711 Become a Marketing Master Through Storytelling with Joe Polish

MARKETING IS MORE THAN A LOGO. If your struggling in an area of your life, it could be due to marketing. Marketing isn’t just important in your business. It’s in every area of your life. Everything you do is designed to attract or repel others. The way that you’re telling your story and selling yourself has a lot to do with who is willing to get on board. That’s why I wanted to bring back a conversation I had on The School of Greatness with a master marketer: Joe Polish. Joe Polish is the founder of Genius Network® and co-founder of the popular podcast ILoveMarketing.com. Joe’s marketing expertise has been utilized to build thousands of businesses and has generated hundreds of millions of dollars for his clients, ranging from large corporations to small family-owned businesses. Joe has helped raise over $3 million for Virgin Unite, Sir Richard Branson’s foundation. His current passion projects include JoeVolunteer.com, ArtistsForAddicts.com, and GeniusRecovery.com. Joe’s mission is to help change the global conversation surrounding addiction and addicts from one of judgement to one of compassion. Joe makes the point that marketing is something you have to learn. It’s all about setting people up to be interested in what you’re offering so that you don’t have to rely on talking them into it. Learn the importance of creating your story in order to market your business and your life on Episode 711. In This Episode You Will Learn: The difference between selling and marketing (1:00) The importance of “positioning” (1:30) The two reasons businesses don’t have success (1:50) The best tool Apple uses in marketing (4:50) The number one question is all customers’ minds (5:30) Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is Five Minute Friday.

• 0:14Lewis Howes?

  Our guest today is Joe Polish, and Joe is a good friend that I've known for a number of years. He is the founder of Genius Network, also known as the 25K Group, and is the co-founder of ILOVEMARKETING.COM, a highly popular free podcast on iTunes, and is the president of Piranha Marketing, Inc. His marketing expertise has been utilized to build thousands of businesses, and he has generated hundreds of millions of dollars for his clients.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  I think marketing is the most important thing. Just like, hold your breath for three minutes and see how well you do. Hold it for five minutes, hold it for 10 minutes, you can't, you'll die. Marketing is like that for business. If people's businesses are struggling, if their missions, and this is not just business entrepreneurship, this is every area of your life. If you have a partner, you did some sort of marketing. There's something you did to meet the person, position yourself. So to answer the question, selling is what you do when you're on the phone or face-to-face with somebody. Marketing is what you do to get someone on the phone or face-to-face with you, so that they're properly positioned. So the key, the word positioning is really critical. So by the time that they actually talk with you, or visit your store, or go to your website, or

• 1:30Speaker 01

  see you speak, they're pre-interested, pre-motivated, pre-qualified, and predisposed to do business with you. And I've said that a million times, and I drilled that into my head. It's all about, you know, pre-interested, pre-motivated, pre-qualified, predisposed. And if people are set up that way, the whole job of selling, selling is much easier. Frankly, if you have to rely on talking someone into something, then you just aren't doing any marketing.

• 1:52Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  You know, my buddy Dean Jackson, he says that a compelling offer is 10 times more powerful than a convincing argument. Think of selling as influence, and think of marketing as storytelling. And if you're more influential, personally or in business, you're going to get more of what you want. If you tell a better story, people are going to understand more about what you have, and you're going to enroll people. So your entire life is, you're going to do marketing your entire life. You're going to be selling your entire life. Everything that I say, everything you say is designed to either attract or repel. And so if someone's out there not having success... With their business, what either they have a very boring product or service, or they have a very boring way of communicating about the product or service. And rarely is any product or service boring.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  It's usually the way it's

• 2:39Lewis Howes?

  Communication.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  Totally, it's all about communication. If you don't have enough business, you probably have plenty of time. So spend that time learning. I mean, every one of us, you included. I mean, we have had to learn. This knowledge of how to do webinars, or how to do videos, or how to do podcasts, or how to write courses, write books, and sales letters, and run events, and you know, whatever, we weren't just born with the knowledge. Like anything else, you have to learn it. So there's three ways that you can learn. You can learn through the school of hard knocks and get yourself bleeding and beaten up. You can learn through the experiences of other people. You read their books, you go to their seminars, you invest in their courses. And the most effective way to learn is you actually teach it to other people. So once you learn something, like my buddy Evan Pagan says, speed of implementation. As soon as you hear an idea, the quicker you can put it into practice,

• 3:25Speaker 01

  the more likely it's going to become ingrained and it's going to become a part of your behavior. And so this is a behavioral change. It's not just having knowledge. There's certain, like a strategy, or a business plan, or a business is a series of to do's done in a certain order that produces a certain result. Everything in life is a strategy. If your life is working, there are certain things you do in a certain way that make it work. If your life isn't working, there are certain things you're doing that are making it not work. So as it comes to marketing, the first thing to understand is that the distinction between selling and marketing. If you think marketing is like just a brand or a logo, I would encourage you to think differently of less about the way your company looks and more about the substance of what you're doing for the client.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  What is the value that you're actually delivering? Even if you're selling something that isn't life changing, you know, like a comedy club. You know, how do you tell the story about the comedy club? So the number one thing that I say to people, if you think of it this way, if you have something to sell, write a sales letter. Because a great salesperson is limited by the clock. You can only talk to so many people in a given day. And what I learned with copy is copier the words. Words are what's And your ability to can and clone yourself. So, sit down and write a sales letter. If you do not have a written sales letter, I mean handwriting, if you, it's not about technology. Even Steve Jobs said in 1997 at the Worldwide Developers Conference, he said, "We first

• 4:53Speaker 01

  start with the psychology, not the technology." And that's why Apple did so well, because he really thought about the customer experience, not about the tech. And so many tech companies that swear up and down they had better stuff than Apple, it was just packaged in a way. It's elegantly packaged. And if you look at all of Steve Jobs' keynotes in the Apple stores, in the Genius Bars, it was all about education-based marketing. If you have to figure out how to successfully sell something nobody wants to buy, it forces you to learn a lot about marketing. So I had, like, how do you position something that nobody even really wants to do? It's like, they have carpet, and it got dirty, or a cat pissed on it, or whatever, now I have to deal with it. It's the necessary evil of owning the stuff.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  No, you know, no one likes to, but I had to learn how to sell other than price. So one of the first things I did was education-based marketing. And I learned one of the most effective ways to sell something is to simply educate people on how to make a buying decision. Because the number-one question in all consumers' minds is, "Who can I trust?" And so your job as a business owner, your job as a marketer, is to establish trust and rapport.