Meet our new Affiliate Manager, Jack Born

We really don’t do anything “normal” around here. Everything always has an odd little twist, doesn’t it?

Like scouting for talent. In December I announced I was looking for an Affiliate Manager and Content Czar. I charged a $25 app fee (which really roiled some people) and created a contest in which candidates would prove their worth.

The app fee prevented people who didn’t really believe they had a chance from applying. Saved me and Jeremy a LOT of needless toil. I’m guessing it reduced the number of applications by 80%, with no reduction in quality. The caliber of the applicants was high.

The other thing you should know about the app fee is, I checked the customer records of people who griped about it. Some had been on my list for YEARS and had never bought a single thing.

Apparently, that’s how much they believe in what I do: Lip service, yes, and yes, they do like to read my emails, but in terms of dollars, zero, zip.

They do not place any value on my products, or the opportunity to apply for the position. They consider the fee “unprofessional.”

Thus they disqualify themselves.

That, my friend, is the key to zero resistance selling: Set up reasonable qualifications and be perfectly willing to let people DIS-qualify themselves. Weed out the Googans. The world will sort itself out for you, if you stick to your guns and let it do so.

You don’t listen to what people say, you just watch what they do.

(One guy commented, “25 dollars? I’d pay a lot more than that to have a seasoned marketer tell me why he didn’t hire me.) The person who said this is serious about self-improvement. Puts his money where his mouth is.

OK, so anyway I got about 10 applications and I narrowed it down to 5 finalists and then gave them an assignment.

The assignment was: You’ve got about a week. Go out and demonstrate what you can do. Rustle up some biz. Find me some deals. Let’s see what you can sell. Work out an affiliate arrangement with some people and show me what you can accomplish.

This was right between Christmas and New Years. NOT the best time to be hunting for JV partners.

But everyone was dealing with the same set of circumstances. Again, just SHOW me what you can do. Anything.

A couple of the finalists didn’t respond.

One guy objected that he could not do this because he would not ask any of the people he knew to do something on such short notice.

A couple of guys did go to work. By far, Jack Born from Florida was the winner.

He put together some deals, convinced a couple of people to hit their email lists and promote a special. He also introduced me to one very prominent marketer from a different corner of the marketing universe, with whom I will eventually do business.

Jack physically, empirically demonstrated ability to not only get on the phone and send out emails and put deals together, but also showed that he could create training materials, supply affiliates with tools and software, do teleconferences, follow up via snail mail and lumpy mail, and provide reference examples of past accomplishments.

He’s functioned as an affiliate, an affiliate manager, and a merchant. Not many people have worn all three hats.

More broadly, Jack is a successful online entrepreneur in his own right. He has achieved the very thing that so many people dream of: He has an Internet business that runs 24/7 and comfortably supports his wife and family. Every morning he is awakened by either the sun shining through the window or his daughter coming into his room and waking him up. He is now in a position to do what he sees fit to do every day.

What he wants to do now is work with me and my team and build a gigantic online sales machine with tentacles extending all over the Internet. I am very excited to have him on board.

Jack flew in Sunday night, my wife and my staff spent yesterday running him through the ringer and everyone was unanimous: “We like Jack.” I’m told the lunch they all had together yesterday was a riot.

One of the reasons that he’s such a good match is that he been incubating in “Planet Perry” for several years already. Jack’s been reading my Renaissance Club newsletter for about 5 years. He’s become familiar, one issue at a time and one email at a time, with how we do things around here.

Similar things can be said of the four Content Czar finalists. (We’re just about to run their product submissions through the maze, btw.)

This happens naturally because a natural ascension process is in place by which customers go from casual familiarity to intimate contact. Not unlike going from blind date to going steady to engaged to married to married with kids. If the world is operating naturally, those steps don’t happen in 2 weeks. They take 2 years or maybe 5 or 10.

My prospects start out with a mini tutorial like the Google 5 Day course or the Guerilla Marketing CD and then buy a product… then become a Renaissance Club member… then go through a coaching program… eventually you end up in Roundtable, my highest level mastermind.

YOUR business should have an ascension model too. So long as you’re not in a purely transactional business where a person buys something from you once and never has reason to return again, you should have a ladder, a set of stair steps that lead people from one level to the next and to the next. You should make it clear to customers that this ladder exists, and what the rungs are.

If your business has this in place, then not only do you have a mechanism for moving customers from small purchases to large ones, you also have a powerful talent pool from which to draw potential partners and employees.

After Jack had gone through the first set of hurdles, there were more. John Paul Mendocha interviewed him for an hour, and I listened to the recording of their talk.

We considered doing the Fraternity hazing thing where you force the guy to drink a pint of vodka and then stick him on a merry-go-round, but we decided against it at the last moment.

My staff took him out to lunch and ‘scoped him out.’ Bryan flew in to participate in that. Laura and I had breakfast with him yesterday, where he had to pass the Wife Approval Test.

The Wife Approval Test simply consists of spending some time with someone, freely conversing while not necessarily talking about anything in particular, and seeing if Wife LIKES him.

If Wife doesn’t like the guy, she doesn’t even have to be able to explain or justify why. Woman’s intuition, her instinctive gut reaction, is good enough. (I’ve ignored that one a few too many times and I’ve always ended up ‘paying for it.’ Not in terms of Wife’s Revenge either, but in terms of the School Of Hard Knocks.)

Your woman has this funny way of sniffing out bad people and bad paths in your life. Listen to her. She’s there to protect you.

My dear affiliates, it might take a couple of weeks to get this show on the road but Jack Born will be movin’ and shakin’.  You’ll be hearing from Jack, and I believe he will serve you well. I can’t wait.

Perry Marshall

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About the Author

Perry Marshall has launched two revolutions in sales and marketing. In Pay-Per-Click advertising, he pioneered best practices and wrote the world's best selling book on Google advertising. And he's driven the 80/20 Principle deeper than any other author, creating a new movement in business.

He is referenced across the Internet and by Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, INC and Forbes Magazine.