How to Thrive in a Changing Economy

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What if the price objection you keep hearing has nothing to do with your price?

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. In this episode, Dan Kennedy and Bill Glazer break down what businesses have to change when the economy, customers, and buying habits change around them. You'll hear why leads you've already paid for may be slipping away through simple neglect and how an ordinary product can become something people talk about and come back for. Dan also has a blunt verdict for any business that won't admit that it is in the business of selling. If this sounds a little too familiar, stay with this one. Let's get into it.

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I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy.

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The legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own peril.

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They're not really the lessons, they're kind of laws that you live by.

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Dan opened my eyes to what small business marketing looks like.

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Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless.

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His ripple effect touches people who don't even know his name. The world as we know it was changed because Dan Kennedy became obsessed with marketing.

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Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy.

Bill Glazer (1:14)

Well, hello, Diamond Telecoaching members. This is Bill Glazer and I'm here with Dan Kennedy, and it's another one of our monthly Diamond Telecoaching calls. So, the topic of today is why the economy will never look the same, and what is your predictions for the emerging new economy? And so, let's just dig right in.

Right off the bat, why do you say that the old economy is shattered, and more importantly, not only is it shattered, because I think it's obvious that it's shattered, but why it's gone forever, where we'll never see it again the way it was before?

Dan Kennedy (1:50)

Well, I think there were accumulating systemic sins that had to be cleansed, and that aren't going to be put back in place anytime soon. To blame the whole thing on, you know, the mortgage meltdown or Wall Street or whatever, ignores the fact that essentially we were consuming at a drunken sailor level, everybody far beyond their incomes, buying everything well in advance of ability to pay for it.

And that led to excesses of the ordinary everywhere you turned. And so, you know, the Starbucks joke went on for almost five years before the reality caught up, and Howard Schultz had to come in and do something about it, the joke that Starbucks now had no place to open anymore, Starbucks except inside the restrooms of Starbucks. And that sort of described everything that was going on. And so we were massively over stored. You really don't need an Office Max every five miles. We were massively over stored, over same branded with all these overlapping brands that if I took the logo off of the brochure or the catalog or the storefront or the menu in the restaurant, you couldn't tell one from the other.

There was so much easy spending going on that service deteriorated, salesmanship deteriorated. And there had to be a breaking point. And I don't think we're going to go back to that level of freewheeling, spending and investing anytime soon.

Bill Glazer (4:06)

Well, you know, and before I move on and sort of talk about the other part of the call today, which is, you know, your predictions for the emerging new economy, I want to just ask you a couple more questions about this whole thing about the old economy being shattered. And the first question is that, you know, I see a lot of entrepreneurs right now that are pretty much buried their head in the sand, and their attitude is, well, I'm going to take this thing out, this bad economy out, until the time that things come back to the way they were before. And I'm pleased to say that we don't see that very often with Glazer Kennedy members, because I think that we've done a pretty good job of making sure that we let them know that it's never going to come back to the way it was before. And by the way, just as an aside, on Sunday at the Outrageous Academy, Dan, you'll find this interesting, that I asked people in the room, these Royal Glazer Kennedy members, how many of them had a better 2009 than they did 2008?

And I usually, when I go around and speak at a chapter meeting, I always ask that same question. And historically, about 40 to 50 percent of the room raised their hand that they're actually doing better in what the government has told us we're in a recession. But at the Outrageous Academy workshop, over 70 percent of the people in the room had raised their hands and said they had a better 2009, 2008 So, Dan, there's something we're doing that's working, so...