The Art of Selling: Brian Tracy’s Secret to Doubling Your Income

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Hey guys, Ryan Offord here. On today's episode of the Radcast, I have Brian Tracy. Brian has written 92 books on the psychology of selling, personal effectiveness, success. Look, I have certain guests on that talk about their life, talk about what they've done, but there's not necessarily key value insights that really drive profitability and growth for you. Brian does that. He talks about how to double your income.

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Talk about specific tactics that you can take to get ahead, to be successful, to meet goals, to set goals, how to do it, the way to think about it. There's tons of value here on today's episode with Brian Tracy. I challenge you to listen to this and put it to practice. It'll make you rich here on the Radcast.

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You're listening to the Radcast, a top 25 worldwide business podcast. If it's radical, we cover it.

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Here's your host, Ryan Alford. Hey, guys, what's up? Welcome to the Radcast. I'm Ryan Alford, your host. We talk about business. We talk about marketing. If it's radical, we cover it. So we got Brian Tracy International. What's up, Brian? How are you? I'm happy to be with you. Yes, I love your I love your subject. I've been speaking and teaching and preaching and writing books on it now for 50 years. So I'm I'm ready to go.

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Yeah, we came right to the export, the expert. And anything that's a book title, eat that frog. I'm like, that sounds pretty damn radical. Well, it's interesting. I have a friend who wrote a book and he spent five years trying to get someone to publish the book. And finally he found a very small publisher and the publisher published the book and it promptly disappeared, where I made the decision that I would write four books a year.

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And I developed a system to write four books a year and have them published. And it's like throwing darts at a dartboard. If you keep writing and you could have good subjects and lots of content, sooner or later, one of them will be successful and Eat That Frog, which was put together accidentally, has become the bestselling book of its kind in the world in 55 languages. And it's basically Eat That Frog, 21 ways to

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stop procrastinating and get more things done faster. It just turns out that is a major subject for people who buy books is to stop procrastinating. And many people have come up to me, I was at a conference in Washington, DC recently, a man came up to me and said, you're Brian Tracy. And I said, yes, he said, you changed my life. You made me rich. And I heard that statement over and over again, I get it, but once a week people write to me and say,

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You changed my life, you made me rich. And it was also, it was always learning to set goals, set priorities, get started on your most important task and stay with it till it's complete. One of the most important things for success in any field is task completion. It's the failure to complete tasks. Get them to 90, 95% and then coming up with an excuse. Solzhenitsyn wrote about this. He said the number of people who

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will work very hard to get a task to the 95% level, and then they'll coast, they'll back off. And the great problem, Ryan, with coasting is you could only do it in one direction. And so completing the task, starting your most important task and disciplining yourself to complete it changes your life. If you can do that as a habit, you become a totally different person. It actually affects you consciously, subconsciously.

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It affects your personality. It affects your self-confidence. Task completion is the key to success. There are no successful people who have not completed task after task. There's a saying in the world of work that the most important ability is depend ability. And that means that if somebody gives you a job to do, they don't have to think about it because they know that you will do it, you will do it quickly and you'll do it well.

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When you develop a reputation like that, you literally put yourself on the side of the angels. I've used that ability quote myself, because I use it with my team, but I've used it with a different word. I've always said, the best ability is availability. Because in today's world, so many people are distracted or finding other things to do. If you're available, you can rule the world.

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If you're a leader, a manager, a person who other people respond to, availability is good, but up to their dependability is essential. I think a combination of those two is the magic sauce. But Brian, I do have a question. Since we jumped and leaped right in. So I'm going to go right at it on the Eat the Frog, Eat that Frog thing, talk with Brian Tracy, author of Eat that Frog. I always think there's so much knowledge available online and there's so much

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coaching and all these things going on, and we're talking about tasks, completion. For me, it's so much learning, but not enough action. I'm curious how maybe part of your 21 or how do you get people doing stuff instead of learning or reading or absorbing information? The answer to that, and it changed my life when I was a young man, was the discovery of goals.

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And goals is so important. And when people say to me, you changed my life, you made me rich, I say, what was it in my materials that was so helpful? And they smile, they beam, they say it was the goals. I never understood the importance of written goals and plans until I listened to you. And I discovered this back in my early 20s. And so one of the things I say, I've got it right here, is if you wanna be successful, here's a very simple formula.

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I called the book Eat That Frog, was originally entitled Double Your Income, Double Your Time Off. And they choose the name Eat That Frog, but it was 21 ways to increase your productivity. And your productivity, your ability to get results that other people will pay for, is the critical determinant of your standard of living. If successful people are known for getting more and better results. So one of the things that I did in my coaching program,

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is I used to say, I will give you a guarantee. I charged $5,000 a person for a year and they would come and spend a full day with me and a group of other entrepreneurs every three months. So it was four sessions over one year plus $5,000. Average income had to be above $100,000 so that a guarantee, my double guarantee, double your income and double your time off within 12 months or you get your money back.

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And I never had a person ask for their money back. Most people doubled their income within the first 30 days. They could not believe it. Now, here's what I did. You and I are talking so they can't see us. But what I did is I would hand out a spiral notebook at the beginning of each session to guarantee that I wouldn't have to give them their money back. And in the spiral notebook, I would have them write goals in today's date and then write down 10 goals.

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that they want to accomplish in the next 12 months. And I hope for our friends who are listening, please remember this, it's life-changing. And it's life-changing for me now in 84 countries. I've given this exercise and people have said it changed their lives, it made them rich. So what you do is you write down 10 goals, and then tomorrow you take your spiral notebook and you turn to the next page without looking back and write down your 10 goals again.

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And the next morning, first thing you do is you write down your 10 goals without looking back. So you write them from memory. And what will happen is the order of goals will change, the description of goals will change, the various goals will change. But your 10 goals, if you keep doing this for one month, you will reprogram your mind almost like a computer and your life will change forever. And so I would say to people, please do this. And they would come back to me after 90 days.

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I say, how many of you wrote down your goals? Almost all of them. And how's your income? Double, triple, I never earned so much money in my life. They couldn't believe it. There's something about programming your mind with goals. And the only goals that are of any value are written. You've got to write them down in the present tense. Not I will earn, but I earn this amount of money by this date. And what that happens is your subconscious and your super conscious mind

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then goes to work on that goal 24 hours a day. And the most amazing things happen. The law of attraction that everybody knows about, you start to attract into your life, people, circumstances, ideas, you see something in the newspaper, it changes your life forever. So anyway, so if our friends who are listening to this want to get a real benefit, number one is to write down 10 goals every single day for a month. After that, by the way, that's a test. It's a test. Can you do it?

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Do you have the discipline? Do you have the character? Do you have the strength to write down 10 goals? Takes two to three minutes. Do it every single day for a month. And I promise you, your life will change forever. And it always does. I've never had an exception. I've spoken for 40 years in 84 countries to 5 million people. Not a single person has ever said it didn't work. The only thing they said is it worked so fast, it couldn't believe it. It was revolutionary. And it made them rich. In every single case.

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They talk about their family and friends and health and everything else. But the biggest thing was I couldn't believe how much more money they earn when they were working from written goals. That's something we pass along to our friends. Hey, look, I'm a firm believer in, in giving value on this show. We just gave, we just gave some dynamite value there, Brian. So we jumped right into the value equation, which I like. My goal coming into this podcast was value to the audience.

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being we've already done it, Brian. But let's step back a second. I want to set the table. How the hell did you get so smart? What's been the life journey? I know we could talk probably for hours. You've had a lot of experiences, but what's guided this path for you? I came from poor beginnings. I didn't graduate from high school. My first job was washing dishes in the back of a small hotel. That was my first job, by the way. Don't want to interrupt you. You learn character when you wash dishes, my friend.

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I used to joke my biggest promotion was to pots and pans. Oh, I still have the marks on my fingers. Macaroni and cheese dishes at a meet and three. Oh, that's right. And I, when I lost that job, I got a job washing cars in a car lot. And when I lost that job, I got a job washing floors with a janitorial service. I used to joke that I thought washing was in my future because that's where the jobs were.

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And I went on from there. I worked in factories and saw mills. I worked in the woods with a chainsaw. I dug wells on farms. I lived in my old car. And then one day I started asking the question, which was the life changer, is why are some people more successful than others? I met people that were my same age, and they had new cars, and they're earning good livings, and they had nice clothes and everything else. And I would say, why are these people more successful?

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And that became my organizing question for my entire career. I've now written 92 books. Every one of them is on some degree of success in business or personal life. I've recorded more than a thousand programs. Every one of them is on how you can be more successful, faster and easier. And what I found is that there's basically, I say three things. I call them the golden triangle of success. Number one is psychological.

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And that is when you accept a complete responsibility for your life and for everything that happens to you. The failure to do that, the 80-20 rule, which we've all heard about, says that 20% of people earn 80% of the money in any field. And the top 10% earn 10 times as much as the bottom 80%. What I found was that when I first learned that rule, that was a life changer for me, because I made a decision.

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If that's the case, I'm going to be in the top 20%. And that changed my life. Within a year, I was. Within two years, I was in the top 10%. I increased my income 10 times. I could not believe how successful it was. So accepting responsibility is the turning point in your life. Most people are still blaming someone or something else, their parents, their upbringing, unfortunate experiences and so on, for their status in life.

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No, what you'd say is the magic words, I am responsible. What's interesting, negative emotions are the biggest single enemy that human beings have. And the way that you cancel a negative emotion is when you think of it, you always think of someone or something who's the cause of it, the blame, and you say instead, I'm responsible. When you say, I am responsible, your negative emotions disappear. And your negative emotion, I used to toss and turn at night, because I'd be

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really angry at people who have done me dirty and so on. And I started just saying, I am responsible, I'm responsible, I'm responsible. And you know what? I just fell asleep. All the negative emotions disappear. But that's number one. And every single leader will say the same thing, is that's the top of the triangle. The second part of the triangle is written goals and plans that you work on every day. And the third part of the triangle, a third point is continuous learning, which is what you and I.

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are talking about, but continuous learning has to be focused on a result or an end game. And therefore you don't learn generally, you learn how to be better and better at what you are doing now. When I was struggling in sales, I was making 70 calls a day and no sales. I used to run from place to place so I could be rejected more often. I used to work on call-out offices and business people during the day and I'd knock on doors of a...

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homes and apartments in the evening till nine or 10 o'clock. My rule was if the light was on, I would knock. I made my first sale at 9.30 at night on an apartment door, the light was coming from under the door and I knocked on the door and I said, I sell this product. And they said, we were just thinking of buying that product. Come on in. That was my first sale. After 31 days of knocking on doors, 70 doors a day.

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I realized at that time I was not a good salesperson, I was a lousy salesman. And so I began to study sales. I bought every book and every article and magazines, I listened to audio programs. I immersed myself in selling and my sales were up and up and up and up. And my program, I did a program some years later called the Psychology of Selling, which is the best selling audio program on sales in the world.

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in 22 languages that I know of. And it's phenomenal. It just takes all of my years of experience and puts it into one place. And they did a study. They said more people, more salespeople became millionaires after listening to Psychology of Selling and any other single sales influence, which was very exciting for me. And I was talking to one of my clients on Zoom a couple of weeks ago.

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And I said to him, I said, did you know that statistic about psychology? He said, that would explain me. He said, psychology seller made me a millionaire. I have now 26 salespeople working for me and I'm worth, he said, I have enough money, but I never have to work again because of psychology of selling. My point is not to sell the program because it's available on Audible, by the way, not to sell the program, but to say that the key to your success is learn.

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how to be very good at what you do. And that means listen, read, attend seminars. I've given about 3,000 seminars in the course of my career and my average audience was 1,620 people. I would keep track, sometimes more, sometimes less. And I found that all the people who came to my seminars.

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were or became the top people in their fields. And this companies began to send people who get repeatedly and so on, is that something about a seminar, which is a full intensive day, and I prepare workbooks and everything else for them, is that people will go out with their mind loaded with new ideas. So that's the key to success is you've got to learn and learn, become a lifelong learner. I still read.

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Two to three hours a day, I read all the time. You can't see my office, but my office is full of books. My living room is full of books. My basement is full of books. I keep buying about two books a week. They say human beings are the only ones who will buy more books than they will ever live to read. And that explains me. But the most important thing for our friends who are listening is he's set very clear goals

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and then ask this one question, what one skill would help me the most to achieve my most important goal? Look at your list of goals, your 10 goals, and ask, if I could only accomplish one goal on this list, which would be the most important? And in almost all cases, it's financial. That's good. And you ask yourself, what one skill would help you the most to achieve your most important goal? This form of focus is life-changing.

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So just focus one goal and one skill. And I promise you, as you work on that skill, you start to move faster toward the goal, your whole life is going to change. And in a very positive way. Each time you take a step toward your goal, it gives you what is called a positive chemical reaction. Usually it's endorphins or dopamine or one of those chemicals that makes you feel a little bit high. And there was a book

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Wooden by William Glass, or last century, called positive addiction. And it says you can actually become addicted to positive chemicals. Positive chemicals are released by your brain whenever you complete a task or part of a task. And so what you can do is you can get yourself addicted to these positive chemicals, dopamine and endorphins. And whenever you start and complete part of a task or even a full task, you feel happy. It gives you a release. You have more energy.

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positive, you're cheerful, you're laughing, you feel good about yourself and you feel motivated to do it again and to start and complete another task, a full task or a partial task. And what you do is you get total control of your mind and your emotions. So you'll find that successful people are happy people. They're positive. They've got a lot of energy. They smile. They tell jokes. And what do they say? In poker, there's that wonderful line.

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winners laugh and tell jokes and the losers say shut up and deal. And I'll remember that the winners laugh and tell jokes and the losers say, shut up and deal. That's the same thing. When you become a winner, when you start to feel yourself moving towards your goals, you, you feel happy about yourself. So those are the most important things we can tell our friends. And these are the most important things I've learned in a lifetime of teaching millions of people. Awesome.

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Number one, it's all on you. Take the responsibility. Number two, set goals and stick to them. Write them down. You gotta write them down. And number three, keep learning and specifically focusing on one skill to meet your most important goal. Did I pass the test? Brian. There they are. My most important skill when I was

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struggling and working with closing sales. I did not know how to ask in a low key, no pressure professional way. I didn't know how to ask the person to buy. So I did a full court press on learning how to close sales. And I became an expert on it. There's a book of mine called The Art of Closing the Sale. And many people become rich reading that book. And what it does is explains everything you need to do prior to asking.

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customer to buy and how to ask a customer to buy professionally, how to answer their objections and so on. And so when I learned that myself, increased my sales 10 times in a more than just over a year. And I began when I began speaking in seminars, the first seminar I gave was the art of closing the sale. It was 24 techniques that you can use to ask people to buy and countless people said it made them rich.

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It made them rich because once they could close the sale, then they became animals for prospecting and calling on new people because they had this confidence. One of the reasons why salespeople hold back, fear of failure, fear of rejection, is they know that they're not going to be able to close at the end, so they lose their enthusiasm for contacting the prospect in the first place.

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low key professional way. You are hyper motivated to call on more people because if you close the sale you make more money and more money have a better lifestyle or a nice restaurant so they better nice home. So anyway, so learning that skill was a life changer. And then I learned every other skill that went with it. But there's no limit to what a person can accomplish if they will identify their goal. Let's say it's financial and then identify the one skill that can help them.

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Once you've mastered that skill, then you ask it again. Now, what one skill will help me the most. And your life has become like a frog jumping from lily pad to lily pad from skill. You keep developing new skill. One of the things I see in mastermind is people say, what skill are you working on today? What skill are you working on today? If the people listening to us, if someone asked you, what skill are you working on today? What's your big skill? And would you have an answer?

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18 to 90% of people have no answer because they're working on a single skill. They're generally reading this and listening to that, but focus, focus is the key to success. I love it. I'm, but I'll tell you out of everything we've talked about, and I know you've got 92 books, I want to tell our audience about the psychology of selling. And so

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I want to pick your brain there. Talk to me. I know a lot about this, but I want to know Brian Tracy's insights. The starting point of the psychology of selling, of course, is to prepare yourself. So I teach people how to use affirmations, visualization, and so on so that they're up. Nobody wants to buy from a sour push. So you need to be positive. But the starting point is prospecting.

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is I tell people in my audiences, I say, how many people here would like to double their income? So you've got 1600 or 2000 people. Everybody says, yeah, okay. I said, okay, today I'm going to give you some methods that will help you to double your income in the weeks and months ahead. And please open your workbooks and let's begin. And this is just an artifice. And they all go, no, we want to know now. We want to know. I said, okay, I will give you a method.

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that is guaranteed to double your income in less than 30 days. Right. Here's the statistic. The average professional full time salesperson calls on two new prospects a day. That's the average. Some are above, some are below. I know salespeople I've spoken to who call on two new prospects a week. But the average professional salesperson calls on two per day. What you do to double your income is very simple.

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you call on four new people each day. That's one every two hours. Is that achievable? Of course it is. So before you're calling on one every four hours, now you're calling every two hours.

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Because of the law of probabilities and the law of averages, you do not know where the sale will come from. But if you call on twice as many people, you will make twice as many sales and you will increase your income by double. And people come up to me, funny, they come up and say, you don't know what you're talking about. You're full of BS. I've been in my business for 10 years and there's no way I could double my income. Just like calling on more people. I said.

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Why don't you, this is my favorite question. Why don't you give it a try? It doesn't cost anything. I'm not gonna charge you for it. Just go out and keep accurate records. Write down how many people you talk to and what you talked about. Just keep accurate records. And so if I asked you how many people did you call on three weeks ago on Thursday, you could open your book and you know exactly how many calls you made.

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And just do that. Keep track of your calls and call four people a day. And they come back to me, they write to me, they come to my seminars, they meet me on the street, they say, I can't believe, I can't believe, I thought it was BS, but I can't believe it. But in less than a month, I doubled my income. I've been in my business for 10 years and I'm earning twice as much now as I ever earned before with no additional effort. I just basically,

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One of my favorite stories and most of the people listening are in sales of some kind is one of my favorite stories is this insurance sales guy and he was about to quit because he was discouraged and he wasn't making any sales and he got this appointment with a store owner on the other side of town and he drove all the way there and he says, if I don't make this sale, I'm quitting. I'm going to get into another line of work. So we went and he made the call and

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The person said, no, thanks. I'm not interested, which he'd heard so many times before. So he walked out of the store with his resolution to quit. And he noticed that there was another store in the same shopping complex. And he thought, while I'm here, I'll just go and call on that other store and then I can quit and I'm finished. So he went in and he spoke to the owner and the owner was very interested and the owner bought from him.

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And he walked out and he said, I was just about to quit. He said, so from now on, my motto will be one store, one call more at the store next door. One call more at the store next door. And he became one of the champions of his field, one of the highest earners and so on. That's the mentality that you have to have. You make one call more at the house next door, the store next door, the person next door, is you always keep adding.

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And what will happen is you more people you call on, the better you get. Sometimes I ask people, I said, what happens if you call on twice as many people, what happens to your skill level? What happens to your skill level? And they look at me and they go, you get better. I said, yes, you get better. You cannot get worse at selling by doing it. You can't get worse at the skill by doing this. So what you do is you just call on more people. Read.

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study, listen, psychology of selling, upgrade your skills, learn from the experts, don't try to figure it out for yourself, and your income will double. And then once you double your income, what do you do? What do you do? I'm asking this huge audience, what do you do? And they said,

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You do it again. Yes. You do it again. Double your income, do it again, double your income again. So it never ends. You want to quadruple your income, dude. You know, it's all a math equation, right? There's all kinds of studies on this and they talk about.

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The most important thing, I remember a woman who was in my course, she said she had two children and she was divorced. She had to drop them off and pick them up and everything else. So she could only work about three hours a day. So what she did is she consolidated her calls in one geographical area of the city so that she didn't have any traveling time. And I never forgot about that. She became the top salesperson in her company, even though she was working fewer hours because of her children.

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But what happened was she was, she cut down travel time. And that's one of the simplest techniques I ever learned is to reduce your traveling time. Because salespeople actually shoot themselves in the foot by saying, I'll call on this person on the other end of town, and then I'll call on this other person at the other end of town. And then they travel all day in between and they convince themselves that they're working while they're driving to an appointment.

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The only time you're working is when you're face to face with a prospective customer. What is the key to success? You take the, my favorite line, you take two numbers with two dots in between, is what is the one-to-one relationship? It's face time. Face time. How many, how much time do you spend face to face with prospective customers or clients? It's the same for a doctor, a lawyer, an architect, an engineer.

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a chiropractor, how much time do you spend face to face with potential clients, with potential customers. That determines your income more than any other factor. So what you do is you use your intelligence, your ability to manage your time to spend more time face to face. And the rule is 80-20. Is 80% of your time should be spent face to face with people who can and will buy and 20% travel time.

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If it's more than 20% travel time, then it's up to you to reorganize yourself so you're spending more time. I used to, when I was calling, I used to drive my car downtown and I would park it in a parking garage in the middle of downtown. And I would leave it there and I would go out and make calls from office to office, from building to building and so on. And I would only go back to my car at the end of the day.

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I only drive and park my car once and I would park it in a center of prospect. And then I just go, I used to take an elevator to the top floor of an office building and start on the top floor and work my way down. And I call it every single company in the office building all the way down. And those are the tricks that I used to play on myself, but they transform my life and they'll transform the life of anybody else who uses them.

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Increase your face time, spend more time face to face with customers. There's a rule that I learned from Peter Drucker and he said, there are no customers in the office of that. There are no customers in the office. If you're in the office, you were officially unemployed. You might as well go home, go back to bed and pull the sheets up over your face because you're of no use to yourself or anybody else.

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if you're sitting in the office, because there's no customers in the office. Us customers are out there, and that's where you've got to be. So you look at the top salespeople, the top 10 or 20% in every company, you'll find that they come in, they call it touch and go, you're flying an airplane. They come in, they touch first thing in the morning, and they go, and they're gone for the whole day. And maybe they'll come in at the evening to catch up, but they're coming in after five o'clock.

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But during the day, you can't find them in the office because there's no customers in the office. How do you balance that, Brian, with today's world of so much selling is online? It's not in person. I know there's still jobs out there that are in person. But what would be the pivot of that advice maybe in the online sales world that we live now? The situation that we have today is this.

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is the things that you order online, and I'm a huge fan of Amazon, the things that you order online are products that you have already decided to buy. Now, maybe you didn't decide to buy them until you saw the ad and you realized that's something that I want, something that I need. Like for instance, books, for example. Sometimes you read a review of a book and you think, I'd like to have that. My friend Jim Rohn used to say this, don't ever ask yourself how much the book costs.

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How much does it cost if you don't know what's in that book? And that's a really important question. You pay $20 for a book, that book may contain something that's worth fortune to you. You never know. So therefore you keep exposing yourself to more ideas. But the whole purpose of online is to buy things that people have already decided to buy. They're already fixed products. You cannot do customized selling, just like you can't do customized medical treatment online.

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So the best thing that you can do online is you use online to get appointments so you can get face to face with people. And it's what your product that you're selling is something that has to be customized. It's not just an automatic cookie cutter for every person. They want more of this and less of that and some of this and some of that and so on. And they cannot make that decision without the advice that you give them as a professional salesperson.

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I always say you think of yourself as a professional sales consultant. A consultant is a person who asks a lot of questions and then gives a lot of thought to structuring the offering so that it satisfies the most important needs of the potential customer. That can only be done face to face. So we say it was all this online selling, yes, but only standardized products. It's only products that have already been manufactured and put in a box.

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they're set out to. If you're selling any kind of a services, whether it's whether it's insurance or investments or anything else that you're selling any kind of a service that requires person to person, face to face, we say knee to knee, heart to heart conversation. Other than that, the sale won't take place. Yeah, it's fascinating. I don't know. I'm making a lot of sales over zoom. Maybe that's the equivalent of a face to face.

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Yeah, it's the equivalent. Sometimes what happens is people will see you online, hear you online, learn to like you, and respect you online. Then they're open. They'll call you, or you can call them, or you can make an offer to them to like a consultation of some kind. Spend 30 minutes with me, and we can decide whether or not I can help you achieve.

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A goal. And one of the things that I teach adamantly is what is called the value proposition. What is your value proposition? Every product or service has one or more and people buy from you based on that. And most say 80, 20, 80% of companies don't know what their value proposition is. It's lots of things. It's better and faster and cheaper and easier and more attractive and so on. But people buy.

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One thing, and that is improvement. They buy a product or service because they feel that will improve their life or their work in some way. More than any other product or service offered by anyone else. So one of the things I learned in economics is that every customer has three choices. They can buy from you, buy from your competitor, or buy nothing at all.

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Customers who buy nothing at all because you have not appealed to them to what it is what that will motivate them to buy represent 80% of the market Most of the customers out there are customers that neither you nor your competitors talking to Why is because you're defined the value of proposition? What is it now? Let's take a look at Amazon I read Amazon because Jeff Bezos started this idea out of his head

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He had this idea of selling stuff online. Just when the internet was getting popular and most it was used for communication, he had this idea you could sell stuff. And so he thought, well, what would be a good product? And of all the products available, he decided on books. And so he worked out a system where he would...

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offer books for sale, popular books, they, as sellers, the ones that were, people were reading about, talking about, and then he would turn the orders over to the publisher. The publisher would send the book and he'd pay them and he would give the customer a 30% discount. And so that was his basic idea to sell books online with a discount. So people wanted the books, the value offered, clear.

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the special value offering is 30% discount, mail to your home so you don't have to go to the bookstore and look around and find it's not available and so on. And that was the starting point. By 2018, Jeff Bezos was the richest man in the world. Richest man in the world. And what he has now is Amazon. And what Amazon does is it delivers products and services faster than you could buy them yourself.

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I remember ordering some lights for my Zoom phone calls and so on. And I went onto Amazon, I ordered the lights, I was given guidance by experts in the field. And I ordered the lights and they came and the answer popped up. When do you want delivery? And this is like on a Wednesday, Thursday morning between eight and ten, between ten and twelve, between twelve and two. And so I pushed.

40:04

between eight and 10. And the stuff was delivered the next morning at about nine o'clock in the morning. You think, oh my God, that's faster. Imagine if I had to go down and go to different stores and walk the shell, walk the aisles, looking for this sort of stuff. They've got 3 million products on Amazon and they deliver them to you overnight. I just read about their new warehouse here in San Diego. It's five and a half acres.

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of mechanized delivery. It's just, it's unbelievable. Five and a half acres. It's what is it? 250,000 square feet or something like that. You can't believe it. And the speed of delivery is amazing. So what did Jeff Bezos do? A value offering is rapid delivery, low prices, unconditionally guaranteed. So if you don't want something, and I turned out I didn't need some of the things that I ordered.

41:03

I called them up and they said, please place them by your front door. UPS will pick them up, will credit your account. And they did. Everything I bought was picked up by them and then credited back. How can anybody ever compete with Amazon? And it makes the founder.

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the richest man in the history of the world. Yes. Everything is value offering. What value are you offering that nobody else can offer that is motivational, that improves people's lives in such a way that they want to buy from you and only from you? That's the key to success in business. As we close out, Brian, how do people find that value prop? Is there just talking to more and more customers?

41:53

It's a great question. 80% of products fail because customers don't want them. And this is, again, I do continuous research in this. That 80% factor, I call it SMH, shake in my head.

42:12

is they come up with an idea that they think is a great idea for a product or service, and then they start a company and they advertise it and they promote it. But you know, the story about the big company that spent $100 million developing the perfect dog food, perfect dog food, and it failed completely. And they asked the

42:34

researchers, what was the problem? They said it was the beautiful dog perfectly developed, but the dogs hated it. And that's a great story because people think, oh, this is a great product or service, but the customers hated it. At least they didn't like it more or better than a competitive product.

42:59

or buying nothing at all. Well, remember they can buy from you, buy from your competitor or buy nothing at all. And the thing I would say to our friends in listening is that if there's three words that determine your success or failure and the words are test, is sometimes just a one company test. Here's one of the great techniques is take a piece of paper and write out a description of your product.

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and the change it makes in the life of the person who consumes it. The benefit, the advantage, the value. All right. And then show this written description to a potential customer. If the potential customer will not commit to buying based on a written description, then the product is not correct. And so there's this cheapest test of all. We call it a one customer test.

43:54

Say, who is the ideal customer for my product or service? Let's say Jeff Bezos, it's a reader. Person who likes to read a lot, all right? So I'm gonna write out, this is what you get if you order it from me, rather than going to the bookstore, which was the alternative choice. And if that description is not so attractive that I decide to buy immediately from this, then you have to go back to the drawing boards.

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And 80% of companies fail because their product does not have a value proposition that customers want in sufficient quantity to buy and to make it successful. And you are responsible. You are responsible. There you go, blending the forgetting with the end.

44:40

Brian, I think I have something tells what we could talk for three hours and we'd get about 100 valuable lessons. But something tells me you've got all this in books and or audio format for everyone. Where can they find all this great info and all the value that you've put out there, Brian? The books are all on Amazon. Yep. Easiest way to buy them. And the audio programs are all on Audible. Awesome. And they're not that expensive.

45:07

And fortunately, these companies all offer unconditional guarantees. One of the things that helped me when I, when I was selling was I would offer from the stage, I would offer different learning programs. And I would say all these programs are free. It's a special offer just for today. They're all free. Everybody would go, yay. I said, no, it's a special kind of free. And let me explain to you what I mean. And then I'll go.

45:33

Oh, it's like playing a musical conductor. And I say, here's what I'll do. Please buy these programs, take them with you. If they don't more than pay for themselves and turn out to be free in terms of the added income that you get from applying them, you can give them back to us any time in the next year or forever. And we'll give you your money back 100 percent. No questions asked.

46:03

So I call it my double. If you don't double your income, then you don't have to pay for it. And so people would buy from me by the truckload. And we used to get one in 400 would come back. One in 400. Because the programs, we could give that guarantee because the audio programs were so good. They're so helpful. And that's the same thing. So I always offer a, I call it free plus a profit. If you buy from me,

46:33

not only is it free because it pays for itself, but it makes a profit. So you can't go wrong because if you don't get it free, plus a problem, I'll give you money back. Hey, that's, I say that to our friends who are listening because it's a fabulous guarantee free plus a profit view. Wow. That's a, that is a great deal.

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And if you believe in your product, if your product or service is a good product or service, then you should have no reluctance to give that kind of a guarantee. There you go. I like to say you're eating your own dog food. You're practicing what you preach. I love it, Brian. I really appreciate your time. I know you've added a lot of value here and maybe we can do it again because something tells me you've got even more value to share. Thank you, Wyatt. It's a pleasure being with you and I wish all of our friends

47:24

the very best of success. And if you want to learn from me directly, join my newsletter, ryanoffer.com backslash newsletter. Sign up, I give daily advice on marketing, personal branding, podcasting, life. Give that a shout, join that, it's free, it's daily. Just like this show, give away our best advice. Hey guys, I want you to check out the show notes. You'll find links to everything Brian Tracy talked about today and his books. We'll link to those in the show notes. You'll find us thereadcast.com.

47:53

And I'm at Ryan Alford on all the social media platforms. We'll see you next time on the Radcast. To listen or watch full episodes, visit us on the web at theradcast.com or follow us on social media at our Instagram account, v.rad.cast or at Ryan Alford. Stay radical.