In Search Of Heroes Spreads Good News About Everyday, Real-Life Heroes Who Deserve Recognition For Their Good Works

Carl Turner: Marketing is in everything, as far as the commercial aspects of it, and even the non-commercial aspects. You’re always marketing to the other individuals around you. If you’re with your wife, you’re marketing the fact that you’re a fantastic husband, or maybe you’re doing “sales” as far as “I’d rather have this particular meal than that particular meal”.

But marketing is about creating value there so that people can enjoy things. If you just had the necessities in life, you’d have a very bland life and the world economy would grind to a halt because all the world really needs is just food, water, and a minimum amount of shelter.

And by working with entrepreneurs, you get a lot more in life; you get cars, you get electronics, you get movies… you get all the pizzazz. But even if you had the pizzazz without the marketing, you really wouldn’t appreciate it as much as you do because the entrepreneurs spend a lot of their time marketing those products so that people can enjoy them even more.

RALPH: You know, this program: the In Search of Heroes Copywriting Program is about copywriting, and copywriting is about getting people to basically invest in things that are beneficial to them. How do you feel that copywriting can make a big difference in the lives of young people in trying to create ideas that make a difference in society?

Carl Turner: Well, I believe it was in the early days that people called marketing “salesmanship in print”. Somehow that salesmanship has to get to print, and that’s the job of copywriters. So if you have copywriters trained in the principles you were talking about, they’re going to be able to help provide the world access to the goods and services that they really want. Because if you don’t have someone to help you understand what you want, then you don’t have commerce and you don’t really enjoy it as much. You know, if you had all this money in the bank but you didn’t understand what you could do to enjoy it, you wouldn’t have real value in life; you wouldn’t enjoy a first-run movie or maybe going to a museum; or maybe climbing up a mountain. So copywriting is the method of allowing those ideas to get captured in print.

RALPH: You know, when I was talking with you, you mentioned the sales letter that you wrote that helped bring a lot of people into Jay’s training seminar. What do you think are the most important aspects of copywriting?

Carl Turner: In copywriting – well, in marketing there are three things: there’s the list, then the offer, then the copy. I would say that the most important thing in copywriting is the attempt to bring those three things together. You have to understand what your target market’s looking for and then you have to have a valid offer. There has to be an offer they can understand. That’s where copywriting comes in.

So it’s the combination of those three factors that allow people to go from the “paralysis of analysis” to enjoy a good or service. That’s where they exchange their hard-earned dollars for a feeling. That’s all that sales is – exchanging hard-earned dollars for a feeling. But those feelings really make the world go “round”.

RALPH: What do you think are the things that motivate people to actually invest in things that will be beneficial to them?

Carl Turner: Again, I think it is successful marketing. Because otherwise, they would have to do all the research on their own and if you had to research every product you buy, you wouldn’t buy very much! So you wouldn’t have a chance to enjoy very much. So if you have good salesmen or good marketing people, they allow you to determine what you would like to have and to ultimately have it.

RALPH: Everybody talks about the importance of emotions and how every sale is basically based on the emotions of the customer. What do you think about that?

Carl Turner: Well that’s true. You don’t buy a product; you buy a solution to a problem or an emotion. And all that does is allow you to understand what that is so you can again, exchange your money for that emotion.

It’s not about having a car; it’s about having the admiration of your neighbors. It’s not about having a life-insurance policy; it’s about having the comfort of knowing that your family is being taken care of. Someone needs to bring these things out in order to allow people to really experience them.

RALPH: You know it’s interesting that you as a person would be an engineer, especially a nuclear engineer! And the left-brain activity that’s required for that, as far as logical judgment, mathematic and verbal skills; How hard has it been for you to switch over to the other brain hemisphere that has the creative spontaneity, the intuitiveness, the emotional aspects that are so critical to marketing?

Carl Turner: Well it was a little harder than I thought it was going to be!

But the thing that we tell people is, “find what you love in life and do it. The money will come.” See I knew I loved marketing, though I didn’t have the skill set. That was relatively apparent. It was highly dormant!

But I was able to develop that over a six year period, and by developing that, I was able to achieve tremendous success in the last three years that I was working with Jay. So, I would say that, yes it was a pretty dramatic change. It was not very easy. But since I loved it, it was fun – and life is about having as much fun as you can stand.

RALPH: What were the techniques that you used? I know that there are a lot of people that are trapped in the left side of their brain in the logical area. You know, but everybody realizes that you have to appeal to the emotional desires of the people that you are marketing to. What were the techniques that you used to shift over to the other side?

Carl Turner: Well I tried to put myself in the other people’s shoes, and that’s highly crucial in sales. So I learned how to sell to my target market. My target market was entrepreneurs, and luckily I was one too so all I had to learn was marketing. I didn’t have to research my target audience. So basically I learned what I needed to do in sales, and then I was able to turn and take those same techniques and apply those to marketing.

RALPH: You know it’s funny that a lot of people think that sales is a dirty word and people that are salespeople, they’re despicable; they’re almost below politicians! What do you feel about the value of salespeople?

Carl Turner: Well, salespeople allow us to enjoy the standard of life that we have. If we didn’t have salespeople, we’d all be probably out on a farm and basically eating what we produce ourselves. And our quality of life would be very minimal. So thanks to the fact that we have effective salespeople and marketing people, we are able to enjoy the standard of life that we enjoy today.

RALPH: Do you feel that marketing is one of the crucial aspects to the success of any business?

Carl Turner: Oh yes, if you don’t have successful marketing, nothing else you do matters. The example I use all the time is the difference between Microsoft and Apple. Microsoft realized that how easy it was to use a computer was based on the operating system. And so that’s what they provided and they were able to achieve 90% of the market because of it.

Now Apple, who had a better product (especially the software), thought they were selling hardware and not solutions to people’s problems and as a result, they are struggling to keep 4% of the computer market. So it’s really about marketing. You can have an inferior product, as Microsoft had, and eventually gain 90% of the market or you can have a superior product and have only 4% of the market. So it’s not about having a superior product; it’s about having superior marketing (as long as your product or service works!).

RALPH: And that’s an integral part of the In Search of Heroes program – to help kids market businesses in their local community – the individuals who are really helping in the community and giving back to the community. What’s one word of advice that you would be able to give those kids that are going to help in the marketing of those businesses?

Carl Turner: “Don’t be afraid to dream”, and then “allow yourself to think big” – have big goals. There’s no such thing as a goal that is too big, but there are goals that are too small. So you want to dream, dream big and go for it.

RALPH: Well, I really appreciate your time Carl in answering those questions and I was wondering if you had any parting words that you would like to share with the young people about how to become as successful as you have in marketing.

Carl Turner: I would say: dream big and then go for your dream, not somebody else’s.

RALPH: So it’s important just to follow your own path and believe that it is possible to attain them.

Carl Turner: Yes, because it is.

RALPH: And the only way you can do that is how?

Carl Turner: By first, daring to dream. And then saying that, “I really want this” and going for it. Otherwise, you’re essentially living someone else’s dreams for them, or providing their dreams for them.

RALPH: Now I did an interview with David Garfinkel the other night and he was just talking about the ability to fail and not consider yourself a failure, but to just learn the ways that things don’t work, do you believe that’s true?

Carl Turner: Yes, especially in marketing. If you meet a marketing consultant that tells you he’s never had a failure, either he has a bad memory or he’s not telling the truth.

All marketing people have failures, but as you fail and learn from those failures, then you become better and better. And the differences between the real successes in life are the people who have made mistakes and learned from them, and the people who haven’t made those mistakes yet.

RALPH: I’ve talked to a fair number of people so far and they just seem to believe that the faster you fail, the sooner you become a success. Do you believe in that?

Carl Turner: Yes that’s true. Now you want to do everything you can to avoid failure: learn from other people, model other people… but once you do that, then you want to experience and go for what you want as fast as possible. But do it conservatively. An example of conservatively: you test. Especially in marketing, you test small and then go for the gusto once you know what it is. Life is the same way: you test small and see what you can do, and once you understand that, then you go for your dreams.

RALPH: So you think that testing your abilities is crucial to being successful?

Carl Turner: Oh yes. You don’t go out and run a mile the first time you go out for the track team. You want to try maybe a hundred yards, then maybe a quarter mile, half a mile, three quarters of a mile and then a mile. So you want to develop the skills, test, and then go for the gusto.

RALPH: Everybody seems to have certain abilities that make them unique. How important is it, do you feel, to create relationships with others that have abilities that you don’t have?

Carl Turner: In life, it’s about strengths. You want to go with the strengths that you have and then find other people to handle the things that you’re not strong at. Because you never really become successful if you do all things well.

What you want to do is develop a few things really well, and then find other people to handle the other items. For instance, when I did the $11 million in sales in three years, I did it with one assistant (toward the end of the third year I had two). And what I did was I delegated all the things other than the selling, and then I kept track of it. And so I was able to do that with one assistant. Before that, the company that had done the same thing I was doing had 16 employees. So by going for the strength I had (which was selling), I was able to do the same thing the other company did, and essentially do it with one other person.

RALPH: So you feel it’s important to find people that can compliment the strengths that you have.

Carl Turner: Definitely. Also, as John Assaraf says, “find people that love to do the things that you hate to, and hire them to take care of those things.”

RALPH: *laughing* That seems to be a peculiar perspective on life, I mean there’s so many things that everybody hates to do, and I guess it’s hard to figure out what you do that’s good.

Carl Turner: You know what you hate to do – it’s the thing you put off until last. Like, I hated paperwork and so I had an assistant that loved paperwork. As I was doing the sales, if I were to ask her to do a sale over the telephone, she would have froze up! She’d have probably quit! But she loved the paperwork.

She loved what she was doing and I loved what I was doing and we would have both hated doing what the other person was doing! That’s the secret of life, I think. I guess the unspoken secret to “success” in life is to find the things that you don’t like to do, find the ones who love to do those things, and then work in a complimentary relationship.