Let me tell you a story.
A couple years after getting started up in this business, I did lots of deals with Michael Senoff where I’d write the sales copy for offers he had the rights to sell, and we’d sell them to his list, and split the sales. Since there was no up front fee and I needed to eat… I didn’t have time to futz around with goo-roo dogma, and could only focus on what actually worked.
And one of those early lessons was when Michael said:
“It’s the same amount of work to sell a high priced offer as a low priced one”
And, thus, his point was we might as well sell expensive offers.
And so we did.
Adjusting for inflation, the offers we sold would be over $1,000 today. That may not seem like a big deal, but this was back in the era of the eBook kings obsessed with selling $9 eBooks, marketers all competing on price, and the JV circle-jerk where goo-roos would all sell and give testimonials on each others’ sales pages selling each other’s low priced offers trying to appeal to each other’s price shoppers, etc.
We did the opposite.
And, I daresay, we had a helluva run.
But, even more important:
The quality and classiness of the customers we sold to and dealt with was exponentially higher in every way. I talk a bit about this towards the end of my Client-Less Copywriter program, about the difference between serving and selling to what Gary Halbert used to call “Players with Money” vs the cheapie price shopper mentality.
Cheap-minded misers on my list get mad when I talk about this.
They’ll reply with magnificent rationalization hamster-spinning about why, too.
It’s actually quite amusing.
These small thinking types can’t even parse the difference between temporarily broke (happens to everyone, all of us, at some point, that’s just life) and being perpetually cheap-minded —literally addicted to buying on price, getting the best price, bragging to their other cheap friends about the price they got, and wasting time (a far more valuable commodity than money) hunting the best price instead of just getting what they want and solving the problem it solves.
Guy driving 30 miles out of his way to save .50 cents per gallon on gas comes to mind.
In my early years in this business I thought that was exaggerated.
But no, it’s real, these types really do walk the earth.
Anyway, back to the Players with Money:
These guys tend to be price shoppers, too. But, they are not shoppers looking for the lowest and cheapest price… they are often looking for, and curate their purchases… the HIGHEST price. A low, cheap price is like holding up a silver cross dripping holy water to a vampire to a lot of these guys.
Yes, they like a “good deal.”
Everyone does, and I know I certainly do.
But they are not buying on cheap, and they are far from cheap-minded.
Thus, they are far better customers.
They don’t complain about dumb shyt.
And they aren’t reply guys or trolls.
They are the types more likely to use/apply what you sold them so they benefit from it to solve whatever problem your offer solves. And they not only refer in abundance to those who sell them a legit solution to their problems… but they give testimonials in abundance, and often become customers (make a “custom” of buying from you as the great Ken McCarthy defines it) vs mere one time buyers, and the list goes on.
Plus there’s the business philosophy I go by:
Preferring 4 quarters to 100 pennies.
I’d much rather have 4 shiny, clean, easy-to-access & handle quarters in my pocket than 100 sticky, filth, God-knows-where-they’ve-been pennies in my pocket. The dirty, sticky, filthy pennies also taint everything else in your pocket.
Again, this is not about affordability or being broke.
Let the pedantic reply guy getting offended take note.
Not being able to afford something is not what I mean by cheap.
Cheap is a mindset, a way of life, and all mental.
Even a lot of wealthy people suffer from it, frankly, and the ones I know are miserable.
Real life example of that:
My business partner in the Oregon Eagle newspaper (Email Players subscriber Richard Emmons) told me about a guy who was haunting the offices asking for a shorter subscription period than a year because he wasn’t sure he’d want to read it. Realize, the subscription is only $39/year which is less than 10 cents per day. And for fun Richard and his long-suffering wife (she has to talk to these cheapies) found the guy’s house on Zillow… and saw it was worth over $1 million.
That’s what I’m referring to by cheap.
And not only can I not help cheap people, but I have no desire to.
As soon as someone says something cheap-minded I set a rule in my email program to automatically delete their message lest I somehow catch whatever sickness of the soul plagues them.
They’ll have to be someone else’s problem.
This is especially true of those wanting to subscribe to the paid Email Players newsletter. Cheapies will look at it as an expense, not an investment that can make them far more than the $3.23 per day price it costs. A bum rattling a dirty styrofoam cup full of change could afford that, but for the cheapies it is too much to bear for a lot of them.
Thus, they should haunt someone else.
We don’t want ’em around here.
Everyone else?
Can learn more about it here:
Ben Settle
