Drilling a Gary Vee fanboi on dribble, pass, and shoot

The other day I hopped on a call with a new contact just to meet (yes, even though I'm an anti-social introvert, it's something that I do from time to time). And after hearing I was an email copywriter, the kind bloke had a few questions.

Nothing I'm about to say is meant to make fun of him, attack him, or degrade him in any way. He was a nice dood. I just found the conversation - erhh - amusing.

1) Because he was a bright-eyed Gary Vee fanboi, with dreams in his eyes of internet stardom (exaggerating slightly for added effect)

And:

2) (this is the kicker) he had neither a list, nor offer, yet was asking me about my services

And the other questions he asked showed he knew very little about direct-response fundamentals.

For example, after I politely told him he wasn't ready for my services, he asked:

"So how many subscribers would I need before I could bring you on?"

The short answer:

It depends.

In theory, with the right list, offer, positioning, pricing, back-end, et cetera, you could pull a nice 6-figure income from a small but rabid list of 100 subscribers (that's only five $20,000/year coaching clients... in fact, I can think of a few people off the top of my head I personally know who could do that).

In other cases (low-quality leads, no product-market match, poor positioning...), you'd struggle to do it with a list of 10,000.

There are so many factors, intangible and otherwise, that it's sort of like asking:

"How long is a piece of string."

So what I told him:

"The list and offer are like 80% of being successful. If you had burning dire-rhea, where every five minutes you were sharting your pants, and I had some miracle cure that would take it away in five minutes, I wouldn't need some great copy or persuasion tactic to get you to take me up on the offer. You'd do it in a heartbeat and thank me."

To which, he chuckled and told me he appreciated my honesty.

It's like what I read on Ken McCarthy's blog, where he talked about how 80% of basketball is knowing how to dribble, pass, and shoot.

If you don't know how to dribble, pass, and shoot, then learning all the high-level strategy, all-star dunking, or "fadeaway buzzer beaters" doesn't mean a darn.

And, what I also read on Ken's blog, the 'dribble, pass, and shoot' of marketing is something like:

"Putting the right offers in front of the right people."

So that's where I told him to start. And, I also said, once he has an offer that converts, he can consider bringing on an email copywriter to boost his response.

So if you're not making sales right now, it may not be a copy problem. It might be a "putting the right offer in front of the right people" problem.

Just some food for thought.

If you do have a copy problem and would like to boost your response, or you're copy is fine and you just want someone to take the writing of it off your plate, head over here and put your info in the box:

www.copybymccune.com/work-with-me

Tyler McCune


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