if you were to take just him divided by your Tam or my Tam and count, and then multiply it by seven seconds, I think you get two months.

Jeff Lerner (25:55):

It's probably right.

Chris Beall (25:59):

I'm killing myself here. This is the unified field theory of business. It just happened.

Jeff Lerner (26:06):

Yeah. The other nuance I want to add to what you said I think it's important for everyone to understand, because I think it would apply B2B or B2C is the more complex the problem is that you're trying to solve the more mistrust there is for you to overcome, which means the longer the opening salvo to build it needs to take. And here's what I mean. If you're calling a business and their problem is they have dirty water in the holding tank because they have a [inaudible 00:26:42] installed that's made of the wrong material. You can call. And in like three seconds, you can build trust by saying, "Hey, I heard you have dirty water in your tank. Let me guess you have one of those porous silicone netting wraps. And I'm here to tell you about the non porous silicone netting wrap that'll eliminate dirt in your groundwater."

Jeff Lerner (27:03):

Well, boom, you got them because it was such a specific problem with such a specific solution. For me, I'm going out to millions of people saying, "So you're not totally stoked about your life." Could be your marriage, could be your health, could be your job, could be your money, turned out it could have been COVID, could be your boss is an asshole, it's such a vague and multifaceted problem that it would take me a month to even demonstrate that I have enough multi-dimensional competence to even speak to them and potentially relate to whatever their particular subset of all those issues actually is. And half the time the reason people think they're not happy, isn't even why they're really unhappy. You see what I mean? It's just a way completely different obstacles set to overcome.

Jeff Lerner (27:53):

And you nailed it though. This is, I think goes to a lot of sales mistakes. You don't build trust with knowledge or technical competence. You build it emotional. You build it limbically and empathetically with people. You can build more trust in a conversation with a guy commiserating with them about how his kid wants to play little league, but is scared because he doesn't think he's good at sports. And you have a shared experience and you can speak to that experience as a father, that's going to build more trust with some high level CEO, than expounding on the technical issue he's dealing with in his business.

Corey Frank (28:35):

Do you find Jeff that as you've tested these messages, because you are selling, you're selling a better life. And as you had said, when you asked 10 people, what is a better life mean? They may have different answers. So you have to sell kind of abstractly, but also big enough and specific enough where there's enough of a honeypot to want to learn more, walk us through that journey of how you tested different messages, because you can't go, "Hey, 10X man." Right? Sometimes that works for some folks, but some are like, "10X? That's too concentrated. I'm happy with 1.5X." How do you go through that in a B2C world? Because you're dealing with so much more volume and your data probably comes at you much faster than it would for Chris or I in the B2B world.

Jeff Lerner (29:27):

Yeah. And I didn't think about it in these terms in the beginning, but I can say based on how it unfolded and now looking back, this is exactly what I think the right answer is. B2C is all about controlling language and creating meaning in words, words that mean something to you. You need those words to become memes, packets of information, to convey complex ideas. And somebody at some point had to create the word streaming. Now if we go on and we say, "We're the world's fastest streaming service." That's a whole set of information bundled in the word streaming. But somebody had to create that understanding across culture.

Jeff Lerner (30:12):

So for me, I had to, and this happened again organically because at first I was. I was jumping all around trying to find my messaging, trying to find my consistent group, because I'm talking relationship dynamics and all these theories that I'm pulling from things I've studied. Positive discipline with my kids, responsive listening with my wife, things I learned from Gottman at The Love Lab things I learned from Tony Robbins and Unleash the Power Within things I learned from Zig Ziglar on old YouTube videos. And it becomes this hodgepodge of accumulated wisdom, the Six Principles of Persuasion from Robert Cialdini so from that cloud had to emerge my vernacular, my vocabulary that people could start to attach to just like a logo or a brand conjures up feelings and a robust understanding of something.

Jeff Lerner (31:00):

When you're just a guy talking on the internet, you're not a logo. You're not a brand. You have to find words that can accomplish the same thing. And what I ultimately honed in on and this is it. If somebody said, Jeff, to what would you attribute the fact that in the last three years, you've sold over 130,000 paying courses, paid students enrolled into your school. That's not really a school, but Entre Institute. You're the fastest growing. And one of the largest private education companies in the world, and less than three years ago, you were an unknown dad in a small town in Southern Utah, driving around in your car, shooting videos on your cell phone. How did you do that? I would say, it's this. I found one really powerful mnemonic theme that everybody resonated with, which is if you want to have an awesome life. My first brand wasn't Entre Institute, it was actually School of Awesome. Basically I honed in on a set of words, the key to an awesome life is a commitment to excellence.

Jeff Lerner (32:04):

It's not about money. It's not about love. It's not about good luck, it's not about a six pack. It's about excellence because progress is happiness and excellence will drive human system progress So you want to have an awesome life. You have to be committed to excellence, but excellence is a big, scary word for a lot of people. So what we're going to do is we're going to chunk it into the three PS of excellence. And this becomes a heuristic that you can apply to every second of your life to make sure that you're either doing something that serves you or you're doing something that subtracts from your goals and there shall never again be a middle ground between those two poles.

Jeff Lerner (32:41):

The three P's are, is what I'm doing right now, productive of physical excellence, personal excellence, or professional excellence in my life. If yes, keep doing it. Do more of it. If no, stop doing it, do something that is. Period at the end. Do that now you'll have a better life a year from now. You can thank me later. I didn't even try to sell you anything. And again, it took me probably 200 conversations before I converged around that core idea. But once I had it, then I could start riffing in variations on a theme from there. Every conversation I've had since then, maybe two and a half years ago, it's been a variation on that same beam. And now I have people posting, "Yo, yo, my three Ps [inaudible 00:33:22]. I worked out this morning. I took my daughter out for lunch and I made $4,500 in my online business." Three Ps, woo-hoo. It just created a rallying cry around that concept. But without that, you're just noise.

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