Outside the Box Ideas that Lead to Extraordinary Results with Doug Allen

In this Episode

• [01:42] – Doug starts things off by sharing the history of how he became someone who helps others by running masterminds.
• [04:34] – Was Doug doing Facebook ads as well, or just AdWords?
• [06:34] – Stephan clarifies what Doug has been saying, and then Doug elaborates. Stephan discusses a study done in Israel involving parents turning up late to pick up their kids.
• [09:50] – Doug shares a case study about his mastermind, explaining why his video was compelling.
• [12:32] – We hear about one of the things that Doug taught, and that Stephan got a lot of value out of.
• [13:14] – Doug explains this compelling concept, which relates to categorizing things into “me too” versus “so what?”
• [16:39] – Stephan points out that in most Shark Tank episodes, the sharks are thinking to themselves “so what?” Doug then talks about an event on Dragons’ Den.
• [19:41] – We learn more about Doug’s work with Tony Robbins.
• [22:41] – Doug shares the results model that he came up with in Fiji when he was there for Tony Robbins’ Date With Destiny.
• [27:17] – Stephan shares a story about a lunch conversation he had recently that ties into what Doug has been saying related to discipline.
• [31:13] – Doug and Stephan talk about a strategy for keeping listeners engaged.
• [32:11] – Doug discusses a proactive formula, beginning by explaining its necessity through telling the story of an incident at a recent mastermind involving Stephan’s wife, Orion.
• [36:13] – We hear about the proactive formula in more detail, with Doug explaining each of its several steps. He and Stephan also take a moment to dig into the concept that everything is a gift, but the bow may be on the bottom.
• [39:42] – The fifth step of the proactive formula is doing it and taking action, Doug explains.
• [41:23] – One person making a more enlightened, evolved decision can make a difference in a more powerful way than bringing your “Truth” to the situation, Stephan points out.
• [42:28] – This perspective is what Doug loves about Stephan and Orion.
• [44:46] – Doug returns to discussing the LinkedIn strategy that he briefly mentioned earlier in the episode.
• [47:06] – LinkedIn gives you the ability to download all your LinkedIn contacts’ email addresses, Doug explains, then offers a creative and effective way of using these email addresses (instead of just spamming them).
• [50:23] – If someone wants to work with Doug, how can they reach him? He suggests texting him and gives his phone number (if you want it, you’ll have to listen to the episode!).

Transcript

You probably already know this about me, but I’m a big fan of masterminds. One of the recent masterminds I attended was called The Destiny Partnership Mastermind run by Doug Allen. Guess what, Doug is today’s guest. I wanted him to share with you some of the case studies, tools, technologies and so forth that he shared in the mastermind with you listeners. I’m very excited to have him here, he’s a five time bestselling author, a hedge fund manager, a business development consultant, a former member of Tony Robbins’ Wealth Mastery Faculty, and founder of The Destiny Partnership Mastermind group. This is Episode 107 and welcome to the show. Doug, it’s great to have you on the show.

Hey Stephan, awesome to be here. Thank you so much, I’m really grateful, I appreciate being here and look forward to have a great call with you.

Me too. I really got a lot of value out of the mastermind that you ran a few weeks ago, really great stuff. You just give, give, give. I’m very happy to have you on the show so we can talk about some of the cool stuff that you’re doing with your clients to take them to a whole other level in terms of their marketing. Let’s start there, let’s talk about some of the case studies that you shared at the mastermind, maybe we could share some of that not super secret stuff that you’re allowed to share publicly. Let’s hear some of that.

I’ll share the history of how I even became someone that people had asked to help on stuff. A lot of my friends have mid-size businesses, maybe $10 million to $50 million a year businesses. In that situation, they rely a lot on third-party vendors to give them advice on how to do things which is always inevitably leading them to buy their services, their products, I don’t want to mention any names. Sometimes, it’s not in their best interest. They get steered down a couple paths that might not be the best thing. The one case study I’m thinking in particular was a good friend of mine just got a quote on a website for $125,000. I was like no, no, no, slow down. Would WordPress work? He’s like, “No, they told me WordPress won’t be able to handle all the traffic.” I was like maybe we might explore this a little bit. He had a service business. It’s like your typical brochure type website and there was no real process on the front end of the website where they would actually get someone to come in, make a call to action to get them on a list or anything. Just sign up over here for my newsletter, some generic thing. What we did was we created a separate test that we wanted to create, standard stuff. Lead page with a lead magnet. What happened was the company took maybe six weeks to create their lead magnet, which was basically a 20 page PDF, it was real corporate-y, not that great. Me and my buddy were working on it, Peter, you met Peter at the event. We got frustrated. We just did one ourselves and Peter did the whole thing. He did a video, he created the concept, did a video on the landing page, and if they opted on the landing page with a video, it was a total different angle, that’s one of the biggest takeaways I can share here. As he came out with a total different angle on the front end where we were asking people, say we need their help, like look, we really need your help and you can help us with this—I don’t want to get in the details of the market—you can really help us, we need your help. It was a really short video, three minutes long. The overall result was they opted in, we didn’t even give them anything. We didn’t give them a lead magnet, we need your help, if you want to help us, opt in here. The opt in rate went from 4% to 19% compared to their main home page.

Wow.

Yeah, and then on the thank you page, we put a call to action. Just fill out a little application to tell us about yourself. It went right to the calendar to schedule a phone call. The end result was we decreased their cost per lead from about $150 a lead to about $30 a lead.

Wow.

They were spending $10,000 a month in AdWords.

You were doing AdWords. Facebook Ads as well or just AdWords?

No, straight up AdWords.

Okay.

We basically forced them to have to hire 20 new sales people. They got four times as many leads with the same amount of money. They all of a sudden said, “Well, we got to slow down here, we made too many customers.” The biggest takeaway of that is just to think outside the box, think outside different angles, the psychology of the person, really appealing to what really drives and what motivates them. It’s not always the same old, same old. You mentioned the event we just did and it’s been a month or so after the event. The thing that all the people at our mastermind event keep coming back and talking about is that the whole page three that was in the book that I put out, page three was just a picture of you in the middle of a big crowd of people that the potential customer’s seeing through their computer screens, through their mobile phone. All these people that claim they can help. You just blend in like all these people. That was on the page three of the manual, and that became a meme of our own. We’re like, “We gotta get off page three.” In all my experiences, all the different case studies we could talk about, that is the distinguishing thing. Getting off page three, doing the same thing everyone else does. The highest level here is really think of what you can do that’s going to help someone the most. Start with that, what can I do that’s going to help somebody the most really get what they want, and then go backwards from there. That was that example. My friend Peter Dudek, he’s just sitting around one day. He came up with this video idea, the whole concept, did the video himself, narrated it, put it off, created the landing page, the thank you page, did everything. The whole thing took three hours to do. The conversion rate went up 475% on a three hour endeavor just to see what was gonna work and just doing it, not overthinking it.

That’s amazing. Basically abandoning the traditional approach of the lead magnet download, the PDF as bait to get people to opt in, and switching to a video based approach on the landing page instead and not having a PDF download at all.

No PDF download at all, it was a call to people who really desired to serve the greater good in this market. Not just they were focused on themselves, what I can get out of it. It’s like what can you contribute as well as what you’re going to get out of it, it’s like a win win.

There is a study—it was powerful for me. It was done in Israel and they studied parents who were dropping off their kids and picking them up from daycare. Kids would get picked up late, they close at I think it was [5:00] and parents would turn up late. They knew that they shouldn’t do that, but traffic, or whatever, poor planning, and they’d show up late. And then they’d be the last kid, just one staff person waiting there with that one kid. Embarrassing, right? What they tried doing in the study is switching to a monetary model where you pay a penalty for every minute you’re late past [5:00]PM. And then what actually happened was parents would show up much later more frequently. The reason why is because there was this social effect when there was no monetary penalty. I don’t feel really good about doing this to the staff, it’s embarrassing, it’s not cool. When it was monetary, it was just like well, this meeting is way more important, this could be a big deal for me. It’s only going to cost me $50 or whatever it was to be a half hour late, I’m just going to do that. They didn’t feel compelled to look after the interest of the staff anymore, it’s just a monetary exchange. If you apply this to other aspects of business and you say well, maybe I should ask people for help, maybe I should enroll them in a bigger initiative that’s changing the world or making a difference instead of just making it all about the money.

That’s exactly what the offer was. We need your help, we’re doing something good in the world, we’re going to need help to do it in these more remote locations. That increased their response rate four or five times. I think the quality of the people that were brought in were proportionally increased as well.

Yeah, and you used this approach, I think, very effectively just in marketing of the mastermind that you put together last month. I was compelled watching the video, I already knew the value that you delivered because I’ve been to one of your previous masterminds in years past. You had a great landing page with video and it felt really real, not overproduced, didn’t have a video team.

I could share that case study. I booked that house in April for a September event, seventh anniversary of our mastermind. By August, I still did not even tell anybody about it because I didn’t feel what I was even doing it for. I was losing connection with why I was even doing it, and I was thinking of the tradition like you just said, traditional how to do XYZ without ABC. They’re just traditional how we’re all taught to market. I was talking to a friend driving down the street and we were talking about it. I was like, “How do you think I’m going to do it?” She’s like, “Well, what do you want?” I was like, “I can tell you what I don’t want. I don’t want how to do this and this and this, just traditional stuff.” I just got out of my car, Stephan, and I had my phone. I didn’t have my tripod, I usually plan a little bit, I usually have a microphone. I just got out of my car and had the phone and I just started talking, right after I got done talking to my friend. I just told the truth, this is what I’ve been doing, this is what I think, here’s what I don’t want, here’s what I do want. I want to have a bunch of people to come that have their like vision, like minded, we want to make the world a better place and we come from different points of view and different backgrounds and different businesses and we’re doing this to just help each other, help the overall mission in the world, make the world better. I’m just going to give everything I’ve got. It was all real. It was one take. The sun was alright, it was really, really super sunny. I left my sunglasses on because it was so bright. If I didn’t have my sunglasses on, I couldn’t even see. I was like ah, I shouldn’t have my sunglasses on, I didn’t shave, oh heck with it. Pop off the camera, and here’s my philosophy on videos. If they don’t turn out that great, just don’t show them to anyone. To me, it was compelling because real, it’s real authentic. I think it was speaking into the heart of the people that wanted to show up. When you saw the people that showed up, it was the most diverse group I was ever involved with. I would say that’s one of the highest level quality in terms of professional quality, people that were there. Just how it unfolded, we had a lot of people just stepping up and delivering like a real mastermind. It wasn’t just me talking the whole weekend, I felt confident, I saw the people are coming. I could just sit back and watch and everyone wants to step up and deliver when the time came. You saw that’s exactly what happened, it was really amazing how it unfolded.

Yeah, it was really good stuff. Of course you did do a fair amount of teaching too and delivered massive amounts of value, it wasn’t just up to the fellow attendees. In fact, one of the things that you taught, I really got a lot of value out of was the me too versus so what. We’ll talk about what that means in just a moment but that applied to the video that you just described; got out of your car, you just gave in one take an authentic view of why you were doing this mastermind and what’s in it for the people who would be attending and who it’s not a fit for. It was very compelling, it wasn’t as well produced as it could’ve been and that actually made it more real. That was a lot of me too instead of so what. Do you want to explain that?

Yeah, it’s what I learned way back in 1997, the first time I was at Tony Robbins’ he called in Trainer Academy back then, it’s called Leadership Academy now. He was teaching people how to present from the front of the room and he just created a really simple framework. He’s like, “Everything you say, just filter between two different things so people can say me too when they hear you say it, or they’re going to say so what when they hear you say it.” I’ll give you an example like what would be a so what. I’m an engineer from [00:14:59] University, I got degrees in Biomedical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, blah, blah, blah, who cares? People are going to say so what? When I learned this, I started using this in presentations right away. The simplest way you can apply it when you do a live presentation is just tell your story of how you actually, physically got into the room. “Yeah, I was coming here today,” this was in Cancun. “I got to the airport in Cancun, I was never in Cancun before. I was driving up this road, I see the beach out to the right and I think oh my gosh, look at all these people in the beach and I’m going to a conference. I look out to the left and it’s like a rainforest. I get to the hotel where the conference was and I walked in…” I was telling this story on the front of the stage when I got there. I was telling the audience of this whole story of how I got there, I walked through the lobby and I saw this big, beautiful waterfall on one side of the lobby and then I walked in the room where all the vendors were and I saw the different people that were selling stuff. I was thinking to myself I wonder if this is valid, I wonder if that’s valid. I was thinking to myself wow, I wonder who I can go meet here, I’m unsure who’s even going to be here. I was describing my journey right to the stage when I start talking, the exact physical journey everyone in the audience had to take to get in the same room. By default, if you tell a story of how you got there when you’re doing a live presentation like that, it’s a me too for every single person in the room. Simple, simple, easy way to do a live presentation with me toos. If you want to do videos or whatever you’re doing on your marketing, if you just think of your avatar, think of the person you’re trying to help the most and then you think okay, what can I say that they’re going to say me too? I think I told the story at the event where we helped another couple in the mastermind group get a deal on Dragons’ Den, it’s like Shark Tank. We went through all the people that were starting to make the deal, the Dragons they called them, we got their bios. We spent probably six hours doing this. Got all their bios, read through all their bios, did as much research as possible, then we created a me too story of how this couple started their company. It was totally authentic, we just focused on the areas of their story that matched up with each of the investors where the investors would think to themselves me too. We started the business in our basement, guess how many investors start their business in basements? One of the investors was all about kids. We want to do stuff on athletics, physical stuff. One of the investors was all about doing physical, sports related stuff. By really understanding the person that you’re speaking with and really truly relating to them, really actually speaking to them that you can relate about them and they can relate about you, that’s what forms that bond, that me too where it’s like okay, we’re alike, we’re on the same side, we’re on the same vision. People can relate to you, as opposed to telling them—a lot of times people try to qualify themselves, they’re insecure. “I’m so great because I did this, I’m so great because I did that.” That’s when people just turn off, so what, so what? They heard that a million times.

Yeah, and I can imagine most Shark Tank and Dragons’ Den episodes, the Sharks are saying to themselves so what?

Exactly.

How many people on those shows are actually preparing in that kind of way, I would say pretty rare.

Yep.

That’s a great innovation, very powerful. What happened with those guys that pitched Dragons’ Den?

They did the whole pitch and it got near the end. One of the cameras, I guess they actually use physical magnetic tape in the cameras, one of the cameras broke and they had to replace it, there was a break. Right before the end, they had four of the five people already tapped out, the Dragons saying we’re not interested, we’re not interested. There was this break. They all got together, my mastermind group with their employees, four or five guys. They all huddled around and they thought back to rehearsal, we just did a run through a couple days before. It was all about being really in touch with the emotion of it, the reason for doing it. At this mastermind event a couple of days before, this guy Amil, he did the whole pitch and it just wasn’t working. His partner, Kayla, she looked at me and I looked at her. She’s like, “Doug, you got to do something.” I went up to them and I was like get in your heart, what’s the reason you’re doing this? I got him to tell the story about this kid named Ruben who really helped transform his life. When this break happened, they got back in that story, he got out of his head and got into his heart again. He got up and told that story at the end. There’s only one guy left. We had an outcome, the outcome was get any one of the Dragons to invest at any price, he lives 100%. The way it works is you had $150,000 then they have to figure out what percent the cut they had is equal to. Amil gives this whole presentation, talks about this kid Ruben then gets all teary eyed. Jim Treliving, this guy that owns Boston Pizzas, he looks at him like he’s trying to negotiate a little bit. He’s like I’ll go in but I’m not going to come in at less than 50%. They’re supposed to go back and have a meeting with me and make it dramatic. But because that was the outcome, right then I knew he was going to take the deal so Amil just reached out his hand and says, “You got a deal, mate,” and that was it. I don’t think that’s ever happened before in Dragons’ Den where they didn’t even go back and talk or negotiate. It was that speaking from the heart, genuine, like you talked about that first video. When you’re speaking from the heart and you’re aligned with someone else that cares about the bigger picture, the bigger vision, it’s not just about making money, it’s about making a difference. I used to end my presentation every time like that, it’s not about just making money but about making a difference because that’s really what’s going to get you—to me anyway, the magic things happen in your life, they unfold and they open up for you when you really align with making a bigger difference, at least in my experience.

Yeah, you got to have a big enough why, that’s the fuel. Awesome. You actually taught for Tony, you’re part of the faculty for Wealth Mastery.

Yeah, I was so grateful to Tony. I went from being $100,000 in debt to making $2 million in a day with him in two years just from what I learned from Tony, trading, setting up a hedge fund. He was teaching this course called Oppa, it’s RPM now. He said at this course that he’s not going to teach Wealth Mastery anymore, and I just had this feeling come over me. It’s like oh shoot, I got to volunteer, at least I got to volunteer to help because I know I can teach it. I had the results. I offered to teach it and I was shocked he said yes. He threw me up on stage, threw me right on the water. I never spoke in front of an audience before in my life but it all comes back to that same premise. I’m going to help people and I’m going to just be myself and just teach people or help them and give them everything I have in the time I had. It comes back to the main thing was the strategy, you have to know the strategy. You can’t just have positive thinking to get the results you want. The strategies are really incredibly important. If you have that big enough why coming from your heart and you’re trying to help people in a way that’s, to me, I call my gift or your gift. We all have gifts that we’re here to share in the world and we can find gifts in different things. When we utilize those gifts and really you’re authentic and get rid of any fear about being judged or fear about being like other people, just speak from your heart and share your gifts with the world, they’re here to help other people. That’s what I did at the Tony events, I taught all the trading stuff but then the end is when I talked about why I got into trading in the first place. I was broke, I had no money. My wife at the time, we already had two children and she wanted to adopt a baby from China and we didn’t have any money. It cost $15,000 and I had zero money, I was $100,000 in debt. That’s why I started learning how to trade and learn how to make money and take control of my whole financial life. That was the only reason I ever learned how to trade.

You had a big enough why.

Yeah, big enough why. Nothing else mattered. Just focused on that. When I say nothing else matters, the immediate results I produce might not be exactly what I wanted, just like when you do marketing and put up a landing page to drive traffic or whatever, you might get zero conversions, who knows, that didn’t work. But if you have a big enough why, do the next step, what’s the next thing we can do? Let’s try this, let’s do this, let’s do this. You don’t judge yourself based on your immediate results. I always associate the pleasure, the reward was just taking the action, the best action that I could take independent of the results that that immediately produced because trading is the perfect example. You can make the right trade and you’re not going to make money every time, half the time you might make money, half the time you might lose money. But if you make more and you lose, you’re going to make more in the long run so you really can’t judge individual results, but you can judge if you took the right action.

Yeah. Speaking of results, you have this formula or this model that you taught at the mastermind about results. Do you want to share that?

Yeah, it just came to me in a vision, sitting in Fiji, one of Tony’s Date With Destiny a long, long time ago. I got started with the whole trading concept but the results model, I kept thinking about any type of improvement you want to make is an improvement in the results. If you have a gap between where you’re at now and where you want to be, it’s really a gap in the results. I was thinking this to myself okay, there has to be a system to create results. Most people, at least me, I’m saying me personally, I never really thought about how I produce the results. I just thought about okay, these are the results, I want to change them. I started reverse engineering it. The first level, when I start thinking about this, is that we all have unlimited opportunities to focus on things, in every moment. This moment right now, if I ask you to think to a number between one and infinity, there’s an infinite number of things you can think of. We have these unlimited opportunities but they get filtered immediately by our beliefs and what we focus on. That was my first big aha moment. It came from trading because when you trade stocks, you have all these stocks you can trade, you can buy them, you can sell them, the quantity of shares, when you’re going to sell them. You really have unlimited opportunities every single moment in the stock market, but it’s filtered right away by your beliefs, what do you believe is gonna work? What are you focused on? Am I focused on small cap companies, am I focused on short term trading, am I focused on bitcoins, whatever. All those unlimited opportunities are filtered immediately by what you believe and what you focus on. Now there’s like okay, what’s after that? Then you have to evaluate the situation. I believe this and I can see it now because I’m focused on it, it narrows down your focus. Now you have to evaluate it and you have to have some type of criteria to evaluate it because after the evaluation, you make a decision. You see the situation, you focus on things, you believe about it and you make your evaluation, now you decide what you’re going to do. It’s like okay, I’m going to say for example in the stock market, I’m going to buy this stock. Then you take an action, then that action is immediately followed by the result that that action produces. When you see all that, it makes total common sense that you believe something, focus on it, evaluate it, make a decision, take an action, and produce the result. Here’s the biggest a-ha moment of the whole thing, you associate pain and pleasure to everything in your life. If you produce results, like in stock trading, lost money. It’s like oh my gosh, there’s pain about losing money. However, if you took the right actions that just didn’t turn out right, just like casino. Say at a casino, they took half the red numbers off the roulette wheel. You’d bet on black every time because that’s on your favor. Just because red came up once, you wouldn’t be upset because you know you took the right action. Let’s talk about football games. If you’re on the one yard, the last play of the game and your team’s losing by four points, you never kick the field goal because that’s only three points. You have to go for the touchdown but you’re not going to make the touchdown every time, but you made the right choice by trying for it. That’s what I realized in this whole thing, especially with the marketing. Everything I did in the hedge funds, the trading, the marketing because it’s very similar how you create the systems, measure all the conversion points. The first example, you set up the landing page to the video, set the thank you page, set the call to action. We didn’t know if that was going to produce a result or not, we knew it was going to produce something but we didn’t know if it was going to work. The fact that we did it and we set it up and we ran traffic to it and we tested it, that’s the win right there. Recording the number is the win. If we got zero conversions, at least okay, we know that this traffic to this landing page to this pitch to this call to action produced zero results, but we did what we had to do because we can’t do the next one unless we do the first one.

We have these unlimited opportunities but they get filtered immediately by our beliefs and what we focus on. Share on X

That’s right, yeah.

That’s from a psychology standpoint, you want to really associate the pleasure, reward yourself for taking the action that’s the right action to take to produce the long term result, and not associate pain, or pleasure for that matter, to actually produce results. We produced four times improved our conversions, that’s nice but that’s not what wins in the long run. Sometimes, you get lucky. Sometimes, getting the discipline, getting the system in place to actually produce the measurable results that you can scale up and repeat, that’s where all the win is right there.

Yeah. It’s funny that you describe this because just two days ago, I was having lunch with a friend of mine, Justin Mendenhall, who I met through Tony Robbins’ Platinum Partnership. He’s big into trading as well. We were talking about discipline. Should he buy or sell, I forget the details of it, but at certain number of ticks, he had this trading strategy in trading options. In certain number of ticks, positive, he would get out for the day. This is day trading. He’d just get into the market for minutes sometimes and he’d be done for the day. But he would get greedy and stay in too long and then his margin eroded and he’d end up with less if he would have been more disciplined and stayed in only until he got to the threshold on number of ticks where his model says that he should be. We made an agreement that for the next month, he’s a man that he says what he’s going to do. Because he’s making this commitment to me that he’s going to get out at whatever it was, 30 ticks or whatever positive and then 20 ticks negative, he’s not going to try to get greedy or whatever. He’s going to just stop at that threshold. He’s just going to do that for the next 30 days. What made the difference for him, I want to be more disciplined in following through on my trading strategy, I would make more money that way. But my emotions get a hold of me, I get greedy. Then I’m like that sounds like an easy problem to solve. I said, “You’re a man who does what he says he’s going to do, right?” He’s like, “Yeah.” “So you make a commitment to me as a friend. You’re going to follow through on your commitments to me, right?” He’s like, “Yeah, of course.” He’s like, “Wow, that was easy, okay. I’ll report back in 30 days and let you know how it went.”

That’s awesome, that’s perfect.

That’s a lot of what you were describing, the results model and the trading strategy of not getting too drawn into the emotion of it and disconnecting that awful feeling of like oh my god, I’m losing, no, no, no.

That’s 100% it.

You just lose your shirt in trading because you get drawn into the emotion. If you were a robot, you’d probably crush it, and that’s why so many people are using these automated strategies, these systems that do the trading for them because they can’t handle not getting sucked in emotionally.

Yeah, that translates 100% to online marketing. You can’t get drawn into the emotion of say the classic thing is someone will set something up online maybe the first time they’re doing it. They get one email, some hater type email, they’re like oh my god someone doesn’t like my stuff, they think it’s bad, blah, blah, blah. It’s like no, just do what you think is best and not get sucked into that.

Yeah, I’ve gotten really affected by hater emails and messages on Facebook and that sort of thing. Really used to mess with my psychology, bothers me less now. One of my past guests on this show, Jay Baer, has a book called Hug Your Haters, I love that title.

That’s awesome.

Embrace them because they’re there for a purpose. There’s a reason, a bigger reason beyond just human interactions, a spiritual reason why they’re in your life at that moment, which gets to the Proactive Formula. That’s something that we also discussed at the mastermind and something I learned from Kabbalah. Now, I understand that because I shared that at the mastermind, that’s actually being taught to some high level executives in a very big company.

I can tell you straight up, yeah, we can go in this a little bit. I’ve got two things I want to share before that. A real practical, tangible, the LinkedIn strategy I taught to mastermind that could really help people. What do you want to hear first? Do you want to hear the LinkedIn one or do you want to save that one and make people wait for the LinkedIn one?

No, that’s great. Either way, Neil Strauss calls this cat string theory. Keep open loops. You don’t close the loops until the very end, or you close them out of order and it really messes with people. “I want to hear what the final result is.”

That’s what Orion did at the event. She’s like stop, you have to listen to the next podcast to hear that.

I’m sharing too much, yep, you’re right, Orion, I’m not going to share the punch line, you’ll have to listen to that episode of Marketing Speak or Get Yourself Optimized to find out what happened. That’s awesome.

Let’s do the Proactive Formula first then we’ll do the LinkedIn one last because LinkedIn was super practical and you can do the LinkedIn one today and get incredible results just for this one little distinction that I stumbled upon as a necessity.

Alright, perfect.

My buddy Scott, we met at the event. He’s a super great guy. Scott has been doing Corporate Leadership Training for 30 years now. He does presentations, because you’re not supposed to say shows in the corporate world, they’re based on plays. He does them about leaders. [00:20:45], Gandhi, Mandela, and these famous leaders. He does them for Fortune 100 companies, Coca Cola, 3M, Boeing, Dell Computer, these major companies. This is so awesome, Stephan, it’s one of my favorite things ever that just happened. We’re doing this whole mastermind event and this goes back to the whole higher purpose. The first night of the event, I had all my content planned out for the whole four days. The first night of the event, we had Orion and Steven who come into this event from two totally different perspectives in life, right? The perspectives didn’t align exactly…

Not at all.

It’s probably misalignment in those perspectives that caused us… What you would normally expect when you say misalignment in perspectives wasn’t harmony, let’s just call it…

Conflict, yeah.

Conflict. Steven is a 60 year old, indigenous, Native American, first nation man. There’s a little bit of a conflict. He comes up to the front of the room and is just ready to bow out. He’s like, “I don’t want to have any disruption here, I’m just going to leave.”

And also because of a word that Orion used that really triggered him. That was the word dominate.

Dominate, yeah.

What do you want to get out of this mastermind?’ Orion uses the word dominate, and he’s like nope, no, no, that’s the kind of thing that… and then he went into this story. We could’ve just calmed things down, okay we’ll agree to disagree.

I tried to. Let’s rewind the clock, let’s pretend that didn’t happen. The big picture there is between Steven and Orion. The first thing was the love of people. I want to help people get what they want to get out of it. It was from that pure place of really caring about people that was no strategy involved in my part. I care about this. Steven, I promise, look in my eyes. Orion comes up, I’m doing whatever I can. Then later, before the evening was over, [2:00]AM, I’m with you and Orion in the room and I realized I patched up the first part of it with Steven a little bit and I still had to patch up the part with Orion where I really failed with her. That’s where you taught me the Proactive Formula. I swear to God, it changed my life as much as anything I’ve ever learned. I’ve used it all the time.

That’s a prime example, in the Proactive Formula which we’ll teach in just a minute, this is applicable across all aspects of your life and your business and human relationships and everything that there’s a bigger purpose, a bigger reason why you have this challenge, this conflict, this situation. In the case of that conflict between Steven and Orion, it actually served the greater good and now is affecting people all over the world in these different companies. High level executives who had never heard of the Proactive Formula, never even heard of Kabbalah, they’re getting to hear this practical application of a Kabbalistic principle and they get to apply that worldwide in their business, pretty amazing. What a gift that was to have that conflict because of what ended up from it. Go ahead and proceed.

The first step of the Proactive Formula is pause. When you have some type of an obstacle, I’m paraphrasing now the best I can, it might not be word for word.

Yeah, I’ll jump in.

If you have some unexpected obstacle, conflict, whatever, the first step is to pause. Step one is pause because step two is your reaction is like your base when you get triggered, your reaction is the enemy. That’s the first thing. Just always pause and be aware, become aware that your immediate reactions is the enemy.

Yeah, so you pause. That gives you the space to have a different action instead of a reaction. We’re so reactive as humans and that’s a robotic consciousness, our reactive nature is how we are by default. If you pause, then you can observe your reactive nature, that’s step one. Then step two is just simply become aware that it’s your reaction that’s the enemy, that’s the real enemy, not the person you’re in conflict with, not the challenge or the situation, it’s your reaction, your reactivity. That’s pretty profound.

That’s part of the concept, just the word react. If you react, retake the action that produces the results, you’re going to produce the same results if you react. There’s nothing new, no growth.

Yeah, it’s like playing a tape.

Step three is the situation is a gift, whatever your spiritual place, starts from the divine, from the light. That situation that you’re facing is a gift to you, it’s being given to you, it’s happening for you.

Yeah, so good. That’s where you can look for where that gift is. Orion, my wife, says that it’s a gift, it’s just sometimes the bow is on the bottom.

That’s awesome, bow is on the bottom. That’s step three, that’s known as the gift. I’ve internalized that so much. Honestly, at this point, I have a hard time even imagining a situation that I’m not going to be able to go over there instinctively. Okay, this is a gift, ask the question, where is the gift? The fourth one is by far how I applied this more like that day, the next day, where the fourth step is to ask the light, ask the divine, ask the universe. Use your own language. Ask for the solution. It’s not all on you, that’s what Orion told me. Just release that burden from yourself, you’re not the one that has to figure it out.

You’re just a channel. If you want to call it intuition, if you want to call it guidance, or grace, whatever your belief system is. We can be guided, we can be a channel for something greater than just our human consciousness. I think this was just something that I learned at your mastermind, maybe it was somewhere else. We’re not human beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings have a human experience. I forget who shared that.

Andy shared that.

Powerful, I love that. I internalized that one. Just like you, the Proactive Formula is part of who you are now. That statement is part of who I am now too.

That’s awesome. The fifth step is doing it. Just taking the action. The next morning, they just came to me. I asked the vibe, okay, just give me the solution there. The next day, we start off in a totally different way than I planned on starting out, we had Scott and Jim, Scott’s partner, do the leadership presentation. They came up and they did a whole entire segment where they did this thing we call the Joanna Cafe that’s helped people really relate to the people in a different level than I had anticipated doing. It all turned out resolved, we reached a new level. Scott goes back, we then went to Coca Cola headquarters right after that. He does this presentation on Ernest Shackleton pole explorer, Antarctic explorer, it was stranded in the South Pole area for two years with 27 guys on a ship. Somehow, miraculously, they made it through it and they were all ice floats. They’re floating on ice 800 miles from land and they still made it through. He does this presentation for Coke, now we’re doing videos for Coke now, that’s for the whole leadership team, global leadership team. He’s in character in these videos dressed as Ernest Shackleton Antarctic Explorer from 1915. The second or third video he does, he goes right in the Proactive Formula without calling it that. He’s like if the man had to understand the pause to realize it was their reactions that were the enemy and that this was a gift, there’s a gift in there. It’s like oh my gosh, do you realize what you just did here. We took what happened and we dropped it right in the Coca Cola corporate train.

That’s amazing. This just goes to show that one person making a more enlightened, evolved decision about how they’re going to act or avoid reacting, I didn’t react, I brought light into the situation through teaching the Proactive Formula instead of trying to inject my truth into the situation. When you come to the situation with just your truth or the truth but without mercy, it creates chaos. That’s another Kabbalistic principle.

Wow, I love that.

All the time people are just like okay, I’m a vegan and what you’re doing is wrong. For them, it’s the truth. Yes, there’s all this horrible stuff happening to animals, the animal cruelty and everything, and yes you are correct, that’s the truth. But without mercy, you create chaos. You’re a destroyer instead of a builder. That’s another really powerful, related Kabbalistic principle.

What I love about you and Orion that night because you live that without saying those words, never told me those words, but that’s how I felt, obviously that’s how you approached it. You are speaking from your heart with the mercy and you left that open spaced to have the divine just drop in the solution. Thank you for that. That’s really one of the most transformative moments of my life that night.

That’s amazing. Thank you. It’s incredible to think how just one moment there, making a different choice, one that was a more conscious choice, allowed this higher level thinking and spiritual approach, the Proactive Formula, to get exposed to Coca Cola executives worldwide. I’m floored by that, what a gift, amazing.

It’s amazing how fast it happened. When you’re in the zone like that, you’re doing something for the greater good, I think my perspective on it, the speed with which things transpire is just amazing to me. Scott and Jim put that in there, and then we did the videos, put on a web page, sent out Coca Cola—the best part about the Coca Cola situation is the guy that’s in charge of this whole team is their leadership and development head of all Coca Cola, he said to Scott, “Just send the email yourself, you’ve got other emails, you can talk to these people directly.” We’re in direct contact with this whole leadership team with Coca Cola, they’re learning this stuff.

Yeah, amazing. Incorporate that into all aspects of your life, including your business, because there are always conflicts that happen. You learn things like negotiation in business but you don’t learn the Proactive Formula. We get reactive and we try all these gimmicks and tricks to try and close the deal, to try and get advantage, to gain an advantage over our opponent, but our opponent is actually internal. It’s our reactive nature, it’s not the person we are engaged in a negotiation with or whatever. Very powerful. Now, let’s switch to the LinkedIn strategy.

I’ll make this really fast. LinkedIn strategy, I was working with a client who’s a service provider, let’s call it that, and he was trying to get consulting clients, basically. We were running Facebook traffic, typical type of thing, landing page, thank you page, settle the call, try to get people in the system. When we started the cost per click on the Facebook ads, it was $2.27, maybe $2.28 a click. Then I had this idea and said let me try if this works, this might actually work. I had learned before a little tactic on LinkedIn where you can get people to connect with you on LinkedIn, the goal is to get connections on LinkedIn. The big picture idea is this, people on LinkedIn can see who view their profile. The people who use LinkedIn look on who viewed my profile so they can see who viewed it.

So the people who pay money to LinkedIn on a monthly basis get access to that information.

Yeah, they get to see who viewed their profile.

Yeah.

You get to search on LinkedIn who you want to view. You can say I want to view everyone that lives in Beverly Hills who’s a chiropractor, just for example, just some random example. If you’re viewing those people and you change your profile description that says something like, “Hey, are you a chiropractor in Beverly Hills? I am exactly what you’re looking for.” Now, those people that see who viewed, they’re going to say person, person, person, holy cow, this person here, they’re exactly what I’m looking for. You can strategically view people and make your profile description match what those people are looking for. That’s like the big picture concept, then you can automate that—there’s different software you can use. There’s a software called Dux-Soup that basically allows you to view people without having to click the button yourself. It’s going through a list of people and clicking their profile so you don’t have to click the button. What happens then is all of a sudden you start getting connections on LinkedIn, people want to connect with you, and it’s the whole goal on LinkedIn; get the connections. You can get them off of LinkedIn. The last thing you want to do on LinkedIn is try to keep—people have so many channels to communicate with. Anytime I’m using LinkedIn, it’s just like hey, let’s get on the phone, let’s do a call, just did that yesterday. Let’s talk next week. Here’s the big magic thing we did though. LinkedIn gives you the ability to download all your connections’ email addresses. The low level approach might be spam them, which would be really stupid, you don’t want to spam them. But you can still download them. That’s what I did for my buddy, I was helping him with his Facebook ads and everything. We download all his LinkedIn connections, then we imported those connections into Facebook as a custom audience. Then, we just advertised to that audience. My theory here is because of the familiarity there, they saw him on LinkedIn, they knew who he was, the clickthrough rate skyrocketed which meant the cost per click dropped significantly. We went from paying $2.28 a click to $.28 a click on Facebook Ads now which all of a sudden made his business profitable through Facebook Ads instead of losing money. Then, we did a lookalike audience which wasn’t as low as the original one, but we ran out of people on the original audience. We had the lookalike audience, but that’s just a little tactical strategy. The big strategy is getting people on LinkedIn, then advertising to them inside of Facebook after getting connected on LinkedIn. That’s just one little way of thinking about how can we use the platform, what tools do we have, what research, what aren’t we thinking of, how can we use this when somebody else isn’t using it? That was a tremendous discovery. If anyone’s listening who’s struggling to break even on their Facebook Ads, that might be something they might want to try.

I think the statistic I heard at least was on average seven touches are required in order to close a deal. This gives you a different touch and a different touch point. You start with LinkedIn and then you move to Facebook. It’s like jeez, these guys are everywhere.

They’re everywhere, yeah, exactly.

And then you do the lookalike audience as a way to expand your audience because you’re getting all this interaction with people in the smaller custom audience, but as you said, you ran out of people there and you want to expand significantly to a larger audience and then you rely on Facebook’s lookalike algorithm to find people who are similar in behaviors, tastes, interests, demographics, psychographics.

Yeah, exactly. I think it goes back to the big picture I recently talked about. It goes back to just doing things that you think might or might not work. You don’t know if it’s going to work. Not being emotionally connected to whether it worked or not, it’s like okay, I’m emotionally connected, I tried something that’s a little bit creative. I told these guys, I have no idea if it’s going to work, I think it might work. But the victory, just don’t wanna get in the numbers and measure the numbers, like okay, these are the actual numbers. It could’ve been worse, it could’ve been better. But the victory isn’t just getting the numbers and not judging yourself, not being hard on yourself, not feeling any emotion throughout the way you thought it was going to turn out.

Yeah. Awesome. If somebody wants to work with you one on one, get you as their coach or as a consultant to help them with their marketing or their business, how would they reach you?

They can go to my—I’m hesitant here, but they can go to my phone number. Should I give out my phone number? I’m just thinking about being different. Just text me, that’s different than going through a web page, right?

I guess what I’ll do is I won’t post your phone number on the show notes page, we’ll just leave it in the audio.

Yeah, because someone listening to this, they can just call me up. Someone listened to this whole thing, just text me. I’ll call you back. How about that?

Cool.

Or you can go to my website, dougallen.com. I would rather do this, just to see if it works. This is one of those experiments. 619-908-2620. If any super famous people call, I’ll let you know.

Okay, awesome. I’ll make sure it doesn’t go into the transcript either. You only get this phone number if you’re listening to the audio.

If anyone listened to the whole thing, that’s the little cookie, that’s the bonus for listening to the whole thing. Call me up, text me, see what happens.

Alright, awesome. The tool that you mentioned…

Dux-Soup. $15 a month, you buy it through Google Play Store, you run it through Chrome. It’s this really awesome little tool. It’s basically just clicking on people’s profiles. It does a lot of other new stuff, they have all kinds of stuff. They have actually an autoresponder built into it a little bit really a lot of cool features to it for $15 a month. It’s something worth experimenting with. Always experiment, it’s the biggest thing I do. Everything I do is experiment.

I do too. I take a scientific approach to SEO, to online marketing, hypothesis, control, all that sort of stuff.

Exactly. That’s interesting. That’s all you can do.

Yeah, alright. Thank you, Doug. Thank you, listeners.

Thank you, Stephan. I appreciate so much, thank you.

Yeah, this was a real joy to have you on the show. Now, listeners, it’s time to take action. Take something from this episode and do something in your business and in your life with it. Maybe employ the Proactive Formula. Alright guys, we’ll catch you on the next episode of Marketing Speak.

Important Links:

Your Checklist of Actions to Take

☑ Find my gift and work to improve my skills. Train myself enough so that I can share my gift with the world.

☑ Have a big enough reason to stay motivated at work. There’s little chance of me giving up if I have a strong foundation and do what I love.

☑ Build a strong connection with my audience. Ask myself what I can say to make people say ‘’me too” before I give a live or recorded presentation.

☑ Know fine details about my audience. Base my script on this information to create an authentic, instant bond during my presentation.

☑ Speak from the heart and don’t over analyze my words. This will help make the experience more natural for my audience.

☑ Give everything I have and help people out as much as I can. This will make people more cooperative and willing to do favors for me.

☑ Don’t let my emotions get in the way of doing business. Understand that hate and failure are a part of the game and they shouldn’t affect me.

☑ Master the Proactive Formula to turn situations around. Pause, be aware, and refrain from taking immediate action.

☑ Strategically use LinkedIn’s Who’s Viewed Your Profile feature. Create a targeted description and view prospects’ profiles to make connections.

☑ Utilize Dux-Soup on LinkedIn. I can view specific profile demographics and make faster connections through this tool.

About Doug Allen

Doug Allen is  a 5 time best-selling author, hedge fund manager, business development consultant, former member of Tony Robbins Wealth Mastery faculty and founder of The Destiny Partnership mastermind group.