Dan Kennedy's communication control
Lessons from the veteran marketer on setting yourself up to succeed, why you need to disconnect and how an open-door policy has disastrous consequences.
He has been described as follows:
the king of direct response marketing
the guru who taught the gurus
the stage-selling OG
a dinosaur
There might be debate about his merits, but what is beyond debate is the number of successful entrepreneurs who profess to have learned most of what they know about marketing from Dan Kennedy.
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Kennedy has also been around the block. He’s been in business since the 1970s, and as he moved into his later years he sold his 40-year-old marketing business, Magnetic Marketing, to one of his most successful protegés, Russell Brunson.
When someone with so many laps of the race-track behind them tells you which corners have some overtaking potential and which need extra care, it’s good to listen up.
From a recent interview with Brunson, here are some of Dan Kennedy’s most important lessons for success.
Four reasons to be disconnected
Kennedy says, “I'm not connected. I don't want to be connected. I use a computer as a typewriter and a file cabinet. With rare exceptions, I don't take unscheduled inbound calls. I prefer to work with uninterrupted focus on whatever I'm doing.”
Here are four reasons why it pays to disconnect.
1. Control your inbox
“The more communication channels you open, the more disruption you get. The more unhappiness I would get because all those inbound channels have an expectation of immediate response, and I'm not going to immediately respond to anything. Restricting them is about that.”
2. Control the message
“I don't like the way a lot of digital communication winds up at the other end. I can't control exactly how it looks on a page, type fonts, etc.”
3. Control the client
“The client’s ultimate behavior starts way back at the beginning of a process and [continues] all the way through it. Clients want to send you a text anytime they have a brain fart, and most of them are pretty gassy. They want to send texts, emails, and have you pick up the phone and talk to them. I tell them they're not going to get any of that. We'll have pre-scheduled calls, and that's it.
Here's the good news about that. You get 100% of my attention during the scheduled call, which nobody else gives you. People who allow you to bother them like that are communicating thoughtlessly on the fly as fast as possible to get rid of you. They're talking to you on the cell phone while they're in the bathroom or walking the dog. Not me. I'll be at my desk with your stuff in front of me, and you'll have my undivided attention for the agreed amount of time.
By the time they're working with me, they're very used to the fact that there are rules and a process. ‘This is how we do things if we're going to interact with Kennedy.’”
4. Control yourself
“When I go to Panera I ask for ‘apple, not bread’, but sometimes they put the bread in there anyway.
“On the way home, I would have to put it in a dumpster in the garage and shove it down real deep because otherwise I'd be capable of going out and getting it back out of the dumpster and eating the bread. I know myself. So hooking me up to 12 million websites, videos, and podcasts is a bad idea for me”
“If I were internet-connected, I would have six million temptations versus actually working. I'm very susceptible to distractions, but I have no idea what's [out there] because I don't look. I'm aware it goes on, but I don't see it. I know myself.”
Why an open-door policy is a disaster
“At one company early in my career I decided to change the culture.
So I took the door off the CEO office, mounted it on a wall, and wrote "open door policy" in big spray paint on the door.
The idea was to facilitate productivity.
Guess what?
All 44 [of the staff] marched in with grievances or problems, 99% of which they were being paid to solve on their own. By three o'clock in the afternoon, you're lying on the ground dead, and they're all going home at four, forgetting about the whole mess.
Then you're coming in two hours ahead of everyone to get something done before the inmates get turned loose in the asylum. Stupid, right? This is no way to run a business.
Lee Iacocca, who was CEO of Ford, invented the Mustang, and then led Chrysler, told a similar story. He said he did the same dumb thing. The first week he was running anything, he thought he'd be everybody's pal and have great morale.
He ended up getting three minutes of productivity out of a 12-hour day.”
Kennedy on positioning, process and environment
“Maxwell Maltz, in Psycho-Cybernetics, uses the terms ‘success environment’ or ‘failure environment.’
You can either create a success environment for yourself or operate in a failure environment.
Most people operate in a failure environment.
If you position yourself properly and are highly skilled at your deliverable, clients will put up with your process.”
Till next time.
PS If you’d like to listen to the man himself, here’s the source interview in full: