I recently had the opportunity to sit down with my friend and colleague, Lois Koffi, for a conversation on her Healthy n Wealthy n Wise Podcast. If you don't yet know Lois, she's an extraordinary coach, trainer, and sales professional. A great introduction to Lois' wisdom and training is her List Build to Freedom Masterclass, which you can access for free here.
Following is the transcript from our conversation:
Welcome to the Healthy and Wealthy and Wise podcast with global sales trainer and professional speaker Lois CofI each week, it is her goal to share inspiration and education for you to be to have the best health and wealth and wisdom for your life.
All right, all right, all right. Happy Friday for those of you who are tuning in live, it's another healthy and wealthy and wise podcast with Lois Cofee. I'm your host. Week after week, I bring you and my community the best health experts, the best health experts and the best experts. I can give you some nuggets of wisdom and getting you to being and becoming your highest and best version of yourselves as salespeople, entrepreneurs, coaches, all of you amazing people that are in my tribe.
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So I'm going to go ahead and move out of the way of greatness. I have an amazing friend and guest on today, David Bearer's actually and my mastermind group. I want to throw this out there, because you're going to hear me talk about it later, I met David at the Strategic Alliance Summit in January and oh my gosh, did it change my life? And I decided to get involved and be in this amazing mastermind group of of high level influencers of which David is.
And he's not only that, he's a theater geek. He's a wine geek. And of course, he's a marketing Gingrich's probably the biggest reason we have him here, although we like theater and we like wine in this group as well. He's a partner in the prepared group. So, David, I would love for you to share with my audience, my my community. Who are you and how did you get to be so awesome and doing what you do?
I think you're totally summarized it all right there. Theater geek, wine geek and marketing geek. And I hope we get to talk about the theater in the wine part, too, because I love those subjects. Well, a quick, quick history. So those that's actually my career trajectory. I started as a stage manager at a college. I worked in the theater industry. I worked at at Lincoln Center in New York in in stage management and company management for New York City Opera and and worked in the classical music field for a bunch of years and transitioned from doing sort of the behind the scenes stage management stuff to marketing.
And that's really where I got into marketing. And I was producing big events, big shows, and I had this passion on the side. I went to culinary school just for fun, not not for, you know, for recreational purposes only as my friends in the cannabis industry like to say. And and what what happened was I got really into wine as I was into food. And, you know, New York is a pretty darn the food and wine town.
And I had lots of opportunity to learn from great people and get access to cool stuff. And so one day I found myself probably out of frustration with my existing job applying for jobs in the wine industry. And I landed one business on a Saturday morning. I was super, super frustrated. You'll realize how long ago. This wasn't just a moment when I tell you that I was faxing my resume to places. And by Saturday afternoon, I had lined up three interviews for that Monday and landed a job by Wednesday of that week as the interim operations manager for a wine importer.
And then I became their marketing director and ran lots of large scale wine tastings and trade shows. So that's good. That's a little bit of history. That will give you some sense of why I do marketing the way I do marketing now.
Oh, that's awesome, I just want to give a shout out. We have Sean wait here live from Hastings, Minnesota, one of my good coaching friends. Thanks for your attention. And it's kind of interesting. You made me think of something because I love sales and marketing and I not to your level. I was in the theater and, you know, in high school and love, you know, the world is a stage right. And we have in business, the world is a stage.
And how did you learn and how did you become so successful? I know that's probably like a five to 10 day conversation as opposed to five minutes. But how did you go from theater and and wine? Happy to talk about that. A fan of that into marketing and standing out from the crowd, because I think that's the biggest thing that a lot of people struggle with is how do I stand out? How do I make myself heard, seen and paid, especially in this new normal.
Yeah. So well, my first marketing training was years ago at the dawn of email marketing back in the mid 90s, when people, you know, still had Prodigy and CompuServe accounts and AOL can't forget AOL. You've got mail and and learning how to use that new communication medium to convince people to take an action. And so I was watching my colleagues in the marketing department utilize email. And so that was my my the beginning of my understanding of how to position an offer was through packaging subscriptions, classical music subscriptions.
Hey, would you like to sign up for, you know, these these up and coming classical artists kind of thing? And how do you how do you sell something that people don't know that they necessarily want? Because it wasn't a famous artist. We were we were presenting. And how do you convince them? So we had to find other angles to position, you know, people who are now a big stars. But back in nineteen ninety six were not not household names.
And so we had to be creative. And that was when I first realized, oh, there's there's a there's a process here, there's a method here behind crafting the argument in marketing and copywriting we often talked about. Positioning and convincing people in a similar sense to the way that a an attorney in the courtroom might. Argue on behalf of taking an action and and providing all the underlying reasoning why somebody ought to and that's when I made that connection initially.
Awesome. I always like to call it. I like that lawyer like also like a private investigator, right. Like turning over all of the reasons or pain points that people are wanting to buy your stuff.
Well, I think I think that's actually in sales more than in marketing. You are having a conversation around stuff and you're sort of peeling back the layers and agitating, you know, the problem so that somebody becomes convinced, oh, I need to do this. But that happens conversationally, a lot more effectively in sales. Obviously in marketing, you need to do it. It's a one sided conversation where you're presenting something and you have to affect that that thinking in the in the consumer's mind.
Awesome. So so I'm such a sales coach, right, and I'm such a geek, you just made you just cause my brain to have a have a moment. Can you define for me and for the audience what you're like delineation, the difference between sales and marketing. Like, I know they go hand in hand, but how do you define the two differently?
So I think marketing is much more about helping identify that a solution to an existing problem, desire, want, need exists and helping match that solution to the consumer out there who's looking for it or may not even know they're looking for it, guiding them to the point where they are then beginning the sales conversation and the sales conversation may simply be you're at the checkout page on an e-commerce site and you fill up your cart and then you press submit and then that's the sale.
Right. Or it may be a lot more involved. It could be something that has a six month sales cycle where you're where you're selling, you know, a high ticket software in a corporate setting, enterprise setting. So sales is really the how do we take somebody who has raised their hand as a result of the marketing process saying, yes, I'm interested. Tell me more. OK, the sales then starts with the we're going to tell you more.
And sales is often continued to be supported by marketing. Through that sales process, right on some like up sells carousels or tree or not eat, not necessarily even those things, it could be. All right. Well, thanks for the information. I'll think about it. Great. We're going to keep staying in front of you via marketing now.
I love it, yeah, you're speaking one of my love languages, because you know me, I'm the fortunate in the follow up lady I love. I love winning friends and influencing people. And you made me think of, like, even how simple. Just Jeff Bezos started with books right in his garage and his marketing plan had to be brilliant to get people to go to the Internet. Back then, it wasn't like a thing. Right. I'm just going to Google or go to Amazon.
That was he. He he's now, you know, one of the top income people in the world. So if someone's out there listening and maybe sharing more of your story, too, because I know there's so many different ways to market, like, where did you begin? Was it the Internet was a direct mail, was it? You know, I might be dating a little bit. I know you talked about faxing. So can you can you share or paint a picture of, like, your progression, what you learned and how you help clients?
Sure. So, yeah, I started I say, as I said earlier with email, but it really was direct mail because in classical music, computer business, it was all about direct mail, sending out the brochure for the season. Right. Then you would try to maximize the amount of subscribers you would get for all of the shows that were coming up for that year. And then you would have all these empty seats left that you would then try to fill with single ticket buyers.
And so we would do postcard mailings throughout the balance of the year. That was that was a chisel on the stone. I love that it would start on this show that I'm so sorry if I can't see your face or your name just because that's how strong there can be. This might be your first one. So that's that's awesome. Chisel Stone. It's great.
Although I know I want to know, I want to see who that is.
Figure it out. Don't worry. Keep keep talking. I'll look it up for you right quick. Hello to Wilma Brown from Houston. Thanks for tuning in. OK, go ahead.
So so yeah, I mean there was there was all that stuff, but the medium and the message are really two different things. And you can, you can communicate. Oh, there we go. I knew it was you. You can. And we don't have to reveal to everybody else.
But anyway, just because just because I Ghaffar I called him my arch nemesis yesterday and I guess he's getting back at me or something and who knows, at least he changed his name back from Lois to Stephen.
We can get into that in a moment. So the point I was trying to make before I was so rudely interrupted by Stephen Caffrey was was that. You know, the medium that you're using is really, most importantly dependent on to whom you're communicating with, right. Where they are most likely to receive that message. And so you want to think about the appropriate channels to get in front of the people who matter the most. And that's why that's why the better, you know, and the more narrowly you focus your market, the more effective you can be at making lots of decisions, like what do I say?
Where do I say it? Kind of important things.
That's so true because I've been seeing a lot of this phrase be beseen bepaid, be heard, you know, my journey, I never did online marketing before the pandemic. And I stumbled and I fumbled. And I realized the more I spoke my truth than the right people showed up. So can you maybe speak to that, too? I know I love what you said about the medium versus the message. You know, what's the best way for people to get clarity around their message?
Because you're right, you could have the wrong message and bring the wrong people and waste a lot of time and be frustrated and all of that kind of stuff.
Well, I think that there's an efficiency in narrowing down who you're speaking to because you get the ability to get their attention, get them to. Trust you more quickly, because you're speaking the language they use and say, yeah, this is actually the the remember the the marketing job is to make the connection between your solution and their want, need, desire, pain. Right. If you are one of many out there, but you are solving the problem for that specific individual as opposed to anybody who you could possibly help.
Right. They're going to resonate with your message far above everybody else. I'll give you an example of this. You know that one of the markets that that we serve is financial advisers. And, you know, for the common person, financial adviser is a dime a dozen inaccessible because I don't have a lot of money. What do I need a financial adviser for all of those sorts of things? Right. Because nobody really understands what they do or what the benefit is that they get from them.
But what if you were as this is the situation with one of our clients, you were a U.S. postal worker and you were thinking about, OK, I'm getting ready for retirement in about six or seven years. I have the one of the four plans that I'm allowed to have through the federal government. And I'm really not quite sure what I should do with my money after that because I have to transition it somewhere. And some guy pops up on your news feed who is an expert in US Postal worker retirement planning.
Wouldn't you want to know more from that guy as opposed to the Edward Jones place that you pass as you're as you're driving to work every week and have no idea what they do, except that they do some sort of money thing? Right. So the specificity around who you serve, what problem you solve, all of that is critical. Now, where where do you what medium do you use? Well, that's that's the next step. Like, where's the postal worker likely to encounter you?
You know, do you want to be doing lots of big conferences while postal workers probably aren't at conferences showing up to hear you talk, so maybe that's not that's not the channel that you want to go on, but you could target them based on their employer on Facebook, at least you could. Facebook is cut back on a lot of things you used to be able to do in terms of marketing. You can also do direct mail. I bet the postal workers will appreciate that you're supporting their employment.
Somebody's got to continue paying for postage. So there's lots of considerations along the way there.
I love that you made me think of another question. And guys, this is just a quick reminder. This is always usually, I should say usually not always a 30 minute show, because we really want to pack in a lot of power in a short period of time. Hello, Scott in Minnesota. Welcome. Welcome, Scott. As a financial adviser. So he probably he perked up his ears when he heard you talk about that. Awesome. So if you guys have questions, make sure you comment below.
Live is is David is super, super successful and has a lot going on on his plate. So sometimes speakers will come back in here and reply to your comments on the reply. But if you're on live, please, please ask now and take take that opportunity. But there's so many mediums in the in this new normal, this pandemic, like I had a crash course in that myself not really having much of a LinkedIn presence. Not really, to be honest, caring so much about Facebook.
Like I had a love hate with social media in general because I was 100 hundred percent face to face relatively. So when the pandemic hit, I had to figure out, OK, what are my mediums are going to be and how many can I really command? Like then clubhouse game and then there's interest and then there's meet up and then there's, you know, I could go on and on ad nauseum. What do you think is the max capacity or what would you recommend?
Because I have a lot of coaches, speakers, authors, couple, you know, some financial advisors in this community and a lot of them are wrestling with that. And I see a lot of people spreading themselves way too thin in my in my estimation.
Well, since since we're on a podcast officially here, I want to I want to speak to that for a moment, because one of the big podcasters in the early days, who's still very big on this platform, this medium is Pat Flynn. Pat talked a lot about in his early days, the be everywhere strategy, how you take your content and you get it out to every single platform you possibly can. That's not a great idea because ultimately, unless you have an audience everywhere and you're trying to reach the masses, it's really a waste of time and energy unless you can see that the data behind getting it everywhere.
Tells you that it's being consumed everywhere, and so I typically like to again, going back to the who are you targeting? Where are they most likely to hang out and be receptive to your message? Look at two, possibly three channels that you focus on and you put all of your energy into those channels, which are specifically chosen to reach that audience you're trying to reach. And they shouldn't necessarily be the most obvious channels if they're the channels that everybody else who does what you do is also trying to communicate.
Maybe you want to think about I'm going to tell you a story that the famous Dan Kennedy in our space shares a lot, which is the B in a channel where you're not likely to find any competitors and you're going to stand out in a big way. And he tells the story about how he's a harness racehorse owner and he tells a story about this guy who owns jewelry stores. And every time there's a horse sale. Were these the the horse owners go and they buy that, you know, they look at the horses to consider buying one, the conversation typically before the guy leaves the house that morning is the wife says to the husband, you're not going to buy another horse, are you?
Oh, no, no, no, no, no. I'm just going to look right. And so what happens is the guy goes and he buys a horse and he has you know, he comes home with his head hanging low and he has to tell his wife, well, what is what the jewelry store guy decided to do was? Capitalize on that show up at these horse sales. And he has beautiful, expensive jewelry available for these guys who just bought a horse to buy for their wife, I bought a horse.
But honey, look, I also got this. Nobody else is there competing with this guy. Can you imagine how many tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars he's probably raking in.
A brilliant. And it's so it's so funny that you mention that, because can I have a question from the audience based on what you just said? Yeah. So Elizabeth, a jewelry designer, so she says, I'm working on becoming an influencer to be able to reach my ideal customers. OK, so go to the horse track is what he's saying. But other than that, do you have any specific advice for artists since you have a creative background?
And Elizabeth, awesome. I'm so sorry, Elizabeth. I forgot to put your your necklace on shame on me. And that would have been perfect sales. I can go get it if you want. David, you can talk.
I'll just vamp for you for a little while. Yeah, no problem.
I'll be right back with the question.
So I think that there's a couple of challenges around, you know, copying the exact story that I shared, because obviously, based on the description of the type of of jewelry that you create, it may not be appropriate for the situation with the guy who's trying to bring a fancy, expensive piece of a commodity back to his his wife. But think about where there's an audience for what you do that's outside of the typical craft fairs circuit or the, you know, the retail shops who might be resellers of your stuff.
Right. And so figuring out, OK, so so figuring out where your audience is also going to be hanging out, where they're not going to encounter stuff like what you have to offer, that's that's useful to know. So I would say that's that's probably that's probably the best advice I can give without knowing more.
And Elizabeth, this just occurred to me and I'm not you know, this is this is up to you. But like, if you know other influencers who do podcasts like me, like, I'm going to give you a huge shout out. She made me this personal Purple Rain Prince inspired necklace, one for me and one for my daughter. So if you if you have connections who have podcasts or YouTube channels, who can give you a shout out and be almost like affiliate or joint venture partners out there for you, like maybe Oprah needs some jewelry and some to Oprah.
Right. Sometimes we just got to think bigger. So anyway, some some thoughts.
I mean, hitching your cart to somebody else's horse to keep going with the horse thing may make a lot of sense if there is an opportunity. I remember actually going back to I think it was Pat again, he actually said, gosh, this is 10, 12 years ago now. So I hope my memory is correct. I'm probably foggy on this. But he said that the place that that catapulted his success with his podcast was actually having a guest on talking about some subject that he really didn't know very much about.
And suddenly he had this expansive audience in this very narrow niche. I don't remember what it was. And he was super popular among this audience he wasn't even going after in the first place. So there may be somebody who can just be a super fan of your work, who can help support you in front of a different audience. And Sean mentioned the blue blue water blue ocean scenario. And I think that's that's something if you don't know blue ocean or blue ocean strategy, that's that's a great couple of books to take a look at.
Awesome. So I know we're running out of time, and until I see another question I have to ask you, what's your favorite wine?
Conveniently, a super conveniently. I happen to have this postcard right here. Seriously, I was just sitting on my desk. This is this is a real car, which is a Spanish wine region. And the producer is called our Lopez de Heredia. And it's knownas they're probably their most famous wine. They are a producer from way back in the mid 19th century, a Bordelais family during the phylloxera epidemic that spread across Europe killed all the vines. But in Spain, most of the vines were reasonably healthy.
And so this family moved down from Bordeaux, set up shop in in real high and planted. And they make just beautiful, beautiful aged wines. They're typically they are holding their wines back because they can because they've been around for so long, 10 years before they release them. And they're just ethereal, layered, delicious.
I love it. Well, I just so you guys know, there's a hidden element of why I was asking David about this, because what I teach and what I've learned after four sales careers and even, you know, closing my husband on a date. Right. We're always selling. We're always marketing ourselves. And what I love about David today is when I asked him, how do you want me to introduce you and please any of my past guests?
I am not throwing anybody under the bus. But a lot of times we want to say, oh, I'm the best selling author and this that which is awesome. Right. But right away, he says a theater geek, wine geek, marketing geek. And I have to say, you're one of the least stuffy marketing people I've ever met. David, he's he's fun. He does things with his personality and he does things with passion. And he shares his personal side, the theater side, the wine side.
So I'd love for you to maybe also because I don't know you well enough to say that you do that for every podcast episode or whatever. But but knowing that that personalized side of you shows out, don't you think that's also indirect marketing?
Oh, I think that's incredibly critical in marketing, because you want to draw people to you and also detract people from you. And remember this this this concept that I think we all know, know, like and trust. Well, there's some people that you really don't necessarily want to be working with. It's in in the in the consulting process that we go through. Now, I'm going to get stuff at the prepared group are we help our clients figure out that entire process of positioning your business in front of the right prospect.
And one of the activities that we go through is who's not your ideal client? What makes them not your and how can we in our copy, in our positioning, make it really clear to them that they're not that they should not call us, they should not sign up for our email list. In fact, in some welcome sequences that I've written. One of the email subject lines that I have is please unsubscribe, and everybody's going to want to know why what why would you write that?
So they open up the email and then the email explains, look, if you're not looking for this, this and this, you're probably in the wrong place and therefore you should unsubscribe. However, if you are, here's what you should do next. Right. And so so it's, I think, very important to show personality, but also to use it in an effective way to position yourself to attract the right people and to detract from people.
And I call that for me that what I hear is that's an abundant mindset, right? If you're trying to help anyone and everyone, you know, it's it's definitely kind of like it also shows I don't know certainly who I am and what I'm doing. So you're laughing. What?
Oh, I'm laughing because of our little escapade yesterday that just just made it into the into the comments. I think you probably should share that, Lois.
OK, OK. So one of the things this is like if if David was going to have you on his podcast next and he introduced me, I mean, when when David has you on his show, when David has me on his podcast, forgive me. One of the things you can say to introduce me is that I'm a member of this critically acclaimed award winning international group called The Lowest Club. And you just got to name your kid Lois, then they can join.
Otherwise, you know, point of admission or entry is you have to have first or middle name Lois. I think we had one dude in there. He might have been Lois, I'm not sure. But otherwise it's women from all over the world who have the first name or middle name Lois. So that's the thing. I shared that with my mastermind yesterday, just as a part of who is in my network and what organizations am I a part of and what referrals am I looking for in all sorts of different great, awesome things.
And when I said that. Everyone in one of the breakout rooms changed their first name to Loess to support me, so it was it was pretty, pretty amazing.
Awesome, awesome. Yeah, it was fun. So I know. I know. I know. We're tight on time. So.
So what would you like to do? Let's bring it let's bring it home. I do want to mention before we close it out here, and it's so much knowledge and wisdom. I'm just going to have to have you come back again, David. But I do want to invite you to join me and David and Steven, a.k.a. Lois Caffery, to come to the Strategic Alliance live. It's a three day summit with some bonus days in there. And it's June 9th through 11th.
That's where I met David. That's where I met Steven. And that's where I met some of the biggest influencers that are now impacting and improving my life with this amazing wisdom, which is why I actually most of the guests I have this month are all from the strategic alliance mastermind. So I'll drop the link below. I'll also even drop the video. You might have seen David inside of a video that I shared last week, also with inviting you to come to that event.
And that's going to be a ton of fun. And it could be a life changing life giving opportunity for you to learn about sales, marketing, speaking, lead, magnet's email, all of the things that that really also that David's really, really good at. So if you if you can please sign up for that and also drop that YouTube video in the comments as well. So that's my only announcement. Again, if you guys saw value today, please hit the share button and share it with your community.
And my closing question for you, David, that I ask everyone is when you hear the phrase healthy and wealthy and wise, what does that mean to you?
Well, I think if you think back to the things I'm really geeky about, that summarizes it pretty well, it's to me it means to have a full life. And I hope that I bring a lot of excitement and energy into my life through my various passions that help make me healthier, wealthier and wiser.
Awesome. I love it, I love it. Well, thank you so much, everyone, for tuning in. Thank you, David, for being awesome and amazing that that went freakishly fast. So I hope you guys can tune in next week. I do have two guests next week, not one, but two. Next Wednesday is the TR. I call them the TR Garland. He is also in my master mind. David knows him. He's going to be talking about recently known as recently known as Loess.
But he was he was one of the lowest yesterday. So next week he'll be representing himself. T.R. Garland. That's Wednesday. It's a special show at 11:00 a.m. Pacific. So if you want to have another mind blowing interview, especially if it's a special edition episode, come to that. And then next Friday, be prepared to laugh. I have my friend Sarah Rotman, whose laughter yoga queen, and she's here to make us laugh, which I know we could all benefit from in our health, in our wealth and our wisdom moving forward.