Dear Reader,

“Going Out of Business! Everything Must Go!! BIG SALE!”

A furniture store can move a year’s worth of inventory in two weeks with a liquidation sale.

It works. Once.

But you don’t get to pull the same trick twice.

Fake sales are carnival barking — they prey on the uninitiated.

The wise shopper isn’t fooled.

Trust is built over time.

Trust is a currency.

Trust depreciates with Direct Response Marketing.

Trust appreciates with Sales Activation.

Direct Response is the endless drumbeat of discounts, daily sales, and manufactured urgency.

Sales Activation is different. It’s the honest, intentional use of real opportunities — the kind of urgency that springs from truth.

In this episode, Roy and I explore the Seven Truths of Sales Activation — and why gimmicks will always betray you in the end.

Watch / listen above or read below

Todd Liles: Welcome to Todd Liles and The Wizard of Ads. Today’s episode is episode number 25, and this is going to be about how to create calls-to-action that drive results. Because, Roy, here’s the thing. I know every listener that is on here has been waiting for us to tell them, what do they do to make people pick up that phone and call right now? Because everybody on here is looking for the direct response.

And we’re going to talk about the direct response, but maybe not in the way that they think, because we’re actually going to use a different term. We’re going to talk about sales activation.

Roy Williams: Right.

Todd Liles: We’re going to get right into the middle of it. Because in our last episode and in the episodes prior, we talked about things like headlines. How do headlines start a conversation? How do they get you to the next step? And three episodes back, we talked about Google and the steady rising cost of PPC and how that’s not going away.

So today I figured, why don’t we give ’em what they want? Why don’t we tell ’em how to create ads that will create immediate results? Because that’s what they want. That’s what they’re craving, Roy.

Roy Williams: That’s what everybody… Of course it is… 

Todd Liles: It’s what they’re craving. As always, you can find resources on today’s episodes inside of Roy’s Monday Morning Memos. I’m going to reference the articles that we’re going to be referencing today up front. How to become a sales activation addict. All right, the Seven Secrets of Sales Activation. I’m actually going to read those seven secrets to them today, Roy. How to create healthy, safe, and sustainable sales activation. The 12 answers of a great ad writer and in Just three words.

So let’s jump into it, Roy. Topic number one today is sales activation. What in the world is sales activation?

Roy Williams: Sales activation is when you give the customer a reason why right now would be a great time for them to take action. And there is not artificial urgency, but there’s actually, there’s a window of time that is an authentic window of time and it’s not subjective. And it’s like, this is the thing you should be doing right now. And if that appeals to you, here’s how you can reach us.

And so you are in fact making an offer. The offer is limited to the number that you have available, or to a window of time, not simply that you just chose a subjective end date.

Todd Liles: Right.

Roy Williams: But if you’re doing something that is a pre-season thing, when in the middle of the season, it’s too late to do the pre-season thing. See what I mean?

Todd Liles: Yeah. So what I like about this is I’m imagining that I’m a farmer.

Roy Williams: Okay.

Todd Liles: And I’m farming this really rare apple. It’s this very unique apple. It took me a long time to come up with this breed. And the season came, I collected my apples. This beautiful rare apple. We come up with a great name for it. But the truth is it’s delicious. It’s super sweet. It’s got this amazing crunch. Everyone that’s tried it loves it. And I count and I go, oh, I’ve only got 12 bushels of apples. That’s it. Normally a harvest of this size would be four times that amount. I really, truly have a limited number of bushels. I’ve got 12. So I’m going to talk about these great apples and say, I’ve only got 12 bushels. To me, that’s sales activation.

Roy Williams: That is sales activation. Absolutely.

Todd Liles: Yeah.

Roy Williams: And it’s not phony.

Todd Liles: It’s not phony. An example of direct response to me would be a different farmer doesn’t have these apples. He’s got your plain Jane apples. They’re not very tasty, they’re sort of mushy on the inside. He does a harvest. He doesn’t have 12 bushels, he has 1,200 bushels. But he says, hey, what we’re going to do is we’re going to tell everybody they’re very limited, they’re sweet, they’re delicious. I’ve only got 12 bushels. But that’s what we need. We need to sell ’em. And also because I want to get rid of ’em, I’m going to sell ’em at a 40% discount.

Roy Williams: Right.

Todd Liles: That’s direct call-to-action.

Roy Williams: Yeah. And so the truth has a ring to it. The truth has a sound to it, and an exaggeration has a sound to it, and then just an outright lie has a stink to it. And people subconsciously kind of know. They kind of know that this guy’s telling the truth. He just has all the marks of the truth. Other times they go, “Yeah, this is just somebody that’s just doing the…” and they just tune it out. And so customers in this century are jaded, experienced, and hard to fool, is the point.

Todd Liles: Here’s a quote that you have. I love this. “Sales activation is like shearing the wool from a sheep. You can do it again and again, and the creature is never diminished.”

Roy Williams: Yeah.

Todd Liles: May I add that direct response is like shearing the wool from the sheep and then taking a lamb chop and thinking the sheep is still whole?

Roy Williams: Right. And it’s kind of like, no, when you slaughter the sheep, you get no more wool.

Todd Liles: You get no more wool.

Roy Williams: You just get whatever that sheep carcass was worth because now the sheep is gone. And so shearing the sheep, it’s actually good for the sheep. The sheep likes it. And it’s like an orchard. It’s a repeatable thing. Whereas if you have to plant a whole new harvest, man, that’s a lot of work. Every time you harvest, you gotta plant seed all over again. It’s like, no, let’s plant seeds that become like coffee or apples or cherries, and it’s just a… Or grapevines that just produce and produce and produce and produce and produce year after year after year. And that’s like, no, I’m going to raise sheep for wool. I’m not going to raise sheep for meat.

Todd Liles: Earlier today, we were having breakfast, and I told you a quote from a guy that is a mutual friend of our friend Ryan Deiss. And he’s really smart. He really is. He’s truly smart. I think this guy’s got a lot of great business sense. But remember I said this guy’s also a direct response marketer at heart.

Roy Williams: Right.

Todd Liles: And I’m talking about Alex Hormozi. I don’t think that people have anything bad to say about Alex that know him. He seems to be a genuinely good human. But when I said he’s a direct response marketer at heart, I mean it to the extent like some of his advice is to have a sale every day of the week for any reason whatsoever. We’re throwing a toga party. Have a sale. It’s Friday. Have a sale. It’s like you should come up with a million… You basically should have a sale every single day. And you and I know that if you’re having a sale all the single time, it’s not a sale anymore. It’s like the furniture store business that’s there in San Marcos that’s been going out of business for 20 years. No one believes it anymore.

Roy Williams: Right.

Todd Liles: It’s done. It’s over. But I think there is a real danger, which is segment number two: the danger of overactivation. There is a real danger to overactivation, and probably the biggest one is summed up in this quote, which is, “Anything that delivers big results quickly loses effectiveness over time.” It’s like drugs. You’ve said this so many times. People, they get addicted to it.

So here’s the real question, Roy. If I’ve become addicted to direct response, I’m just looking for a sale, looking for a reason every time I can, and I’m an addict now. I know I’m a direct response addict. I keep spending money even though it’s costing me more. How do I break that addiction?

Roy Williams: Okay. Pain. Let’s talk about change. Any change. If you want to lose weight, you will not lose weight until the pain of remaining as you are is greater than the pain of limiting your calorie intake. You will not change unless the pain of not changing is greater than the pain of change. And so change is always painful. The addict… No addict will ever actually get treatment that sticks. Your family makes you go into rehab, you’re going straight to your dealer when you get out. You’re not fixed. You just did the rehab thing, but you still have the craving. If you are going to change, it is pain that will make you do it, where you say, “This isn’t working anymore. I keep trying it. I keep spending tons of money. I keep taking the advice of people that are supposed to know what they’re doing.”

And in my experience, Todd, and this is tragic, when a person has just been trying desperately to get to the next level and they’ve been doing it for three years and they’ve done everything they can think of and nothing is working and they’re flat at best or slightly down year after year, that is when the pain is usually sufficient.

Roy Williams: And that’s a totally subjective number. It’s just the number that I’ve noticed over the years.

Todd Liles: Right.

Roy Williams: Nobody will really change if they believe, “Well, I should be able to spend the money and generate the lead. Spend the money, generate the lead.” And I’m going, “Okay, it’s a beautiful dream.” And when you’re small enough, you can make it work. And even big companies can make it work if everybody else in town is doing the same thing. In other words, if everybody in the category in a community is… Everybody’s doing Google Ads, and they’re spending all their money on Google Ads, okay, the guy with the biggest budget wins. The end. Game over. And so you can do something that really is not the highest and best use of your money as long as nobody else in town knows any more than you do.

Todd Liles: I want to talk to you about pain for a second.

Roy Williams: All right.

Todd Liles: And dear listener, forgive this story. I did grow up as a redneck in Mississippi and Louisiana. That’s a fact. And we would go catch frogs. Sometimes we would gig, which I don’t know if it was illegal at the time. Sometimes we just caught ’em, caught ’em by hand, because we could, and it was fun. And there was something that we knew. We’re kids. I wouldn’t do this today. But what we knew was that if you took a couple of frogs and you put ’em in a pot, right? And the pot was the temperature of the water they came out of, they’d stay in that pot. It’s comfortable, it’s cozy. And if we’d slowly turn the heat up on the pot, slowly, they’d never jump out and they’d boil themselves to death.

Roy Williams: Right.

Todd Liles: The reason why I bring that up is that I think the thing that a lot of the addicts have found themselves into is I agree with you about the pain. But the problem is this. The pot has been turned up slowly over time. They become so used to it, it feels somewhat comfortable. They weren’t thrown into it immediately. And that is sad, because some people will cook themselves, literally. It’ll be over, game over, you’re done. You’re toast.

I have a recommendation. Because when you’ve become desensitized to the pain, the way that you feel the pain again is that you must get contrast. You must know what cool water feels like to know what hot water feels like. Here’s what I recommend to the listener that’s hearing what we’re saying. Pull up your stats now and from years ago. Look at your cost, look at your reduction in response, and you’re probably not doing relational branding right now.

But you probably know people that are, people that are perhaps connected with us. Call them, see if they’ll share their stats. When you see what a well-branded company that’s doing relational marketing, what their cost per click looks like compared to yours, when you see what their conversion is compared to yours, you will be awakened to the pain again.

Roy Williams: Yesterday we were looking, well, it was Tuesday. This is Thursday. On Tuesday we were actually looking at data that one of our partners extracted from Service Titan. He has access to the API and he pulled this data to demonstrate from the Service Titan data to a client that unbranded keywords… The unbranded keywords are whenever somebody types in hot water heater replacement, air conditioning repair, something like that. They name the category that they need, not the name of the advertiser.

Now, the advertiser, of course, had seen the branded keyword search. People searching for him by name or by one of the phrases that is always used in the ads, right, opening or closing phrases. Those are branded. In other words, nobody else uses them. They’re definitely looking for you, even if they don’t remember the name of the company, remember this thing that you always say. Okay, in the same city in the same week. And this was like three years into the campaign. So we had 156 weeks of nonstop advertising behind us, okay, 52 weeks a year. And a click, not a sale, but a click was costing him $42, which was not bad in the unbranded keywords.

Todd Liles: Okay.

Roy Williams: Branded: barely $4.

Todd Liles: There you go.

Roy Williams: When somebody typed his name into Google and clicked it. And the close rate, the conversion, unbelievably high conversion when they type in your name, unbelievably high average sale because they’re not shopping around, and unbelievably high profit margin. So high CAP, C-A-P. And so all of the profits, you can look down at the bottom. This amount of profit is made from jobs this last week that typed in your name into Google.

Todd Liles: That’s it.

Roy Williams: And you know what saw on the other side? The conversion was so low, it’s actually in three different cities. The conversion was so low, the average sale was so low, and the profit margin was so low on those jobs that he actually lost $18,000 in this city after you deduct the cost of the AdWords.

Todd Liles: That’s it.

Roy Williams: So the gross profit on the job minus the cost of the AdWords, right? And in three different cities, red ink at the bottom. And this is straight out of Service Titan, dead loss. Most digital agencies don’t want to separate your data from branded and unbranded keywords unless you don’t have a name. Nobody’s typing in your name, so it doesn’t change anything. But whenever your branding campaign, we like to call it customer bonding, you’re building a bond with future customers. When you finally have got enough, and usually it takes six, seven months to really get any kind of momentum going at all, and even then, you’re not going to be excited, but you’re going to know it’s working and you’re going to be able to feel good about the future. Well, this person was ready for it because he had had three years of pain, real serious pain.

And so when he switched over, he was all in, never looked back. And so now we’re at the end of a year, he’s super excited. This has grown great. At the end of the second year, he’s like dancing in the street, showering in money. At the end of the third year, we pull this data and we’re saying you need to quit spending money on unbranded keywords. Just quit, ’cause it’s actually costing you money. You’re literally spending more money to generate the click than you’re making on the jobs. And once he saw that, he goes, “Yeah, you’re right.”

And so you can get to the point where you’re paying $4 a click that have a super high conversion rate, and now all of a sudden, you have a very modest AdWords budget. Always pay for your own name. Figure out a way to make people type your name into Google.

Todd Liles: That’s it. That’s 100% it. And the next part of that after pain still is belief. I can realize my pain, but can I believe that you guys can actually do what you say that you could do? It’s the same thing we struggle with at Service Excellence. People can be in deep pain, but as you’ve said before, when someone’s had three or four bad experiences, they are automatically assuming that their experience is also going to be bad with you. And I would say you don’t even want to take that client on if they’re already convinced at the top that, “No, no, you’re going to be the same as everybody else.” Well, then go away, ’cause you’re not even going to give me a fair chance. I need a fair chance.

Let’s move into the next segment here. I now want to talk about The 7 Truths of Sales Activation. And before I get to The 7 Truths of Sales Activation, I want to read something from one of your articles, The 7 Quiet Secrets of Sales Activation. So, listener, if you will, these are quiet secrets. I’m not going to read them quietly, but I want to give them to you.

Number one, every powerful message comes at a cost.
Number two, when you don’t have cash, spend time instead.
Number three, these diamond earrings whisper, “I love you.”
Number four, promote your slowest day of the week.
Number five, you don’t think like a business owner, you think like the customer.
Number six, in-house financing at 0% interest is a friendlier offer.
Number seven, powerful offers work even when they don’t.

Now, if you want the context, go read the full blog in its depth, The 7 Quiet Secrets of Sales Activation. I wanted to preface that, Roy, because now I want to go into The 7 Truths of Sales Activation, which is in the same blog. And what I’d like you to do in a sentence or two, land the plane after I give each one.

Roy Williams: Okay.

Todd Liles: Number one…

Roy Williams: Okay.

Todd Liles: You never see a bigger crowd than the first time you cry wolf.

Roy Williams: Yeah. The companies that do store closings, going out of business. There’s several companies that will come in and facilitate a going out of business for retailers. You know what their single biggest question is when they determine the level of their interest in being the people that you contract with?

Todd Liles: What’s that?

Roy Williams: How often do you have a sale and how deep are the discounts? And when a company never has a sale, never had a sale in the history of the company…

Todd Liles: That’s what they do.

Roy Williams: Then they go, “Oh, we’re in.” Because now when you say, “We’re selling it to the walls, no reasonable offer will be refused,” and all that kind of stuff, everybody believes it because this company in 70 years has never had a sale. And so now all of a sudden, you’ll have to have a traffic cop. I mean, it’s a madhouse. People will be standing in line for blocks before the doors even open.

And if a company got in trouble ’cause they were always, always, always having a 30% off sale, and then nobody would come in at 30% anymore and they’d have to start having a 40% off sale to get traffic, and then nobody came in on 40% off, so they had to have a 50% off sale, and then pretty soon it’s like the fireworks stands where it says, “Buy one, get 12 free.” And it’s like, yeah, that’s a scam, and we all know it’s a scam.

Roy Williams: But the point is, when people believe you, they respond.

Todd Liles: Right.

Roy Williams: When they don’t believe you because they’ve heard this lie before, they don’t respond.

Todd Liles: I want to read the number two truth, and I think you just already covered the detail of it, so I’m just going to read it. Number two, anything that delivers big results quickly will work less and less well the longer you keep doing it.

Roy Williams: Yep.

Todd Liles: Number three, you cannot build a strong and resilient company on gimmicks and empty promises. Number four, anything that works better and better the longer you keep doing it will deliver disappointing results at first. Let’s pause there.

Roy Williams: All right. And so the one about gimmicks and empty promises, okay, there’s two kinds of customers in every business category in the world. Well, three kinds. There’s customers that are switchable. They’re willing to switch to a different brand or a different provider. There’s customers that are non-switchable. They’re not leaving their current product or service provider until that product or service provider screws up really, really, really, really bad more than once. They’re absolutely going to be forgiven for one big screw-up from a loyal customer. Two, maybe. But there comes a point at which, “Yeah, I’m gone, sorry.” So switchable, non-switchable.

And then the third category is switchable for reasons of price alone. So when you’re doing gimmicks and you’re doing hustles and you’re doing little con things, you are appealing to customers that are switchable for reasons of price alone. All the research, every independent research organization that’s ever researched it, and some big ones have, they’ve done it for decades. Guess what they will always tell you. The customer who will switch to you for reasons of price alone will switch from you for the same reason just as quickly. And there is nothing that someone else cannot do a little worse and sell a little cheaper.

And so you cannot build a solid business on price alone. And so whenever you get caught into this trap of discount and special offer and whatever, you’re training these people to wait for increasingly big offers, and you’re training everybody else. Those people are just scam artists, and I want to deal with a company that is reliable, has integrity, delivers a high level of service, and they’re not caught up on all this carnival barking. And so the switchable customer is how you build a powerful company.

Todd Liles: Absolutely.

Roy Williams: And then you win the switchable customer, and then you make them non-switchable.

Todd Liles: So Roy, I’ve heard different numbers before. I’ve heard that the switchable for reasons on price alone was as little as 15% and as high as 30%. As in there are just 15% to 30% of the marketplace where really the only thing they’re really concerned about is the lowest price. Do you know if those numbers are accurate?

Roy Williams: I don’t know what’s accurate. I will tell you what I actually believe…

Todd Liles: Yes, I’d like to.

Roy Williams: Very, very, very, very, very deeply. I believe in every product or service category, it’s about half.

Todd Liles: Oh, wow.

Roy Williams: I think that about half of the purchasers are going to shop till they drop. And it’s the transactional customer. The transactional customer, their biggest fear is that they could have bought it somewhere else for a little bit less. And the biggest fear of the relational customer is making the wrong choice. They don’t want to, “I bought the wrong one. I chose the wrong company.” And so when a person isn’t primarily concerned about price, they’re concerned about a whole lot of things. It’s about 50-50, Todd. 50-50.

Todd Liles: I have to make a point on that.

Roy Williams: Okay.

Todd Liles: I’m thinking about my business contractor, owns a plumbing, electrical, air conditioning, roofing company, garage doors, the whole nine yards. And this is what you’ll hear. They’ll want a certain closing percentage. Of course they do. They want a certain closing percentage, they want a certain average ticket. And what they are not understanding is that whether it’s 30% or whether it’s 50%, that’s a large portion of the audience.

Roy Williams: Right.

Todd Liles: But if you’re running direct call response sales, sales, sales ads, you are attracting those people. And yet you still want your professionals to have the highest average ticket at the highest close rate. And the only way that that’s going to occur is that you use such strong, undesirable sales tactics…

Roy Williams: Bottom line is you’re dancing on the edges of felony fraud.

Todd Liles: Yes, it’s dangerous.

Roy Williams: That’s what you’re going to have to do. Because if they have to deliver high-yield profit margins when…

Todd Liles: You better damn near have a gun to their head.

Roy Williams: Well…

Todd Liles: Or it better be a really good lie.

Roy Williams: The number of… We know companies, you know companies, that have never been my clients, but have gotten in serious, serious, serious legal trouble, FBI raids, things like that for deceptive trade practices. And I’m going, “Nope, it’s real. Seen it, watched it, very familiar with a bunch of those.” And I’m going, “Yeah, that’s how that happens when you start overreaching and putting too much pressure on people.”

But you’re not giving them the tools to make a high margin. They’re not given the products, they’re not given the customer experience that deserves a high margin, but they’re demanded to get it. Why? Because you’re paying them to be professional liars. And I’m going, “This is not a company with a good culture. This is a company will have inventory or employee churn like you wouldn’t imagine.” And the bottom line is, whenever you have people that stay with you and they love working for your company, it’s because they know that the company delivers everything it promises.

Todd Liles: Right.

Roy Williams: And that is culture. And when companies go, “Man, this company, we really are who we say we are,” and that’s when your people feel good about it and they have confidence and they perform like crazy. And I know that you teach culture and you teach sales, and you cannot have a great sales force without a great company culture. And the culture has to soak down so that everybody knows, “Yeah, we’re not telling lies in our ads. We really are the company we say that we are.” And then everything works like it should.

Todd Liles: 100%. Truth number five, it takes a while to make people feel like they really know you. Along with truth number six, this is why winning the hearts of customers requires months of meaningful courtship.

Roy Williams: Yeah.

Todd Liles: Truth number seven, the average business owner does not have the faith and the patience to build an attractive brand. This is particularly true of business owners who trust metrics more than they trust their own heart.

Roy Williams: Right. Okay, this is going to sound, I say a lot of things that are tacky, but maybe this one’s more tacky than not. You can observe numerous observable behaviors of a person and you can predict a lot of, I don’t know what that is, needs to be turned off. You can predict a lot of other behaviors that they’ve never displayed. They’ve never shown you those behaviors, but they’re predictable based upon other things that you’ve seen. And there are people that I call twitchy little bastards, and it’s because they just don’t have the spine, the backbone, the determination, the commitment, the diligence, the follow-through. They just don’t have it. They just flit from one thing to the next and they’re easily persuaded. And anywhere they land, they’re going to be gone. They always believe the last person they talk to.

Todd Liles: Right.

Roy Williams: And no matter what they decide, the next person that talks to ’em is going to send ’em off in a whole different direction. And I’m going, I’ve learned never, never, ever even meet with people like that because they will believe everything you say until they talk to someone else.

Todd Liles: Until you’re gone.

Roy Williams: And until they talk to someone else. And I’m saying, if you find a person and you see these people always finish what they started. These people have got employees that have been with ’em for a long time and they got a lot of people have been with ’em for a long time. They don’t have a big employee churn and you just see all kinds of evidence of they’re a reliable rock. Once they’ve made a decision, they execute it. And they’re not twitchy, they’re not fly-by-night, they’re not nervous, they’re just made of the stuff that doesn’t get scared. And I’m going, oh yeah, give me that guy, give me that guy and we’ll take over the world. And it’s about again, it’s about 50-50.

Todd Liles: Yeah.

Roy Williams: Customers are about 50-50, business owners are about 50-50. And I’m old enough and been doing this enough years, I can spot ’em pretty quick. And so choose who to lose. You’re going to ask me what is the question, how would you summarize today’s show? I’ll tell you right now, choose who to lose. You’re going to lose one of those two groups. Do you want the high-profit, repeat and referral customer that is switchable and then they become non-switchable when they learn to love you? Or do you want to chase the other twitchy little bastards that will leave you just as quickly as they came to you because the only thing they care about is the cheapest price?

Todd Liles: I love it. All right, listener, we’re actually going to give you something, we’ve given you many things already, but I’m going to give you something specific to take away. And I’m going to do that by giving a quote from the 12 Answers of Great Ad Writers. And then we’re going to go into the ad segment today. And the ad segment today isn’t going to be a video and isn’t going to be a display copy. It’s actually going to be a story about Kessler’s. So here’s the quote. 60% of your ads should bond to the customer and 40% of the ads should activate them to respond. Now, Roy, I give that quote because I don’t want any of our listeners or watchers to think that what we’re saying is that they shouldn’t do some sort of sales activation. Now very clearly we said that they should.

Roy Williams: 40% of the ads should be sales activation.

Todd Liles: Right? The type that shears the sheep but doesn’t take the lamb chop with it. So we’re going to move into Kessler’s and specifically what I want to talk about is the event that they have every year that they call their annual upgrade event. Annual upgrade event. And if I have the details right, then we’re good to go. If not, give me some slight corrections.

Roy Williams: Okay.

Todd Liles: But as I understand it, the company built loyalty year-round through their relational advertisement. And every year they had a major upgrade event which was essentially saying, like, hey, if you have a ring, bring it in. We will upgrade it. I think when I was looking on their website, I saw something that’s still very similar to that, which is almost like a trade-in. Like if you have a ring that you like today but you want to upgrade that ring, then bring it in. We’ll upgrade you now.

Roy Williams: Right.

Todd Liles: So I don’t know all the details of this, but what I found myself going is this annual upgrade event sounds sort of fun and sexy, right? You’ve bought something from us or you’ve got something from someone else and it’s time to get your wife a little bit bigger. You want to upgrade that engagement ring. So talk a little bit about that. Were you in on that creation?

Roy Williams: Of course. I’m glad you’re talking about Kessler’s because I mentioned there are companies I’ve worked with for 37 years and they’ve advertised 52 weeks a year for 37 years.

Todd Liles: That’s a long time.

Roy Williams: Kessler’s is one of those companies.

Todd Liles: Three times a week at least, minimum?

Roy Williams: Well, no, what I’m saying is the average person in Milwaukee or Appleton, Wisconsin, or Grand Rapids, Michigan, or Madison, Wisconsin, okay, of these nine stores, the average person in those towns, about half of the population, will hear one of those ads. The same company, the same person will hear an ad for that company three times a week. Actually hear it three times a week. Now, we run a lot more than three ads, of course, but they’ll hear it three times a week, 52 weeks in a row, 156 times a year. At the end of 10 years, they’ve heard it 1,560 times. Right. And the point is, you become a household word. So let me talk about sales activation and Kessler’s.

Todd Liles: Okay.

Roy Williams: So the upgrade event is just one of the many, many, many sales activation things we do every year. But now let’s look at the backbone of the business at Kessler’s Diamonds, right? Go to the website, kesslersdiamonds.com. In 37 years, we’ve never had a discount event. They don’t discount across the counter. If somebody’s looking at a ring and it’s $4,500, they said, “Well, I’ll give you 4,000 for it,” or 4,250, or name a number. They go, “No, I’ve got a lot of $4,000 rings. Let me go get those for you.”

Todd Liles: Smart.

Roy Williams: “This one’s 4,500.” And so not $1 here, not 50 cents. No discount. But when you buy from them, every jeweler in the world says, “Well, you know, if you bring your jewelry in once a year for us to inspect it, then if a diamond falls out, we’ll replace it,” or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, Kessler’s figured out early in the day how to mount diamonds so that you don’t have to re-tip the prongs. Gold wears down, right?

Todd Liles: Right.

Roy Williams: And when gold wears down just through putting your arm through your sleeve or in your purse or whatever, and it wears down that gold that holds the prongs that hold the diamond in, one of those prongs wears down enough, the diamond falls out. Platinum is like stainless steel. Platinum is much more dense, infinitely more strong, and doesn’t wear down. It’s hard. And so a platinum head is white, and it doesn’t make the diamond look yellow like yellow gold does. So he puts platinum heads in even though they cost him about $100 more than a white gold head. You know why he does it?

Todd Liles: Yeah, ’cause he doesn’t want that diamond to fall out.

Roy Williams: He can give a lifetime warranty. When you buy a ring from Kessler’s, if that diamond ever comes out, or if the ring is ever damaged, or if it actually fell down the garbage disposal, or it was laying in the street and a truck ran over it, if you can bring us the pieces that used to be the ring… If you lose the ring, we hope you had insurance. But if you bring us what used to be the jewelry, if we can’t fix it, we’ll replace it at no charge forever.

You don’t need to have your receipt. We have records. We know you bought it here. And maintenance is free forever. Changing the ring size is free forever. Everything, any service you need, you bought it here, whatever you need us to do to it forever, we do it at no charge. Then the upgrade, it’s real simple. When you buy a diamond at Kessler’s in that ring and you want a bigger diamond, it’s what we call shrinking diamond syndrome. “This diamond used to look bigger. I know it used to look bigger.” It’s like, okay, we will give you 100% of the price you paid for that diamond when you trade it in on a larger diamond.

And we’ll do it again and again and again and again with the diamond stud earrings. You buy a quarter-carat and then you want bigger ones, full value back for the quarter-carat diamonds and we replace it with bigger diamonds. You just pay the difference. And so now that when you start talking about that is a sales activation thing, we say we have this huge, huge, huge selection of diamonds we brought in, unbelievable number of diamonds. If you want to upgrade your ring, come in. We know how much you paid for that diamond. That’s how much credit you have towards whatever you pick out. You want to put a bigger diamond in your ring, the upgrade.

But here’s the last one. We also do what’s called a feature item. Now, in retail, a feature item is, “This is a really cool design. It looks way more expensive than it actually costs.” And so you talk about it, and then when people see it, they go, “Oh, yeah, that looks like it would be like 2,500 bucks.” Well, it’s 450. And it’s kind of like, “Oh, hell yeah, that’s an amazing value.” Now, 450 is full price.

It just looks like it ought to be worth more than that. See what I mean? It has a really powerful look. So how many of these can we get? And these are 450 bucks till they’re all gone. And we got all there are in the world. We bought everything the manufacturer made because this is a really awesome thing and we’re excited about it. And I remember one of my clients, they were able to buy like 7,000 of something. And they had seven stores, and every store was selling like a thousand in the next 10 days. We were hoping they would last until Valentine’s Day. We were out like a week before Valentine’s Day. We sold all 7,000 of this feature item. Now, the feature item isn’t discounted. It’s just a really cool thing that people are going to love and because of whatever, it just looks a lot more expensive than it ought to be. People get excited.

Todd Liles: Yeah.

Roy Williams: That’s not a sale, it’s not a discount, but we’re going, “Hey, wouldn’t this be a good time to have your air conditioner maintained? You’re getting ready to start it up. It’s been sitting without the compressor moving all winter long.” And now because you’ve got a gas furnace, now this sucker’s going to come on. And the, as you know, the lubricant travels within the refrigerant.

Todd Liles: Right.

Roy Williams: And the refrigerant hasn’t been circulating and you want to bring this thing in to… You want to get this thing ready to come on.

Todd Liles: Would you want to bring it on gently?

Roy Williams: Yes.

Todd Liles: Gently?

Roy Williams: Yeah. And so what happens is when you can tell people, “Now would be a good time to do this. If you want to do this, here’s how much we’re going to charge. We’re going to charge you 89 bucks to do this for you.”

Todd Liles: Right.

Roy Williams: And it’s a good thing to do this time of year. That is a feature item. That is an offer. That is sales activation. You’re going to get invited to the home, you’re going to do exactly what you said you were going to do, and you’re going to find a weak capacitor or something. And so everybody knows this, but what I’m saying is you can trigger an action without having to be weird about it.

Todd Liles: Yeah. Have a real legitimate…

Roy Williams: Have a legitimate reason that makes sense. And it’s not a discounted price. It’s just…

Todd Liles: Let me give you my big takeaway from what you said about Kessler’s. When you talk about the upgrade and when you also talk about the platinum prongs, what went through my brain immediately is that that is a byproduct of some core value that they have that I’ve never seen their core values, but somewhere or another, it’s basically written, “We will do what it takes to have a client for life.”

Roy Williams: Absolutely.

Todd Liles: Because if you’re replacing my ring and my ring’s fine, but I want to upgrade my diamond, it’s essentially saying, “How do we have a client for life?” And it just occurred to me that any sales activation built around your core values is a legitimate sales activation.

Roy Williams: Right.

Todd Liles: And I love that.

Roy Williams: So here’s the deal. For the record, I didn’t know you were going to choose Kessler’s. Okay. Kessler’s Diamonds is the most secure, profitable, fast-growing diamond company in America today. They are legendary. And it’s because unconditional integrity, unconditional… And by the way, nobody leaves Kessler’s as an employee. Everybody wants to work for Kessler’s. Nobody leaves. Nobody ever leaves Kessler’s. It’s like, no, you’re there, you’re not leaving. This is the most fun place to work in the world. They don’t have quotas. They don’t have… There is no pressure. It is like you just have to absolutely make the customer so happy they came in here, and you’re going to make tons of money for that. And everybody makes tons of money. And the bottom line is they come in here because they love us, because we deliver the best experience and the best products and have the strongest warranty and they just have more fun in here than anywhere else. And I’m going, “Yeah, they win.” They absolutely win. And everybody tries, “Well, how do they do that?” They do it by being the company they say they are.

Todd Liles: Roy, on this topic of sales activation and doing it the right way, what is the one thing the listener should take away?

Roy Williams: Tell the truth.

Todd Liles: Tell the truth.

Roy Williams: Don’t make crap up. If there’s a legitimate reason that this would be a good time to do this, tell ’em what that is, and they will do it.

Todd Liles: Thank you. So good sales activation isn’t actually about forcing your client to do anything. It’s giving them a window to do the things that they want to do, the things that will keep them in relationship with you for a really long time and have them thinking about you and feeling great about you for the lifetime of that client. That’s today’s episode.

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