WOW Your Prospects to Take Their Eyes off the Price, with John “JD” Dwyer [Episode 403]

In this episode, we discuss the power of wow factors with customers in conversation with John “JD” Dwyer, CEO of The Institute of WOW, on the Gold Coast of Australia.

Key Takeaways

• The Institute of WOW is all about creating wow factors, to take your client’s eyes off the price. Andy asks how JD got Jerry Seinfeld to star in an Australian building society’s ad campaign. There’s a great story!
• Companies hope to be different, but “live in a sea of sameness.” Without a real wow factor, like the Apple iPhone, you’ve got to create an artificial wow factor. McDonald’s Happy Meal toy takes your eyes off the price.
• JD had a moving company differentiate themselves by offering a two-person holiday to the Gold Coast, to have Mrs. Homemaker take her eyes off the price.
• JD has a framework system for adding the wow factor. Identify your most profitable customer, and look for more who look like them; decide on the wow factor. JD has tested them all, and holidays, fuel discounts, and alcohol, are “evergreen.”
• A turf farm didn’t care to discount, but they had an end-of-season surplus. They offered a carton of Crown Lager Premium with every home’s worth sold. They ran out of turf, even though landscapers could have bought their own beer!
• Buyers of goods have short attention spans, decide quickly without analysis, want to satisfy a demand, and like something of value for free. So, capture their attention, and they won’t look at the price.
• How do B2B sales professionals create their personal wow? JD gives sales behavior advice.
• JD suggests you will double conversions by offering a premium and a deadline: “I will give you an XYZ bonus, if you make a decision by 5:00 p.m., Friday.” Or, “I’ve only got 52 of these available, and when they’re gone, they’re gone.”
• The law of reciprocation says offer something of value with every contact. Have a landing page to showcase your value. Most sales professionals don’t even do LinkedIn well, but a personal website of your own, with your video, is best.
• Everybody buys a solution to a problem. Theatrically highlight to the audience that you are the solution to their problem. Marketing and Sales share this tactic.
• People will pay more to eliminate pain, than they will pay to enjoy pleasure. They will pay more, if it is an enduring solution to the pain.

Episode Transcript

Andy Paul 0:56
Hi, I’m your host, Andy. Join me as I host conversations with the leading experts in sales, marketing, sales automation, sales process, leadership, management, training, coaching, any resource that I believe, to help you accelerate the growth of your sales, your business, and most importantly, you. Hello and welcome to the Sales Enablement Podcast. I’m excited to be joined by my guest today all the way from the Gold Coast in Australia is John JD Dwyer. He’s the CEO of the Institute of Wow. And we’re going to talk about what that means here. JD John, welcome to the show.

John JD Dwyer 1:35
Thanks, Andy. Glad to be here.

Andy Paul 1:36
Yeah. So take a minute man, introduce yourself. Tell us how you got your start doing what you’re doing.

John JD Dwyer 1:42
Look, I’ve been around a few decades in the marketing game. And when I left school I was pretty handy with artwork, and I could see this thing called the computer age coming along and realize that I couldn’t make too much money out of artwork and decided to morph into the adult marketing game. So I did my college degree in advertising and was lucky enough to get jobs with some major retailers in Australia who were very good at taking consumers’ eyes off the price. One of these companies happened to be like a Macy’s in America, I guess. And they taught me that the price discounts should be left to the Walmarts of this world and Costco. And as it turned out, I fell in love with the model that I saw happening which was being able to take people’s eyes off the price and that’s where I am now. I own a marketing advisory business called the Institute of Wow and it’s all about creating wowl factors to take your clients eyes off the price because the last thing you want to do is market your products or services on price. Unless your business is designed like Walmart.

Andy Paul 2:50
Okay, so one of the things that you talk about and I want to cover this up front is that you had an interesting interaction with an American celebrity that you convinced to represent one of your products.

John JD Dwyer 3:08
Thank you very much, Andy. You’d be happy to let me do the big name drop early in. Wow, it’s good to stay up, get it up, the Pope’s name in my pocket. I’ll be bringing that out after this one. But yeah, I was lucky enough a few years ago to get Jerry Seinfeld, the Jerry Seinfeld to actually represent a banking client of mine here in little old Australia. And it was quite a career because Seinfeld’s only ever done two advertising campaigns before and that was for American Express and Microsoft companies that were a little bit bigger than this relatively modest sized bank in Australia. And when I asked why did he do it, because you and I both know he’s got more money than God. He just said to me that no one else had asked him from Australia and he quite enjoyed Australians’ sense of humor.

Andy Paul 3:51
So tell us the story. What was the bank for the campaign? Why’d you think about Jerry Seinfeld? And what was your pitch to Jerry Seinfeld?

John JD Dwyer 3:58
The quick version of random at the year 2000, I ended up getting a client called the greater building society in Australia. And look, I refer to them as a bank but they were building society and many of your listeners would know that building societies and credit unions tend to attract a working class audience whereas a bank tends to attract collar and tie. And so therefore, what I did for this particular building society was assist them in taking the eyes off the price and we brought in a campaign where we said look, get a home loan from the greater building society in other words, swap from those nasty banks who are charging all those fees and treating it like a number and we’ll give you a free vacation. And it was an incredibly successful campaign that ran for 11 years not once did that building society ever advertise that life in years and interest rate? Sir only bank the only bank in the world well they did is that we came onto eBay and said, Get a home loan and get a free vacation and particularly when you’re gearing up towards a working class audience that really worked very well and towards the end. I was involved with this building society because I was doing their marketing for them as a consultant for about 11 or 12 years. But towards the latter stage, they said, look, we would like to take our brand persona up a little bit, can we get into white collar workers outside of, you know, basically working class people? And I said, Well, if you do that, then perhaps as a quick way of doing it, and that is associate yourself with a personality a celebrity, who would be able to escalate that very fast and cut a long story short, we put a survey out and I was hoping that some relatively easy celebrity in Australia might come up number one, which means that I could I could easily bring him up or her up and get them out. Of course, just my luck. Seinfeld came up number one, Robin Williams came up number two and Jim Carrey came up number three.

Andy Paul 5:47
So what was the pitch to Seinfeld to get him involved? I mean, that just goes through his agent. I mean, how’d you even contact them?

John JD Dwyer 5:53
Yeah, look, he’s represented by creative artists out of Hollywood, as many of them are. And I had been down that track, and found that it’s a long, long, long, long track. So I decided to cheat if you like, and I contacted George Shapiro who has an office in Beverly Hills just off Rodeo Drive. And I knew that he would probably not take my phone call. So I sent an email over on Tuesday and then late on Tuesday night, your time would have been 1am-2am in the morning. I left a voicemail on his telephone.

Andy Paul 6:25
George Shapiro is?

John JD Dwyer 6:28
I’m sorry, Shapiro is the half of Shapiro West who actually produced the Seinfeld show.. So it says that George Shapiro discovered Jerry Seinfeld about 40 something years ago, and George would be in his 70s now and he’s been beside Seinfeld for all that time. And he and his partner Howard West, basically produced the Seinfeld program. So anyway, having sort of researched that and found out that you know, George was the man that probably could get to Jerry. I actually left a voicemail message for him at two in the morning with my very best Crocodile Dundee accent.

Andy Paul 7:03
I don’t think you have to work hard on that.

John JD Dwyer 7:05
No, no. Look, we’ve just sent you an email to ask whether or not Jerry might be interested in becoming a spokesperson for a bank here in Australia that happens to be a client of mine. And you wouldn’t believe that. Two days later, not the next day, but two days later, I happened to be in the greater building societies office, and the phone rang. And it was an office that they kept aside for me as a consultant when I came down from the Gold Coast to Sydney, and the phone rang and I thought it was a gotcha, cool. I really didn’t think it was George because the girl said, Look, I’ve got George here on the line, I’d like to speak to you and I’m like, Yeah, okay. And I’m normally the one that would have super glued the phone to the handset

John JD Dwyer 7:49
I thought this was payback. I just thought one of the guys in the office was getting back many because I treated George with, you know, not the best of respect for the first 30 seconds or 60 seconds. And then I realized that was the real deal and I let him in on the secret, but I thought it was a gotcha goal. But he’s got a stupid sense of humor. And we got on like a house on fire. And you know, 30 minutes into that first phone conversation. The name Seinfeld never even came up. It was just really nice fun larrikin conversation. And then he said, Look, leave it with me. And I’ll put it to Jerry. And you wouldn’t believe it. Two days later, we get an email from George said, Jerry thinks it might be fun to make fun of the banks, because what I asked him to do, the premise of the campaign was to distinguish the greater building society, not only as a result of the free vacation, but also distinguish them from the 40 town gorillas, which was a very, very, very big banks in Australia. It’ll be like your Wells Fargo, from Wells Fargo. And Jerry said, Look, I like challenger brands. I like taking on the big boys and I love your sense of humor. So let’s do it. That was it.

Andy Paul 8:48
Amazing. So did he come to Australia to shoot the commercial?

John JD Dwyer 8:51
No, everybody thought that he did. But as it turns out, in Jerry’s contract, he cannot fly anywhere on a commercial plane. So if he has to travel more than 50 miles from home you have to give him a Learjet and we when we decided that we could find a little, little town that was 49 miles away from New York. He lived in the Hamptons in New York and we found a little town called Cedar Hurst which was 49 miles away from where we live. And yet we found a beautiful empty delicatessen and we shipped over all the great Building Society signage and we built a great building society branch in the middle of cedar Hurst which is in New York. And Jerry stood outside the greater building society and did stand up but the whole premise was that Jerry had come back to do live comedy outside the greater building societies branch and across all the shoppers were walking past and couldn’t give a you know what, and that was part of the humor of the whole thing. He set up his own market and found his little speaker who was busking in front of the guy.

Andy Paul 9:50
So was it a successful campaign?

John JD Dwyer 9:53
Wildly successful, absolutely off the planet inside the greater Building Society here in Australia triple that has market share in the first 18 months. Wow, Yeah. And you know, I guess really that shows if you put a whale on top of a whale, which I guess you’d call it a whopper well, then you know, the sky’s the limit because we had to get a home loan, get a free vacation. And then you put something like a shipping star with Seinfeld next to it. And the thing just went nuts. And not only went nuts, because the campaign was quite clever that was put together by the way, I’m not taking a lot of credit for this, I would write the TV commercials and Jerry would throw them in the rubbish bin and start again.

Andy Paul 10:33
He’s a pro at that. So let’s talk about your business called the Institute of Wow. Which, you know, meaning the wow factor, you know, something that’s really, really different. So, you know, I would think, in general, most entrepreneurs and business owners set up to be different. I mean, what were they missing the ball?

John JD Dwyer 10:55
You know what, I think they do set out to be different, but 90% of them aren’t. They’re living to save sameness, I’m putting a marketing campaign together at the moment for a removalist company in Sydney, and they have the big, bulky gorillas that you know, come and pick up your furniture and take it into state for you in your movie. And when I’ve compared him against all of these other competitors, guess what, they’re all the same. They would scare the daylights out of any woman who was booking a removalist company because when you get onto their website, they all look like Mike Tyson. And of course, they will sell on price they will say that will beat any other genuine price, which is exactly the game that you don’t want to be in. And this particular guy said to me, what do I do? I said, You’ve got to stand out from the crowd. And if you don’t have a unique wow factor like Apple iPhone, you’ve got to create an artificial wow factor like the free vacation. So in the instance of the online business where the money looks exactly the same from one bank to the other bank, you need to create a Happy Meal toy, and I would convince the bank to do this. I just do a Happy Meal box on McDonald’s Happy Meal box in the middle The boardroom table. They all laughed because they knew that I was a bit sarcastic and they said, okay, what’s this all about smiling? And I pulled out the Disney Toy. And I said, if there’s any sort of parents or grandparents in the room here, because they were in the management table circle, okay, I said, I’ll give you $100 . You guys are all bankers. I’ll give you $100 for anyone that can tell me what a Happy Meal costs. And you know what, despite the fact that they’ve all bought Happy Meals for their children, and grandchildren, not one of them got within $1 what a Happy Meal cost because McDonald’s took our eyes off the price.

Andy Paul 12:31
So what are you doing for the moving company?

John JD Dwyer 12:35
Well, for the moving company, in fact, I hate to sort of get back on you know, the whole of the what we call holiday but you guys called vacation, but it could very well be that if you choose this particular emotionless company, what we’ll do is give you a beautiful weekend away on the Gold Coast now, as I mentioned to you earlier, and the the Gold Coast is the Orlando of Australia. So when somebody’s spending 10 $15,000 on a ring and you can get a holiday to the Gold Coast for two people for 567 hundred dollars, then I would throw in a holiday or vacation to the Gold Coast or I would send in a throw in maybe a year’s worth of golf passes to the local cinema, I would do anything that you need to do in terms of an artificial wow factor to take Mrs. Customer because it’s a lady who makes a decision on their movements all the time. Anything you have to do to take your eyes off the price may even be a 12 month subscription to the local hair salon. But you’ve got to take her eyes off the price and onto the value.

Andy Paul 13:33
So you have a framework for creating the wow factor when we start to take through that to understand so what’s the first thing you need to sort of focus on when you’re trying to say okay maybe I’ve got a product I feel like a little bit of a me too product How do I create this wow factor what’s the first thing you got to focus on?

John JD Dwyer 13:51
Number one, I got the five step system and the reason I mentioned that, Andy, up front is because I know on the podcast he might be listening to this if I said that I had a choice. nonpoint system, you would have just lost half your audience.

Andy Paul 14:06
Each part has five sub parts.

John JD Dwyer 14:19
It’s just five points, they’re pretty simple. Number one is just identify your most profitable customer and then look for more people that will buy him pretty simply.

Andy Paul 14:28
I mean, the logic being that you need to have margin, you didn’t have room in your margin to be able to afford the Wow.

John JD Dwyer 14:35
Absolutely. That’s right. So therefore, that’s why you want your most profitable customer. A lot of people say, like, here’s someone might say, Well, my customers are predominantly females. And I will say no, do they drive a BMW? Do they have 2-3 children? Do they have an average income of $200,000 in the house and do they get their hair done more likely every two weeks instead of every four weeks and when you go through that interrogation, all of a sudden the most profitable customer pops The other end so that’s number one identify your most profitable customer and number two is create that wow factor to take their eyes off the prize and I guess the best way of explaining that to everyone and is that I’ve got six children and they’re either into late 20s now so they don’t want McDonald’s Happy Meals anymore but at one stage my wife and myself you know, would have spent $6 billion on Happy Meals

Andy Paul 15:23
You may have done right

John JD Dwyer 15:25
I couldn’t tell you what the price was because the kids threw the hamburger out for the free Disney Toy that’s what it’s all about. So it creates a wow factor.

Andy Paul 15:34
But it’s up there so there’s gotta be some science though to some degree behind how you choose what it is that’s going to have the appropriate impact on the customer. Yeah, so you know, how do you brainstorm that? How do you work with the customer to come up with something that you know they can afford and really fits the marketplace?

John JD Dwyer 15:54
Exactly. There are some evergreen well factors of bonuses that work every single time and they happen to be vacations, fuel discounts as in guests discounts. And if you have an over 18 audience alcohol and I’m not being funny there, but if you have an over 18 audience and alcohol is a winner, and you’re talking to someone who’s tested everything, I’ve tested plasma TVs, refrigerators, lawn mowers, you name it, I’ve tested a whole lot of them. And those evergreen products are successful because they’re appealing to all ages and sexes. So I’ll give you a classic example. I have a turf farm, as in I saw grass, and they had six miles worth of turf. When they introduced themselves to me and said, Look, we’ve got to get rid of it because the season is changing. We’ve got to get rid of that turf. So we can plan mortar for next season. And I said How are you marketing yourselves? And I said, Well, $5 a square meter. We got meters in Australia, you guys got yards, but let’s say it’s $5 per square meter. And I said I bet you the landscapers when they ring up because they’re the people who buy most of the grass or if you Say that they can get it down the road for $4 50. And then you have to drop your price to a base. Exactly. That’s what we want to get out of that game. What do you think landscape is like? And he said, No, you told me I said I like beer. And I like particularly premium beer because they normally brew singlet work who buys the normal traditional beer but if you offered them crown lager, which in Australia is a very upmarket beer. I think the walk ever broke glass. So we actually sent out we got a mail list of 500 landscapers, we set out to 250 landscapers a beautiful version of letter which said that if you get your grass from us, for every homes with a grass you get from us, we will give you a carton of grand lager premium beer. Now the big cost him 40 dot $40 for Captain, okay. He rang me up eight days into the promotion and said to me, Look, we’ve got a problem. I said, What’s that? He said, we don’t have any more grass. And I said, what six miles worth of grass. He said yeah, he said I had the biggest pain in the backside landscape but he used to always bargain on price and say look, I can get the turf down the road for less than what you should give it to me. He rang up and ordered 22 homes worth of grass and said he didn’t care when the grass belt day but he had a party on Friday. He needed to be by then.

Andy Paul 18:08
But what’s sort of interesting is sort of the psychology that I want to dig into is that he still could have gone to buy cheaper turf and use the money, it’s safe to buy the beer himself. So why did he just go with your client?

John JD Dwyer 18:20
Well, it isn’t psychologically exactly that people in this day and age because of the speed that we live in, make decisions pretty fast. And so therefore, it’s all about getting them with the profound headline before they start to think laterally about well, if I’ve got it down the road for cheaper. It’s really the happy male principle. I think the easiest thing to come back to all the time is that you and I both know that we could easily buy that hamburger and fries much cheaper somewhere else if we wanted to. But the fact is, is that we’ve got pester power, you know, pulling out our slave saying, I want the Disney Toy. And it really is about making sure that we understand particularly in the online world now that we’ve got three seconds to capture their attention. And once we’ve captured their attention, we’ve got a little longer that we can convert them. But we’ve got to capture their attention in the first place. And if the greater building society had said like every other bank homelands four point something percent, they wouldn’t have captured their attention anyway, like, get a home loan, get a free vacation.

Andy Paul 19:15
So I want to start thinking about this in the context, there’s a lot of people listening to the show who are professional salespeople, they’re selling to other businesses, they’re selling business products and so on. So how do they create their wow factor, as individuals in terms of not just their personal brand, but you know, a salesperson these days in the business to business sale, you really are at the initial point of differentiation for your company. So how do you how they create the personal?

John JD Dwyer 19:45
I think you’ve heard this ad from 1000 other people I’m sure but it’s going beyond the normal Call of Duty and you know what that means? That means you know, whether it be you actually spending more time with them or actually giving them a bonus. I mean, the thing is, is that this direct response world that I live in, is based on giving time limitations and scarcity as well. And so I don’t know, I don’t know how many of the people listening to this right now might be in a sales role where they’re simply giving a price and leaving it there. But the fact is that you will probably double your conversions. If you say, look, I will give you an XYZ bonus if you make a decision by five o’clock on Friday. So if you actually put a time limitation to something that’ll work for you, or if you’re in the business of scarcity, then that means that I’ve only got 52 of these available, and once they’re gone, they’re gone. And I find that a whole lot of salespeople don’t do what the car salesman does. Because you know, and I know when you go to buy a car, and if you ever do, you should go at the end of the month, not the beginning of the month, just because this person’s got a great budget. But when they say to you look, if you make a decision right now, we’ll give you free air conditioning. That’s obviously the conversion tool that they’re using. And I don’t know how many of your listeners would be using scarcity or older notation in kanji quantity, but they should.

Andy Paul 21:02
Yeah, I think some tpo. I mean, there are some business sales that are very transactional. And certainly scarcity is certainly appropriate in that type of timeframe or that type of framework. But I think in particular about, you know, people dealing with more relationship based sales and maybe taking a little bit longer, that, you know, this is how you create differentiation is really the key thing, right? Because in the minds of the customers, even complex business products these days is that the mindset of the customer almost looks alike, right? I mean, you could have, yeah, it’s really hard to maintain any sort of meaningful product differentiation. So in that environment, as thought might be interesting to explore is how do you maybe have a sales cycle that take six months, but how do you create that wow factor that differentiates you and from the other competitors, and it’s something maybe you have to do relatively early in the sales process, but then you also need to be able to maintain it over a period of time.

John JD Dwyer 21:59
And you’d be very familiar with the law of reciprocation, all that stuff, you can do something nice for someone, they feel that they like to do something nice for you. And in my own instance, I mean, I’m selling coaching programs. And so I’m dealing with business owners most of the time, and these business owners are doing anything from hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of sales up to 2030 $50 million. And what I do to get their attention, as always make sure that I provide them with a free something. And whether or not that’s a free report, or whether or not that’s a free book, or whether or not that even might be a free 15 minute, you know, call myself. I make sure I go outside the square by proving to them that I practice what I preach because the world that I live in, is all about making sure that you do what the other guy doesn’t do. And I don’t think enough people do that. If you know what, 80% of websites out there at the moment, don’t have a data capture facility on the homepage. So it means that they’re letting anybody come to the dinner party and walk away and they have no clue who they are. And so therefore, I would say that if you are a salesperson, and you may think that setting up your own landing pages outside of your regular sort of domain, I’d say set up your own landing page. I mean, I’ve got an ad on a 21 or 22 year old who was at college at the moment. And they’re interested in photography and videos and all sorts of things. And I’ve convinced them recently to set up their own landing pages and I said, why we don’t have a business I said, set your own landing page up so that when you do pitch to someone that you want to work for them, then you can just send them to your landing page and that can tell them all about you instead of the kid that’s sending out the letter to the employer, which just has a photo of him on the right hand corner and it’s just a letter.

Andy Paul 23:41
So on their landing page, are they giving away any content?

John JD Dwyer 23:46
Okay, just to be honest with you, it is something I’ve barely beat them over the head within the last month. In the process, you know, as well as I do the windows 8 in 2021. I am the biggest nerd in the world. Yeah, and you have I’ve got to convince them what when they get to 25, or 26, which a couple of my other children are, and they’ve got mortgages that all of a sudden, I’m smart, for some reason, they come back and ask me for help. But at 18 and 21, and 22, they think any suggestion I give them is just so yesterday, but they’re in the process kicking and screaming and doing it at the moment. But all it would be is basically highlighting that they’re in whatever position, they’re in the middle of the end of the college course. And that they would be a terrific prospect for a part time job to this, this, this and this. And of course, because they don’t have a lot of life experience at the moment, what they’d be doing is putting their qualifications from schooling in and a little bit of their interest. But basically, it’s this is your life in whatever life that you have.

Andy Paul 24:38
Well, sure. So when you’re talking about that personal landing page, really personal branding website, that’s really LinkedIn is certainly what most people use these days for that. And yeah, we’ve had lots of guests on the show, talking about LinkedIn. But one of the things that seems clear is that most sales people still aren’t doing a professional job and aren’t creating a unique brand experience for themselves on LinkedIn.

John JD Dwyer 25:04
They’re not and and you know, the LinkedIn one, I would say is what everyone has and go get a LinkedIn profile. But everyone has a LinkedIn profile. But not everyone has their own landing page. And you can get your landing page put together in the Philippines these days for probably three or four or $500. And what the landing page gives you the opportunity to do is even have a welcome video. And so therefore, you can just get your wife or your husband and put the iPhone in front of you. And you can actually talk about the skills that you’ve got and why you would be so employable and so valuable to an employer. Yeah, it’s just crazy. Because at the end of the day, we’re in such a great, you know, age these days from a technological point of view. Why wouldn’t you spend three or four $500 in the Philippines and get your own landing page?

Andy Paul 25:49
Yeah. All right. I mean, when you say landing page, you’re really talking about a personal website. Okay, so we went Through the first few steps of your process turns to identify your target market creature wow tactic. And then you talk about the problem solution tactics. So what do you mean by that?

John JD Dwyer 26:11
Yeah, look, everybody buys a solution to a problem. And doesn’t matter whether you’re going to see your doctor or your dentist, or whether you’re getting removed from us to take your furniture to the next house for you. The fact is, that they are solving a problem. And I guess when you look at newer fan TV these days, in the old days, near fan headache tablets, would have a picture of the box. And I would tell you those paracetamol and codeine in the tablet, well, we don’t much care about that. These days. We just want to hit a gun in 10 minutes. So what happens on the TV these days is that the lady comes home from school, the kids are running right in the kitchen. She rubs her forehead because she has a headache. And she actually takes a tablet with a glass of water. And there’s a little clock in the corner of the TV screen that goes around for 10 minutes Tick Tick, tick, tick, tick, and in 10 minutes, not only is she pretty Oh because she got lipstick and blush on now that the kids will behave and the headache is gone. And it’s all about, it’s all about theatrically highlighting to your audience that you are the solution to the problem. So if you’re putting together your marketing campaign, think of what your prospects’ problems are and make sure that you deliver the solution in your marketing messages.

Andy Paul 27:18
Well, yeah, the same thing, obviously is true in sales. I mean, it’s if you have to be focused on what is important to the buyer, not what you’re about. Yeah, which is problematic oftentimes in sales and marketing. not interesting. You say people will pay more to reduce the pain. Pay more compared to

John JD Dwyer 27:40
Getting pleasure.

Andy Paul 27:42
Getting pleasure.

John JD Dwyer 27:44
Yeah. People will pay much more money to eliminate pain than they will pay to enjoy pleasure.

Andy Paul 27:51
So would they pay even more to ensure they never experienced that pain again? Absolutely.

John JD Dwyer 27:57
Yeah, absolutely. And, that’s why you’ll see psychiatrists out there earning so much money, because they’ve helped them eliminate it in the first place, but they’ve given you enough scary statements that it might come back again if you don’t keep on seeing them every month.

Andy Paul 28:14
When does therapy ever end?

John JD Dwyer 28:17
I figured, well, it was a smart cycle.

Andy Paul 28:20
It never does, right? Alright, so JD, in this last segment, I’ve got some standard questions I ask all my guests. And the first one is a hypothetical scenario. So it puts you to the test a little bit here. So in this hypothetical scenario, you just been hired as the new vice president of sales for a company whose sales have stalled out and they flatlined plateaued and the CEO of the company has put you in charge of turning things around. So what two things would you do your first week on the job that could have the biggest impact?

John JD Dwyer 28:54
Well, first of all, if sales have flatlined, I’d have a look at the competition, the landscape. And this is pretty much what I do for a living when I have a client come on board, as you know, the first thing I do is have a look at their competitors and have a look at the landscape. And I would see whether or not there’s any Coca Cola in the industry. In other words, 40 tongue gorillas that have a massive market share, and then have a look at how much market share is left for all of the others. Knowing full well there’s probably going to be much easier to steal the market share from the others than it is from the $40 gorilla Coca Cola. And once having done that, and of course, no one understood my competitors were having a look at what they’re doing from a sales and marketing point of view. And make sure that what I do is different. And so I guess point number two after you know, checking the landscape is to create a sales plan. I know that sounds boring because I’ve already said it in the first part of this interview but that doesn’t concentrate on price or otherwise. I put together a sales plan that would talk all about solving problems for people, those people being my target audience, of course. And then what I would do is make sure that all of our sales and marketing activities were not price based, unless it was Walmart. But I mean, most businesses aren’t so therefore, it would be identifying the landscape, identifying the opportunity to steal market share, whether that’s from the little people or the 40,000, gorilla, and then creating a marketing or sales plan that’s not based on price, but based on benefits.

Andy Paul 30:29
All right. So now some rapid fire questions. You can give me one word answers if you want or elaborate. So the first one is when you JD are out selling your services. What’s your most powerful sales attribute?

John JD Dwyer 30:44
Probably saying why not instead of why.

Andy Paul 30:49
Okay, like that. Okay. Who’s your sales role model?

John JD Dwyer 30:57
Probably Zig Ziglar

Andy Paul 31:00
So if you’d recommend one book that every sales and marketing person agreed, what would that be?

John JD Dwyer 31:06
And I’m going to be a sarcastic answer here. This is a guy called John Dwyer in Australia that has one cool way to Wow.

Andy Paul 31:13
Other than other than your own?

John JD Dwyer 31:17
Because he’s so close to the mantra that I preach, I’d have to say Seth Godin, the purple cow, because it’s very close to the wow factor thing that I preach.

Andy Paul 31:25
Okay. All right. Seth Godin purple cow. Okay, last question for you. So what music is on your playlist these days?

John JD Dwyer 31:33
It’s the Beatles BGS and Michael Buble.

Andy Paul 31:40
Michael Buble. Okay. You know, an Australian act?

John JD Dwyer 31:44
Not really, I mean, we’ve got quite, you know, we take ownership of anyone who’s become successful. So despite the fact that BJs were born in England, they lived in Australia for a long while start so we say all the beaches were Australia, but now look, and I know that whoever’s listening to this is here to say, oh, corny Are you but yes if Olivia Newton john came on the radio, I’d probably listened to it.

Andy Paul 32:05
I haven’t heard that in a long while. Alright, so JD thanks for joining me and telling people how they can find out more about you and connect with you.

John JD Dwyer 32:13
Well, thank you very much. We have a website and the website is the Institute of Wales.com. And if anyone would like to enjoy a free webinar and do your listeners, do you feel within joy? Listen to more of this sort of stuff. Sure. Make it I think they offer. Good Okay, well, therefore, if you wanted to get our free webinar where I go through my five step program, it’s completely free. All you need to do is go to wheel of well calm, so that’s wheel of wild calm, and you can register for a video which runs daily, normally your time at 11am and 8pm at night, so if they want to just really get a grasp on this stuff, we’ll have web.com

Andy Paul 32:55
Okay, and they get a free vacation with that.

John JD Dwyer 32:59
Wouldn’t that be I’ll tell you what, there’s a very good chance I’d have a good visitation to that website if I throw in a free vacation to Australia.

John JD Dwyer 33:08
Maybe not a free vacation maybe if you actually buy from JD

Andy Paul 33:12
JD thanks very much for participating in the show. And remember, friends make it a part of your day every day to deliberately learn something new to help you accelerate your success and easy way to do this. Take a minute to subscribe to this podcast Sales Enablement Podcast. That way you won’t miss any of my conversations with top business experts like my guest today JD Dwyer, who shared his expertise about how to accelerate the growth of your business. So thanks for joining me and until next time, this is Andy Paul. Good selling everyone. Thanks for listening to the show. If you like what you heard, and want to make sure you don’t miss any upcoming episodes, please subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or Stitcher comm for more information about today’s guests, visit my website at Andy Paul.com

The Sales Enablement Podcast with Andy Paul was formerly Accelerate! with Andy Paul.