“What the hell was that?” someone standing behind me
whispered urgently.
I turned to see Bosco.
He had sidled up to the podium right after Joey left. He seemed agitated, so I said nothing. Bosco
glowered at me and repeated his question.
I stepped back from the podium and motioned for Bosco to follow me as we
took an aimless little tour around the room, so as not to be overheard.
“That was Joey’s new Web site,” I said.
“I could see that, Michael.
Don’t be flippant! Just tell me
why the hell you found it necessary to put it up on that overhead for everyone
to see! People will think we designed it
for him, God forbid.”
“Don’t be such a
drama queen, Bosco.
It’s done.
Now, what else is on your mind?”
“I just want to be sure you’re ready to talk about the Web
site. Keith is very nervous right
now. There’s a rumor circulating that
we’re going to be offering the use of it to all of our clients for free! You’ve got to set people straight on that!”
“Bosco, the absolute worst thing we could do right now is to
acknowledge this bullshit rumor. I’ll
lay out the case for why the Web site is critical to everyone’s marketing plan,
but as far as the pricing, I’m leaving that for individual consultations after
the conference breaks up this afternoon.”
“You got anyone lined up?”
“Sure, about 10 as of Friday.
But you gotta let me close them.”
Bosco paused and then asked, “What do you plan to tell them
this morning?”
And quite unexpectedly, an idea came to me.
I’m one of those people who actually like to speak in
public.
I tried out for a part in a play
when I was in high school and got it, but I hated memorizing lines.
My first and last foray into the thespian art
was a disaster as I adlibbed my way through Shakespeare’s Julius
Caesar, at one
crucial point, responding to the main character’s dying query, “Es tu Brute?”
by shrieking, “Die motherfucker!” as I plunged my knife downwards to finish him
off.
I next took a class in debating and
discovered that speaking “extemporaneously” was actually encouraged and so I
did, almost to the point of absurdity.
During one mock debate, I ridiculed my opponent by repeating his
argument back to him at high speed.
No
one in the room could understand a word I said and so when my opponent tried to
counter the argument, his own argument, I revealed the ruse and thanked him for
making my point for me.
The next thing I
knew, I was on the Debating Team.
This
was a truly dangerous proposition.
I
mean, how could I resist the opportunity to pontificate in front of a captive
audience?
It was beautiful!
I was a born attention whore then and nothing
in the intervening 30 years had changed that.
When I stepped up to the podium at the conference room at the Monte
Carlo to deliver my presentation on the Web site, I was completely in my
pudding.
I looked out at my little flock
of pie-eyed studio owners. They were all sipping their second or third cups of
coffee of the morning and wondering how long they were going to be stuck there
before they would be let loose.
It was
kind of cute.
They looked like a bunch
of 11-year old kids during the last day of school.
They knew they had to be there and they
couldn’t wait to break out.
My challenge
was to hold their attention for about 45 minutes while making my case about the
value of Web advertising.
Then it would
be up to Keith, Les and Bosco to get them primed for the afternoon of seminars;
that, and the very rude awakening that SlipNot was going to expect them to pay
us for a product that we were going to insist that they give away for
free.
I smiled, took a breath and began.
“
Imitation is not the greatest form of flattery.
Acquisition is.
I’m going to repeat that, okay?
Imitation is not the greatest form of flattery,
but acquisition is.
Now why would I say
that?
The reason is that literally
anyone
can go about trying to copy a good idea.
They might get it right, or they might screw it up.
But either way, all they’ve done is try to
steal someone else’s hard work.
Why in
the hell anyone would take that as flattery is beyond me.
But, if I like your idea so much that I come
to you and ask you to sell it to me, then I’ve paid you a hell of a
compliment.
I’ve acknowledged that I
admire your work.
I respect it so much
that I feel compelled to own it for myself.
But because I also hold you in high esteem, I will negotiate with you to
acquire it through a deal that benefits both of us.
But the reality is that this had better be a
really great idea, otherwise why should I bother?
“Let me tell you a story.
About 10 years ago, Bosco Ignatz told me to go out and learn everything
I could about commerce on the World Wide Web.
Back in 1995, there were a lot of folks trying to make a buck on the
Web, but almost none of them were actually succeeding. Hell, even amazon.com didn’t make any money
that year! In fact, Amazon didn’t turn a
profit until 4 years ago! That’s a long
time for an idea to show tangible results.
But I bet there isn’t a single person in this room who hasn’t bought something
off that site in the past couple years.
Amazon.com is a huge success, even if it lost money for almost 7
years. But in 1995, less than 2% of all
of the commercial sites on the Web earned a profit, so amazon.com wasn’t
alone.
“As part of the research I did for Bosco that year, I
investigated a site called firefly.com.
It turned out that these folks were running a very entertaining, on-line
research program to test market musical acts by allowing visitors to their site
to tell them what kind of music they already liked.
The site also offered recommendations of new
recordings that the data it had gathered indicated that the users might
enjoy.
The database firefly.com created
was of enormous value to the wholesale distributers of CDs, LPs and tapes.
The distributers had warehouses full of
product that they had to move and firefly.com was able to help them select
products that were apt to spend less time on their shelves before they were
sold.
What these guys had figured out
was that
the most important commodity that could be traded on the Internet was information.
This may not seem like such a revelation
today, but back in ’95 when everyone was trying to sell every damn thing they
could think of on the Web, and getting killed in the process, the folks at
firefly.com were acquiring, processing and then selling a product that they
created by themselves, owned exclusively and could store indefinitely without
incurring any kind of warehouse overhead.
Furthermore, they owned a product that was of great value to a target
market and that target market was grateful to purchase it.
This proves one of the great truths about
sales that Bosco has probably told each and every one of you in this room: If
you can figure out what the other guy needs and you can guarantee to deliver it
to him in a timely fashion, he will give you anything you want in return.
The genius of firefly.com was anticipating a
need and providing it before anyone else had a chance to do the same thing.
“So what happened to firefly.com? Well, I told you that acquisition was the
highest form of flattery, right? One of
the smartest entrepreneurs in the world heard about what the folks at Firefly
were doing and so he poked around to learn as much as he could about it. When he discovered that they had created an
on-line community that offered information to its members for free and that the
members were reciprocating by giving the site an almost endless supply of data
that could be quantified, qualified and assigned to determine the future buying
habits of that community, he recognized that they had revolutionized the way
that marketing analysis was going to be done from that point forward. He also realized that he had missed the boat. He could allocate his resources (and believe
me, he had plenty of resources at his disposal) to try to create a similar
database and then build a community to feed it, or he could go see if that
database was for sale. His name was Bill
Gates and in 1998 he paid $40 million to scoop up firefly.com. He used the technology that Firefly had built
to launch a variety of Windows platform services, but the important part of
this story for all of us is that in business, forward thinking is often
rewarded by other forward thinkers.
“So, I would submit to you that Bosco Ignatz was a forward
thinker in 1995.
He had no experience at
all with the Internet.
Hell, I could
tell you stories about the trouble he
still has just turning his damned
computer on in the morning.”
This got a
good laugh from the group and I saw that even Bosco was enjoying himself.
“But what made him brilliant was that he saw
the computer and the Internet as necessary sales tools for our industry.
My bet is that few of you had email accounts
10 years ago.
Jesus, I guarantee
it!
How many of you insisted on getting
your first batches of leads from theresnohaironmyhead.com via fax?
That was, to put it delicately a pain in the
ass for all parties involved, wasn’t it though?
Thank God we’ve evolved!”
There was a big laugh from the attendees for that line. To my surprise, some of them began to
applaud. Joey Romano was red-faced, but
smiling.
“But the most remarkable thing that Bosco and I found during
that first year was that the damn thing actually turned a profit. People from all over the world were investing
psychotic amounts of money in Web sites that they were all sure would bring
them millions of dollars in sales, only to fall flat on their faces. Meanwhile, a tiny consulting company in
Vermont had achieved what 98% of all the sites on the Web that year had failed
to pull off. We actually made money! But
the bigger story was that we helped our clients make money too!
“I guess it shouldn’t have been a big surprise that some
flatlander from
New York City would take notice.
Keith Baade saw what Bosco had done and he
wanted in on it.
And by the way, not
just for him.
He wanted this tool for
all of you.
He knew that if he helped
you make more money, you would make him more money as well.
He saw that theresnoheaironmyhead.com was the
right sales and marketing tool for right now and he offered Bosco the ultimate
flattery: he asked if he could buy him out.
“So now Keith has this great tool and he wants all of you to
have it.
You are the best customers
SlipNot has and so you get first crack at making it your own.
If you take a good look around this room,
you’ll notice that each of you represents a completely different DMA.
This isn’t by accident.
Keith personally put this guest list together
with the thought of making sure that the people who had helped him build his
business got first refusal on the opportunity to use theresnohaironmyhead.com
to generate qualified leads for their studios.
That means that if you put your
hand in the air and say you want in
right now, you get exclusive access to that supply of leads.
No one else in your DMA will be offered this,
if you agree that you want it.
It’s
yours for as long as you want it, period.
“I can already see that a few of you are asking yourselves,
‘Okay, so what is this going cost me?’ It’s a legitimate question and as some of you
know, I’ve already made appointments to talk about this privately with
you. But the rough outline of the deal
is that you will be billed $2500 annually for the exclusive license to the Web
site in your DMA. I know that’s a lot of
money, but think about it for a minute.
If you give us the approximate annual gross that you take in from one of
your existing clients and we can get you qualified leads that you can convert into
7…9…12 new clients a year – would that be okay with you?
“You’re going to need help learning to work these new leads
though.
They’re not like the ones you
get from
TV.
To begin with, these folks
have done their homework by researching solutions to their hair loss
on-line.
They’re educated and that makes
them better clients for you, once you know how to talk to them.
This is the young client base that this
industry needs right now.
We can’t keep
selling to baby boomers forever, even if they did keep us alive through the
‘90’s.
We have to go where the new
market is and that market is on the Web.
You may not know how to talk with these leads yet though.
They came to you from the Internet and so
they expect you to deal with them in that medium.
We know how to talk to this market and we’ll
coach you on how to do it.
After all, we
can’t succeed at what we do unless every one of you is successful too, right?”
I stopped for a few seconds and took a drink of water. I wasn’t really all that thirsty, but I
wanted to make sure my audience was still following me. Frank Rotella smiled broadly at me as I
caught his eye. He was dressed in an
extraordinary outfit, a cream colored suit, a light blue shirt and he was festooned
with an outrageous salmon colored tie.
Joey Romano looked intently at me.
Bosco and Keith were standing at the back and both of them were nodding
their heads. I scanned the room and
spotted Sasha. She was busily writing
something in a notebook. No one appeared
to be staring off into space.
Holy shit, I thought.
They’re buying it!
The next episode of SlipNot will be published on September 29th.
If you'd like to read SlipNot in its entirety, GO HERE.
