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Episode 27 with Guest Robert Allen

Lisa: Welcome to Episode #27 of Boost Your Sales and Lifestyle. I'm your host, Lisa Sasevich, the Queen of Sales Conversion and the founder of the Sales Authenticity and Success Mastermind Program for Entrepreneurs.

Today's episode features an interview with the brilliant Robert Allen. In this interview, we cover Robert's hottest secrete on how to automate your online and offline sales conversion machine. Robert believes that once you've cracked the code and have your product to sell, then you automate. On today's episode, we cover two different licensing options. Number one, you can flip to a licensee and you're the licensor. Number two, you can partner with people who do the things you're not good at. This will all mean a lot more to you as we dive in with Robert Allen. This interview is jam-­packed with powerful information. Get ready to open your mind and get sassy with me. Let's dive in.

Announcer: Welcome to the Boost Your Sales and Lifestyle Show, with Lisa Sasevich, the Queen of Sales Conversion. Lisa teaches experts who are making a difference how to get their message out and enjoy massive results without being sales-­y. Lisa is here to lift you up, show you a new perspective, and open your world to what's possible for you, helping way more people, making way more money, and making the difference you were born to make.

Lisa: I'm very excited to wrap up day one with our headliner, someone who has become a personal friend, someone that I admire. I call him one of my kings because he was so generous in becoming a student, really studying my work early on. I remember seeing him in my audience with my knees knocking going, "Oh my God, this amazing person that I've studied is studying with me."

From that, I've learned the power of generosity and the power of being a lifelong learner from this man. His name is Robert Allen and he is one of America's most famous and most influential financial advisors. After graduating with an MBA from Brigham Young University in 1974, he began his real estate investment career and turned his successful experiences into the colossal bestselling book, Nothing Down, which spent 58 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List. If that wasn't enough, he followed that with 4 other major New York Times bestsellers. I'm sure you've heard of many of them: Creating Wealth, Multiple Streams of Income was the first one I got my hands on, The One-­Minute Millionaire, and Cracking the Millionaire Code. Not that long ago, he co-­authored a book with Mark Victor Hansen called, Cash in a Flash: Fast Money in Slow Times. Obviously a very timely book. He's appeared on all of the great shows: Good Morning America, Larry King, you name it.

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His most important achievement, and what I love about Robert Allen, is his beautiful 30-­year-­plus marriage to his wife, Darryl. Together, they have 3 incredible adult children: Amy, Aaron, and Hunter. I've had the privilege of visiting their gorgeous home here in San Diego, getting to spend some time with Robert. You know, he's one of those people where the more you scratch the surface, the more you find gold. Robert, I'd like to welcome you to the call. Thank you so much for being here today.

Robert: Lisa, it's such an honor to be here with you. You are one of my favorites as well. It's a mutual admiration society, but everybody knows that you deliver like nobody's business and I'm just so thrilled to be here to help in any way I can. Let's inspire and empower the listeners to go to the next level.

Lisa: Awesome. Well, I know that they're energized. We've had some amazing contributions today from some of the people that we both know and love and have learned from: Jeff Herring, Jeffrey Gitomer, Nathan Kievman, Finish Agent, one of our sponsors.

I'm excited to wrap up day 1 of our 3 days with you because you have been in the industry a long time. You've sold over a billion dollars of your information in so many different formats. I thought, when it comes to someone who over the years continued to innovate and look for ways to be in many places at one time, without having to actually be there, you have definitely tried everything.

I can't imagine there's many people on the call that are not already familiar with your work, but just in case, maybe you can tell us a little bit about you, who you're serving, the transformation that your work is providing these days. Then we're going to peel back and really do a little bit of a different kind of interview. It's not so much about what you're doing, but in Automated Income Secrets, we want to know currently how you're doing it. How are you attracting leads? How are you converting leads? What experts are helping you? What programs are you using? Where are you struggling? People have been very vulnerable about sharing the parts that have been easy and the parts that still seem like a mystery. It's just been brilliant. Let's start with you. Who are you-­

Robert: Before we go any further-­

Lisa: Oh sure, sure.

Robert: On this program that you're delivering, AutomateMyIncome.com, how many speakers are going to be on this program?

Lisa: We have 4 people a day for 3 days, plus 4 sponsors, each of who are contributing. You can actually see the lineup if you go to AutomateMyIncome.com. You can see all their pictures right there.

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Robert: Excellent. I was listening to you mentioning the price point and I'm going there myself because I know if I can just get one idea or one belief that gets changed from one of the people you're going to be interviewing, I know that it's going to make my business better. Sometimes it just takes one idea. I'm a constant learner, and like you said, I've been in this career, in this business, for almost 35 years, marketing information.

The world is just changing so fast. Back when I got started, 1980 is when my first book came out. Throughout the decade of the '80's, Nothing Down was the #11 hardcover bestseller on any subject for a 10-­year period of time. It was just huge. Back then, we didn't even have the internet. It was television and infomercials and full-­page ads and all kinds of different marketing. When you bring the internet into the picture, it just changes the game. It used to be so expensive to market. Now we can, like I say, on the internet we can fail fast for free.

Lisa: I love that. Isn't that the truth, though?

Robert: You can test all kinds of things really quickly and you can have your answer almost immediately. At any rate, I've been marketing information for a lot of years and so once you've cracked the code on whatever you're marketing, at first for me it was marketing real estate information on how to buy real estate with little or no money down. Started with a seminar I was teaching in my hometown of Provo, Utah. We rented a hotel room. We charged $75 for a 4-­week class, evenings for 4 weeks. Then I said, "Well, gosh, I wonder if I could do this quicker and get it all done in one day?" We would charge $100 for people to come on a Saturday. $100 times 100 people is $10,000. In 1978, that was a lot of money.

Lisa: It's still a good amount of money, right?

Robert: In 2013, that's a lot of money.

Lisa: Yep, yep.

Robert: Then we went to $200 for a weekend. Then it was 100 people times $200, so it was $20,000 for a weekend. Then it was $400, $500. Then we get 200 people at $500 in a weekend and it's $100,000. It was serious money. A lot of the marketing was done in more traditional ways. That means you have to hire employees that do that kind of work and essentially it wasn't automated. It required my presence. I'd have to go do the seminars to promote the previews, we called them, then I'd have to go do the trainings on the weekends.

What happened for me was in L.A. doing a big, huge seminar and one of my competitors saw me and was just testing me out, seeing what the kid was doing. He said, "This is the new kid on the block." This is the new Lisa Sasevich, frankly. When I see you, I say, "Now, this woman is the future." For me, back

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then, I was the new kid and they said, "We want to take all our expertise about promoting seminars. We're going to apply it to you and pay you a royalty." Talk about automated. In a sense, somebody takes and creates the infomercials, trains the trainers, trains the preview speakers, does all that work and sends me a royalty check every Tuesday for $25,000 to $50,000. When they do that for 6 years in a row, it makes you a lot of money and creates some incredible fame that I really had other people do for me.

What I call that is licensing. Therefore, when you've cracked the code and have got your product to sell, doing the hard work, meaning you won't be automated. You'll have to work hard at this until you make sure you find an audience and you have lists that you're building, et cetera. Once it's become a platform, a commodity that people like, then you automate it. You could either flip it to a licensee. You're the licensor.

Right now, my programs are licensed and various different parts of the world. First it was up in Canada. There are seminars going on right now, as we're talking, this very second. I have almost nothing to do with that. I get a license fee for doing that, but it required me first to create a program that was marketable, that people liked, and therefore I could prove there was value in it, created a little bit of a name, and even before I had my name, the Robert Allen Real Estate name, when I was a zero nobody nowhere, I had a hot product.

Lisa: Jeffrey Gitomer was on earlier. He's 67. He shared and he said the exact same thing. When we hear the words of wisdom from some of you have been here awhile, it's you've got to create your platform. You've got to have some content. You have to have something real to sell. He said, "If you pull back the green curtain, you're going to find me working my ass off." It's not a get-­rich-­quick thing. You did the push-­ups and the sit-­ups and really created something that people wanted.

Robert: Yep. The first point is just exactly what he said. You've got to create something that works. Then you either license it or you partner with people where their responsibility is to do the things that you're not good at. Now you have to give away pieces of the deal to other partners who play. You basically say to them, "All right, we're going to be owners. I'm not going to show up very often. I'm going to work hard at getting this thing up-­to-­speed, but a year from now, you're not going to see me much. That's my position here. That's the way I'm going to play."

Then you outsource all that work to a partner to do it with you. This is not a licensee, where you're licensing yourself to another complete company and all you're getting is a royalty. In this case, you're doing business with a partner where they do all the things that give you the freedom to do the things you love to do. For me, it's creation. I like to create. I like to teach, love to teach.

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As I learned at your event with John Assaraf, he said one of the most profound quotes I'd ever heard, he said, "You've got to partner or hire people who play at the things you work at." For me, I play at some things. It's so easy to me, I can't even imagine why somebody would think that's hard. I never have writer's block. Ever. My mouth can go on for hours, as you can tell right now. When it comes to the writing the marketing pieces and managing the employees and doing all that stuff, I just glaze over. I just don't do it very well. I have to bring people in who do the same thing with that. For them, it's their piece of cake. That's what I call it. What's your piece of cake?

Lisa: Oh, I love that.

Robert: You have a piece of cake and then you have your pain in the ass. The stuff you just don't do very well. Find your piece of cake, do that. Let other people do their piece of cake. Let them do that. Then you've got yourself a powerful team. That's how you automate with an ownership position. I've done many situations like that where I have partners I work with where their job is to do the things I'm not good at to give me free time.

Oh, by-­the-­way, just in terms of the licensing, I've licensed to many different organizations and they come and they go. One organization was with me for 6 or 7 years and generated $5 or $6 million worth of royalties for me. Then they died. That's what happens with the real estate industry. It comes and it goes. Right now, it's dead, but it's heating up again. When it heats back up, my joint venture partners are going to come out of the woodwork and they're going to say, "We need a name to market our stuff to," and they'll attach my name to something. I'll agree to it and then I'll get a royalty and so it comes and goes.

Lisa: Before you jump off of licensing, Robert, just because this is an area I'm also very interested in and I know a lot of our listeners are as well, when you say, if you could drill down a little bit, when you say that you've licensed your stuff to many organizations or that there are seminars going off in Canada right now as we speak that you don't have anything to do with, can you explain a little bit more what you mean? Did you pre-­package a seminar with the content and the slides and then they pay you to use it? How does that actually work? Because I think this is really on-­topic and you're the only one that's talked about it so far with a way to automate and leverage yourself.

Robert: When you create your platform, you're going to have your PowerPoint slides and your marketing materials and your websites and things like that. It's just the way you ramp up. Then you'll take that content and you'll find somebody who likes to promote. They may have other seminars that they're already teaching. Maybe even in a similar vein as yours. You go to them.

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For instance, I'm in talks with the Rich Dad, Poor Dad people right now. They have a brand and it's big and it's great, and yet they have a whole machine going on with employees and ongoing marketing. What if they took that same machine and applied it towards somebody else's name, that while they're in one city doing a seminar, they could be doing a totally different name in a different city?

I call this, it's the grass-­cutting business. Essentially, when you're coming into doing a seminar in a city, there are certain numbers of people who are hot for that product on that particular week. It's like the grass gets cut. Those customer who are looking for a real estate product, for instance, whoever's marketing in that city on that particular week, they go to the people's promotional events and grass gets cut. If 3 or 4 seminars come on top of each other in a weekend, then there's not a lot of grass left to cut. If you're competing, the person who's the promoter, if they can put another name in a city they've just been in, and they cut the grass with that name, but they've got a new name to promote, then they've got enough revenue coming from that new venture to help cover with the overhead for all the employees they have for their main product.

That's exactly what I've done up in Canada. Somebody's doing trainings up there and they've been very successful at it, but they're starting to wane a little bit. The hotness and the freshness and the newness of their thing has started to wane, like I was saying, so they're looking for a new kid on the block that will come in and they'll use their same kind of promotional machine to promote them, so that's exactly what they're doing with me.

Lisa: Yet somebody else is leading your content. You're not up there, obviously. You've given them the slides, the materials, the content, the layout, and yet Joe Smith is saying, "Robert Allen says and Robert Allen teaches and in Nothing Down."

Robert: Exactly.

Lisa: They might be doing a Nothing Down seminar.

Robert: The trainers, they hire the preview speakers, they create the full-­page ads, they create the television commercials. Since I speak French, I'm actually going to be recording a French radio interview. I'll read it to you right now.

Lisa: It's really like they're promoting your teachings. They're promoting your teachings, but they're not promoting that you will be there.

Robert: No, they basically say I'm not going to be there.

Lisa: Right, but that they're going to learn your secrets. Things like that.

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Robert: I go: [foreign language 00:19:09]. On and on and on. This is the first time I ever read an ad for a radio, but I'm going to record that today. I'll do very little in terms of promotion. I'll end up at the big upsell event that we're going to be doing in Atlanta in a couple months. They'll do lots of promotions across Canada and they bring people down from Canada to sell real estate. There's lot of great deals down here, whereas Canada's not quite as hot, quite as good deals.

Back to licensing, it can change what you provide. Sometimes, with one other licensee, I almost did nothing. They created the whole program for me because they had a whole staff of people. They said, "We got it. Thank you very much. Just be quiet. Let us send you money."

Lisa: What you're talking about is every expert's dream. "I just want to teach. Let somebody else do the business part."

Robert: Exactly.

Lisa: Obviously, there's a give-­and-­take here, right? That's the rosy side, but you lose some control, you lose some profits. I imagine those are the gives.

Robert: The royalties are not that enormous. What you want from the relationship, though, is the lead. You let them market in whatever ways they market your ideas to whatever depth of the funnel, as we say in marketing, or the leverage progression plan, if you say it the Lisa way.

Lisa: You're a good student.

Robert: Very good. You let them do their full marketing effort, but you get the lead when they're done. Then if you have another program that doesn't seem to compete with theirs, for example, we're just creating a brand new program called, The Fortune in You, which is how you create a platform of your own material, how you market information from your own message to the world. There are a lot of people out there doing that kind of marketing: Brendon Burchard and yourself and a lot of others that have different ways of marketing. I've been doing this for 30 years, so I'm going to be packaging my way of doing it.

Lisa: I love the title. I think it's brilliant. The Fortune in You. In a few minutes, we'll show people how they can dig into it. I know you've put something together, but tell us about-­

Robert: Well, here's this licensee, this marketing. A real estate program, for instance. For that same lead now, I can go, "Well, thank you very much for the royalties. I appreciate that. Let's love this people. Let's deliver what we promised. Let's use my name in the proper way." Now I have that lead. I say, "By-­the-­way, I'm going to take those same people and 90 days later, I'll communicate with them. They

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already "love" me, hopefully, by the way we've trained them and coached them." They might say, "Well, Bob has this other thing he does, which is The Fortune in You. If you're interested ...", and now I take that lead and I can promote my new program to them, which I'm just now in the process of creating a platform around.

Lisa: This is our piece for the action sheet here. I just want to highlight this goal. If any of you ever get into a situation where you're licensing your material, what Robert's highlighting for you here is make sure you negotiate that you get the leads. That's a huge one-­liner on the contract, right?

Robert: Exactly. It's big. They don't like it a lot, but you say, "Listen, you had your shot with them."

Lisa: It sounds like you give them about a 90-­day grace period, from what you've shared.

Robert: Exactly. It's usually 90 days. Now the lead might have gotten cool, but remember, if you're doing, for instance, let's take real estate. They run a full-­page ad that says, "My big mouth can make you a millionaire." There's a picture of me and all the stuff about the program they're going to introduce people to. People respond. Let's say 200 people show up at the previews for that week. We tell them that there's ways of making money. We teach good concepts. Only 15% of the people actually buy something. That means 85% of the people didn't buy something. Now of course they'll have their telemarketers communicate with those 85% and see if they can get another 5%, perhaps, to convert. Still, 85% of the people didn't buy anything.

Well, what if they were approached later on, 90 days later, "Oh, by-­the-­way, you attended this particular event. You might not have been interested in the real estate, but there is another opportunity you might consider." Then we market something else to them and take them down a different path and see whether or not they were destined to fall into my lap, as they say.

Lisa: You always give so much value. I wasn't even planning for licensing to come up, but it is such an amazing extension of how to get your work out without being there, and set yourself free, which is exactly what you're talking about. Seminars are firing off and you're talking to me. How cool is that?

Robert: Exactly.

Lisa: Go ahead. I had one more question.

Robert: Well, there's a chapter in Multiple Streams of Income on licensing, but it's true. Very few people talk about it. If you create your information product with the goal to ultimately license it, then you know what your end result's going to be, then

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you know to create the content so that it's very programmable, very systematized, so that anybody can take it from that point forward. Then you have worldwide licensing opportunities, see?

In China, I have a gal friend of mine who teaches a program called On Money. She is licensed out to a Chinese partner. I said, "Aren't you worried about them "ripping off" your content?" Because sometimes folks can easily rip things off. She said, "No, I've been with this partner for 9 years. We're a fabulous relationship." Literally, they just send her checks.

Lisa: I know her, too. I know who you're talking about. One of our friends in San Diego here. Let me ask you this, Robert. One of the things I know you're brilliant at, and I remember, you obviously love to teach. In fact, if it's okay for me to say, in your own home you've built this gorgeous 20-­seat theater just designed for the highest-­level teaching. You've got the big, beautiful recliners in there. It's like being in first class in an airline. I had the privilege of bringing some of my clients there last year and learning from you.

One of the things that I see that you're really great at, and I don't know if you would ever frame it in the automated way, I want to talk about lead attraction. All the different ways that you have leads coming in that we could call automated systems or really just these recurring systems that are happening without you having to push the button everyday. What can you share with us? I'd like to look a little bit at your own business, whatever you're willing to share about how you attract leads in an automated way, and anything that you have in place or that you're working on to convert those leads in an automated way.

Robert: That's a great question. When it comes to my partners and my licensing people, I don't get too much into exactly how they do it. I just say, "Do as much as you can and send me as large of checks as possible, please."

Lisa: I like that.

Robert: When I launch thing, and with The Fortune in You, we're launching a new program, it requires going through all the steps that I'm sure that everybody on this call is going through. The first step is I have to fish in two kinds of lakes and multiple streams of internet income. I refer to the big lake of leads that we all have. There are two kinds of lakes: one is a lake where you stock with your own fish and that means you're building your own lists;; and the other one is other people's lakes that are stocked with their fish. In a sense, you have to do both at the same time. You joint venture with people who have lists or lakes filled with their own fish and you partner with them and say, "Would you let me fish in your lake?" They go, "Not unless I get part of the catch."

Lisa: Yeah, or, "Not unless you let me fish in your lake."

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Robert: Exactly. That's the point. "I'll let you fish in my lake." Therefore, you have have this joint venture relationship. I haven't done a whole lot of that, frankly, Lisa. It's only been in the last, because if I can be blunt, I've just been big enough that I just never needed to do any joint venturing. I just didn't do much because we'd have so much online internet marketing and online revenue generating on ourselves. We generated all leads that I just didn't do much joint venturing, but in the last year I've learned the power of that.

I go through a list of my 25 top friends, people I know who have lists. I think no matter who you are, I think you should go through that exercise. You take the list of the people you know and maybe all you know is your friends and relatives. Big deal. Some of them probably have some kind of a list, even if it's only the people they would have come to their funeral or their marriage.

Lisa: Their wedding list, right?

Robert: Or Christmas list. Yeah, exactly. Everyone you know knows somebody, so you would just network with them and say, "Do you have a list of people? Do you have a business? Oh good. What kind of list do you have? What kind of database do you maintain?" In my case I have 25 top, top, top players. You're one of those. You've got Jack Canfield and all the rest, Brian Tracy, et cetera. I'll start to reach out to them and say, "Guys, gals, you do have your calendar where you do certain promotions with partners, JVs. Let's see if it might be in our best interest to continue to joint venture with each other." That's a big and it's a difficult process. It's something I work at. It's not something I play at.

Lisa: Right, right. Have you heard or explored any ways that people are doing that in sort of a, once you make that relationship, "Hey, we're going to fish in each other's lake or I'll let you fish in my lake," do you have any automated ways to do that fishing or do you find that it's more of a manual process where you need to show up with your fishing pole?

Robert: For now, I'm showing up with my fishing pole. I think once The Fortune in You program is established and we know exactly what our dollars-­per-­click is, with all the marketing machine that's going on, they say that if you can get $5-­$10 per click, if somebody has a list and you send a message to it and if they just click on it, it generates between $5 and $10 a click. When we've created that metric and we know what our dollars-­per-­click is to various different lists, then we can go to them with an automated, pre-­recorded seminar that I've done that I now works.

Some of the JVs that have done this with me, they literally had me record a 2-­ or 3-­minute intro to a pre-­recorded call they'd done and they know it works. They know it produces like crazy and a 2-­ or 3-­minute outro at the very end of it that we promoted to my list and did extremely well. For him, all he needed to do was to get me on the phone for 20 minutes and then it was done.

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Lisa: Yeah, I've participated in that as well and we opened this morning, I did a little bit of an opening ceremony and I know you've studied my Speak to Sell work. One of the things that came out of my mouth is you need that conversion machine. You need that signature talk, or in your case you're going to work on this presentation, or that person that gave you that automated seminar, he created a signature talk that sold. Once you created that conversion machine, I think then everything you said. You've got to create your platform, your reputation, the whole thing. Then you can automate. You create that talk that converts, then we can package it into something that can be there on our behalf.

Robert: I recorded a 2-­series teleseminar that we used for probably 6 years in the middle of the 2000's. It generated millions and millions of dollars. I recorded it. I have them homework assignments. We would get people who did their homework assignments and would come back to the second session. We would give away gifts. It was really quite an episode. It was prerecorded but it was done live with a co-­host and they would say, "Now, let's bring Robert on. Robert, you there?" I would go, "I'm here." They'd say, "Robert, it's yours. Take it away." Then they would just start the play record, frankly. We used the same series for probably 2 times a day for years, literally. Once you've nailed it, you've cracked that code, then I never recorded another one. It was just amazing.

Lisa: Here you are now. You've got this awesome new platform that you're building, The Fortune in You, taking all of your years of infopreneuring and teaching it in the expert space. The process here, you've identified your top 25. It's part of how you and I got reconnected early this year. You're building, in my campus, what we call that signature talk. You're going to test it, do it live. Show up with your fishing pole until you get that thing nailed, right? Then it sounds like you have plans after that to automate that and set yourself free for the next thing.

Robert: This is the way it will look. I'll tell you where we're aiming 90 days from now. The leads will flow in and they'll be paid leads. We'll probably do a lot of radio. We'll generate, somebody raising their hand saying, "Yeah, I've always wanted to either write a book or do a speech or make some money online with some of my messaging." We'll track them. They'll come into a free preview. It will probably be prerecorded. It might have a live person that does it, but it won't be me.

It'll take them to an upsell, to a $197, 90-­minute program. Actually, excuse me, it will be $200 for a real, in-­depth teaching experience that people will be on for 3 hours. When they come away, they'll realize they got $200 worth of value. This will all be done by a live salesperson, if you will, who can deliver that content with a PowerPoint presentation that's all laid out. They know exactly where they're going. They know when the pitch will happen, et cetera. They give lots of value, lots of content. People are thrilled. They never ask for refunds.

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Then those people get upsold into a probably $2,000 or $3,000 series of webinars with me now, but eventually will be some of our successful students. Their job will be to deliver the Robert Allen Fortune in You program as a success story and then eventually Robert Allen will step away and will come into my theater here, as you say, will be a $10,000 to $15,000, maybe $20,000 program that I call Exponential that I show up for because it's in my house. I do that because I like it. I enjoy it, but ultimately, 2 or 3 years from now, nope. They will take that to a hotel and other people, successful students, will deliver that and then the whole thing will be automated and the profits will be generated and I won't have to be here. That takes a couple of years to figure that out.

Lisa: Then that theater is going to become a playroom for grandchildren or something.

Robert: There you go.

Lisa: I hope you enjoyed this episode of Boost Your Sales and Lifestyle with Lisa Sasevich. If you did, be sure to visit BoostYourSalesShow.com. While you're there, download my free, bestselling book, Boost Your Sales: How to Use Irresistible Offers Without Being Sales-­y. If you know you're sitting on a gold mine, and it's time to finally cash in while making the difference you know you're meant to make, grab this book and give yourself the unfair advantage of being ready with your signature talk that you love, irresistible offers that sell, and all of the confidence that comes with being prepared.

Thank you so much for allowing me to be part of your entrepreneurial path. Until our next episode, live sassy.