Jon Benson, founder and CEO of BNSN, joins the podcast to talk about his path from writing the “Fit Over 40” book to becoming a leading direct-response copywriter and building AI tools for copywriting. Benson explains why video sales letters (VSLs) are effective, combining voice and text, narrative, and emotional pain points to reduce skepticism and improve message retention.
He describes how his software BNSN generates higher-quality copy than generic chatbots by training on strong examples and running multiple rewriting passes to remove common AI artifacts. Benson argues B2B marketers should write to one person, focus on relieving the buyer’s pain rather than company features, and use tactics like strong subject lines and PS sections in emails.
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About BNSN
BNSN.AI is an AI-powered copywriting platform built for small business owners to create high-converting ads, emails, and sales pages in minutes. It is trained on proven, high-performing marketing campaigns and designed to simplify the process of writing persuasive copy through promptless AI tools and built-in marketing frameworks.
About Jon Benson
Jon BENSON is a copywriter, entrepreneur, and AI pioneer whose work has quietly shaped how the world buys things online. Best known as the inventor of the Video Sales Letter, the format that became the backbone of modern digital marketing, he has spent decades writing words that move people to act—not through manipulation, but through what he calls “ethical persuasion.”
In 2010, Jon turned his attention to copywriting software, becoming one of the earliest pioneers at the intersection of AI and sales copy. That work eventually evolved into BNSN, a platform trained exclusively on high-converting marketing campaigns and built for small business owners who sell good things to good people. BNSN reflects Jon’s core belief that the human element of business—community, coaching, and genuine connection—separates sustainable success from a flash in the pan.
Time Stamps
00:00 Welcome and Introductions
02:22 Nontechnical AI Builder
05:33 Why VSLs Convert
08:28 Narrative and Pain
12:14 Customers and Big Ideas
16:31 Beating AI Slop
20:38 Fixing B2B Copy
25:16 Email Subject and PS
27:40 Career Advice on AI
31:58 Resources and Wrap Up
Quotes
“There’s no such thing as selling to a business. It doesn’t exist. You’re selling to a person at a business.” Jon Benson, CEO at BNSN.
“If you don’t speak to the pain of your prospect, you’re not ever going to make them feel like they’re seen, heard, or understood.” Jon Benson, CEO at BNSN.
Follow Jon:
Jon Benson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonbenson
Jon Benson on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/itsjonbenson/
Jon Benson on X: https://x.com/itsjonbenson
Jon Benson on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/itsjonbenson
Jon Benson on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPDvmgurd-rym4pyPjviIuw
BNSN website: https://bnsn.ai/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
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Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Jon Benson at BNSN
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Job Benson
Mike: Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology the podcast from Napier I’m Mike Maynard and today I’m joined by Jon Benson Jon is the founder of BNSN and CEO of that company and also the creator of BNSN. Welcome to the podcast Jon
Jon: Thanks for having me. Appreciate it, Mike. Good to be here
Mike: It’s great to have you on Um we always like to start off by getting people to tell us a little bit about their story and what they’re doing So tell us a little bit about your background and what led you to create BNSN
Jon: Uh, so I started in 2004, back in the Stone Age, with, uh, a crazy book idea that I had. I wanted to write a book all my life, and I was in my, I was in my 30s and decided I would write a book on, being fit over 40, which became the name of the book. Fit Over 40 became the, the, the title. It’s pretty self-descriptive.
But e- I had just gone through, uh, a heart attack and obesity and horrible disease states, and so I just, it went back to my athletic roots I grew up with and, and kinda thought, “Okay, well I, I can’t be the only one that has gone through this and worked themselves nearly into an early grave.” And, but I probably am the only guy that I know with, like, a dozen diseases and, and two of which can kill you, at my age.
So I was like, “That’s pretty rare.” And I thought, “Okay, well this might make a good story, but a short one.” So I decided I would interview 50 other people that did similar things, and that became Fit Over 40. And, um, so I was just a writer. I… And a, and a fitness guy. I… clinical nutritionist and, and you know, just, just that’s what I w- I was doing that part-time and design part-time, music, playing on the side.
You can see the guitars in the background. So I, I was just kinda living a, like, a bohemian lifestyle really. And, and then next thing you know, I’d, I start a friendship up with this guy named Tom Venuto, who’s still a, a legend in the, in the marketing space. And, and he said, “I’ll write the sales copy for this.”
And I had no idea what he meant. And, uh, he goes… I go, “Yeah, that sounds, sounds great. 50/50 partners.” And little did I know that this was gonna be, um, like, the biggest book on ClickBank for a while. And, and so it took off and, and I never looked back and I… That’s how I got thrown into this crazy world
Mike: And so that drove you to kind of work out how to create content using AI But I mean
Jon: Mm-hmm
Mike: of alluded to the fact you’re a nontechnical founder So I mean what sort of challenges does that present
Jon: Yeah, I’m like, I’m like a really techy, non-techy guy. I’m, I’m like, i- it’s… I used to race motocross in high school and, and in junior high and, and th- this is kind of a parallel. Like, people would ask me all… I’d go to the track and I’d be throwing my bike 30 feet in the air and it’s like, it’s like it was nothing, right?
It was like crazy stuff that you see, you know, all those people doing back flips and stuff. And, you know, I, I was just… And I’d, you know, I’d come into the, the, the pits and they’d go, “You know, what, what, what kind of, what kind of plugs are you running in that gate?” And I go, “I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about.
No cl- I, I just turn the machine on and I go.” And that’s kind of the way I am with, with, with computers. I don’t… I, I have no idea what, how much m- memory I have on my computer. I don’t care. And so I just kinda just focus on what can it give me, what, what can I do with it? I don’t care about the inner workings as much as I care about what it can do with.
And so I, the programming thing never fit my personality, but the conceptual, the idea really did. Like, “Oh, I can do this. I can build this.” So I kinda became an architect of it. And when AI came out, we were way ahead of the AI curve. We’ve been doing AI since 2018 and, and really saw the handwriting on the wall because the apps we were building that, that this is gonna, this is gonna be revolutionized the world if it ever gets to the point where people can use it.
And yeah, we helped a, a small way getting it to the point where people can use it. So at least in copywriting, at least in what we do, it’s, it’s, we were the very first software- Mm … uh, that did copywriting on a high level and, and that language breakdown was necessary for LLMs to understand how to even think about copy.
It’s, uh, it’s, it’s, it’s kind of interesting ’cause it, it’s, it’s structural before it’s learning from examples. So, um, so yeah, that’s, that’s really how all this kinda all melded together at a, at a really good time. It’s the, the V- VSLs and, are, and copy in general is notoriously difficult to write. Uh, if, if it was easy to write, there’d be, you know, millions of millionaires out there that, uh, uh, it’s, there’s just not in there. I mean, not in the space, right? There are not, not a lot of offers that are doing, you know, eight, nine figures, and the ones that do have really got this down. They’ve really figured out how to tap on the, all the, uh, key points of persuasion, and a VSL does that better than any other selling vehicle.
So, so I wanted to see if AI could do it, and AI is, i- is not… Like, if you go to Claude right now or ChatGPT or whatever and you say, “Write me a VSL,” just good luck. It’s just n- it’s gonna be really, really bad. But, but we took the capabilities of AI and just s- strung it together in this long chain of things that we know to do and created BNSN.
That’s how BNSN got created, and does more than VSLs, but it started with just VSLs. It started with just long form VSLs, which are notoriously difficult to write. And ours sounded really human and converted, so it was, that’s how it kinda got started and, uh, now we’re, now we write anything and everything we want with it
Mike: I I love that approach It’s like we built something and it really worked it delivered results so
Jon: Mm-hmm
Mike: was quite good I I think that’s fantastic
Jon: Yeah
Mike: talk a little bit about VSLs Maybe some of the people listening aren’t really familiar with the term Um
so you can explain what a VSL is you know why um it’s so difficult to write and also why it delivers such great uh results and and great revenue when you get it right
Jon: Yeah. So, uh, it stands for video sales letter, and you’ve seen them because they’re all over the place. I mean, it, the, it became ubiquitous in, in [00:06:00] Instagram feeds and Facebook, where you see videos and you see all the script at the bottom. Like, you see these apps like Descript that do nothing but put the copy at the bottom of…
Right? That, that’s just VSL. That’s, that’s, that’s what we built. But ours went one step further. It had no images in it at all. It was all text. And so you still see these all over the place. You just have… Especially in direct response. Uh, Agora still uses them all the time. The top offers on ClickBank still uses them all the time.
We- and they can blend some images, but it’s mostly text. And the reason it works is because people notoriously don’t read. But, uh, if you’re reading and listening at the same time, uh, obviously you’ve got two different modes of, of getting information into your brain. So it’s gonna go up. The ability to hear and the ability to see is gonna make things a little lot better than just the ability to see.
So as far as retention goes. Then we add all this other layers on top of it, which is hypnotic pacing and NLP and things that, that really disengage the critical part of your brain, not the critical part that says, “Oh, I’m trying to manipulate you [00:07:00] into making a decision that’s not good for you,” but the part that’s skeptical by nature, the fear mechanisms in our brain that, you know, they’ve evolved a lot slower than we have.
And so we still have all of them. You know, we still hear a sound and think it’s a tiger. It’s, it’s, it’s just part of our evolutionary programming. So we kind of had to slip underneath that radar and slip underneath that, that guard that everybody’s got up and speak to the emotion and speak to, uh, sometimes the primal emotion, depending on the topic, but definitely the emotive state of the, of the buyer.
‘Cause you buy based on emotion. You justify your buying based on logic. You don’t buy based on logic, no matter how logical you think you are. So once you– we understand all those factors, a, a, static text page becomes a far less compelling thing. it doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. I mean, I remember when this came out in 2006 and Ryan Deiss was saying, “Oh, Jon killed sales pages.”
And it’s like, no, I still use sales pages. It’s just a, it’s just another mode of selling that happens to be insanely effective because it, it forces you to read. Another thing it does that’s really cool is most sales pages [00:08:00] get read to the tune of about 6%. Well, this forces you to either bail or read every word.
I mean, it’s like if you bailed halfway through, you read half the sales page. There’s just no way around it. You, you heard it or read it or something. So the message that people spend these months, they used to spend months on writing a letter, on can now be heard, and that is now can be written in minutes, thanks to tools like BNSN, but it can be heard, which is kind of an important thing.
Get, get your sales message heard.
Mike: I mean that’s interesting Obviously you know a lot of what you talked about the driving emotion is important in whatever you generate whatever you write I mean is there something particularly special that really makes a great VSL stand out against something that’s not gonna perform
Jon: Usually I would say it’s, it’s how they weave narrative with pain. So the, the, the weaving of the- everybody that’s buying something has a pain, has some sort of pain they wanna fix, right? even if you’re saying, “I’m buying a pleasure cruise,” okay, why are you doing that? You just keep going down that, that
It doesn’t take very long to get to the real reason. It’s like, well, You might really enjoy pleasure cruises, and that’s great, and I’m not saying that, that people don’t buy things that they enjoy. They do. The primary motivation for buying something is, is lack, is pain. Now, I’m not saying that’s a good thing.
I’m not saying … I’m not here to judge it either. It just is what it is. And so if you don’t speak to the pain of your prospect, it, you’re not ever going to make them feel like they’re, they’re seen, heard, or understood, the three most valuable things you could ever do as a marketer. So if you can make them feel seen, heard, understood, and then valued and respected on top of that, now you’re batting 1000.
I don’t think there’s a better way to do that than combining narrative, a story, with the c- understanding the pain. And to do that with words is completely possible, otherwise sales pages wouldn’t work. To do it with words and voice is far more doable, and that’s because it goes, I think, back down to when we were children, we were read stories a lot.
So we- we’re used to hearing stories. We’re used to hearing narrative. We’re not so much as used to reading narrative, and it’s a sad statement of, of indictment of our culture maybe, but we’re not avid readers anymore, that I don’t think VSLs would have worked in the s- in the 1700s. But I, I, I, w- you know, if, if the technology was invented.
But it certainly wouldn’t work for people who are just totally avid readers, uh, even though I … You would be, be shocked how many doctors we have in our community, just people who are avid readers that just, they still start reading and they, they’re watching. but it’s the, the narrative co- combination with, with really relating to somebody’s pain, and I’m not saying in, in a, “Oh, if you, if you don’t get this, you’re going to be harmed” or anything like that.
Nothing like that. All I’m saying is, like, relating to where their discomfort is. Like, as an example for, for, for weight loss. The reason why my weight loss offers work so well, and I was the top guy in the industry for 10 years, is because I … Very few people lived it.
When they wrote the copy, I would read the copy and go, “You’ve never been fat a day in your life,” you know? Yeah, I could tell because the things they were saying just didn’t make any sense, and they didn’t do the research, the avatar research. But, and the ones that did w- were far better, but there’s still that missing factor of s- of literally being able to say, “I know exactly what this feels like, and it feels different for you than it deals, does for me, but it sucks for both of us.
Trust me. We don’t … I don’t have to feel exactly what you feel. Maybe it’s because y- ” And then I’ll say things like, “Maybe you’re feeling, uh, guilt-ridden because your, your kids are looking at you and watching how you’re eating, and you’re scared that they might be forming patterns around you, or maybe you feel ashamed.
I felt this. I felt this, that, and the other.” But what I did in that very subtle sentence Was say maybe you’re experiencing this, and people who are are gonna go, “Oh my gosh, that’s, that’s completely me.” that makes them feel seen and understood. And then when you say, “Look, this is w- there’s a fix for this.
There’s nothing, th- there’s no j- judgment here. I totally get it. I was there.” And so once you can say, “I was there, and I was, I figured out a way around it,” then the judgment goes away. cause you’re not judging anyone. You’re, you’re just saying, “I, I have a solution that’s been proven to work, not just for me, but now for, you know, these thousands of people.”
So, so that’s, that’s much more effective to do with a voice combined with text in my opinion
Mike: I love that I think that’s great I mean I I’m really interested about the sort of early days in the company cause obviously you built the product You you used it it worked but then you gave it out to to customers I mean what surprised you when customers started using it What what did they do that you didn’t expect
Jon: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I, I, I jokingly say I put myself out of business. I, I, I was ready to stop writing for other people, and, uh, I, I wanted to really do something that could expand this, what we built to people who couldn’t afford it. I mean, I was $100,000 to write a VSL. That’s, that sounds shockingly high until you see what they generate.
So once you generate, you know, $50 million, the VSL $100,000 isn’t that much money. , But I’m, uh, w- was the top guy in, in the world at that… And, and it feels, so it’s a very, very high margin, right? but even guys who are, like, in B-level copywriters are charging 30, $40,000 to write a VSL ’cause it’s a lot of work.
And so I was like, “Well, I, I don’t, I’m not trying to put people out of work, but what if I can help them do it, like, 10 times faster?” And also with the knowledge that of a dozen copywriters, that they just, there’s no way they could filter that knowledge. They couldn’t hold it all. I mean, I can’t hold it. No one can hold all the knowledge they learn from all the greats in the world.
And so then with formulas that we already know work, so it just make it so much easier. Then all they have to do is put their creative input into it, and then they can say, “Oh, I see the vision going this way.” And then, then it becomes what they really wanna do. Most people don’t wanna write words. Like, most copywriters don’t wanna write.
They wanna create. They wanna… There’s a difference there. I’d rather speak it, and then I’d rather, like, narrate it like an idea. And so I got into this consulting realm where it was like, okay, five grand an hour to consult with for 10 years.
It’s- that’s what it’s been. And I’d say, like, “I’m not gonna write any copy at all. I’m just gonna get on a c- get on a call, and we’re gonna talk, and we’re just gonna talk through the offer. Where’s the positioning? Where’s the hook? Where’s the big idea?” That’s almost always missing. So it’s almost always buried, you know, so it’s very rarely is it right at the top where it should be.
and then we’ll fi- figure it out, and then when we start talking, all of a sudden it’s a, it’s a conversation and the narrative changes. And then they’re just like, “Well, yeah, this is how you sell. This is exactly how you sell, so just turn our conversation into words on the page.” There you go. So record it, record everything, and just give it to them.
And that became kind of the impetus of what I was doing. I said, “What if you g- I could teach other people to do that if I was there saying, ‘Okay, what about this?'” You know, a- and that’s what Vincent 3 has, is me saying, “Hey, let me help you come up with your big idea. Let me help you come up with your hook.
Let me do this right from the start so that everything you write, ads, emails, everything, obviously VSLs, sound fantastic,” and, and they s- they h- they resonate on a level that’s beyond just trying to market to somebody. ‘Cause if you, if you talk about what some people want from a product, it’s one thing, but what do they want from the life that the product that they s- they are imagining will…
What do they want that life to be different? How do they want it to be different? In what ways do they want it to be different? That is so radically different than, “I want to learn to be a copywriter.” Why do you want to learn to be a copywriter? What is it about being a copywriter that makes any sense at all?
Uh, well, almost always you’re gonna get down to freedom. You’re gonna get down to, like, you know, l- uh, like, the ability to, to work and travel anywhere you want, uh, the ability to make more money than you’re making now. So, so, so, and why do you want that? And so you just keep asking why, why, why. You get down to these really core values, right?
So that’s what a job of a copywriter is, is to get to the core values, and if I take the mechanism, all the stuff out of the way that gets in the way of it, which is I have to think of structure, I have to think of, uh, l- I’ve gotta, I’ve gotta learn all these, these, these patterns, these NLP technique patterns and these hypnotic phrasing patterns and these induction phra- uh, you know, take all that away and just so you can just think about it.
Just, just w- uh, think about the vision. Makes it a lot easier, and so that’s… When I turned it over, I was kinda surprised that people were able to… You know, I’ve had so many people come up to me say, “You made me a millionaire,” and I, I, I just… They went through just, just a VSL, and it’s like that’s what they did.
Th- but they had a formula, and they could free their minds to think and, and so once you do that, it… Same thing with all copy. So ads and emails and everything people need. It’s- they try to do it themselves. It’s like trying to fix your own car, and even worse, it’s probably more like trying to operate on yourself.
Even if you’re a surgeon, you don’t wanna do that
Mike: I love that analogy I mean I guess you know one of the things I need to ask is know AI’s got a bit of a bad name when it comes to content You know there’s a lot
Jon: Mm-hmm.
Mike: slop being produced is it you do with BNSN that makes sure that you focus on delivering quality rather than volume
Jon: It’s a great question. Man, if you only knew how much I hate, uh, AI copy. Um, it’s, I, I have, uh … There’s a crack in my monitor from the, uh, um, from how much I hate this. Uh, so yeah, whenever you’re a writer, I, I think your sensitivities go up dramatically over when you see really bad copy, and AI is flooded with really, really, really bad copy.
And the only way that we could even remotely get this to work is we figured out early on that if you did not do this more than once, there was no way for it to happen. So it had to start with something that it understood as being good. It had to. There was no way around it. You have to start with something that you know is good.
And it can’t be one thing, ’cause the AI will just latch onto that one thing and then make a clone of it. That wouldn’t, that’s not what you want. It has to be a series of things, and then this is way before, by the way, just so everyone knows, way before Claude, way before, like, having, like, a, a custom GPTs.
We, we figured this out, like, four years, five years ago. So we had to lump it all together into this thing and say, “I need you to learn from this knowledge base.” Okay, first of all, don’t replicate it. Learn from it, and then get your first draft. And that’s where the people that were really kind of in, in the know, that’s where they stopped.
And the first draft came out, and they’re like going, “Oh, wow, that’s so much better than, you know, going to Chat.” Of course it’s better than going to Chat, but, um, because Chat’s been trained on copy that sucks I mean, uh, chat’s been trained on the internet. Do you think the internet’s full of good copy?
It’s like, it’s, it’s, it’s the most obvious question to ask, right? It’s like, well, why do you… why is BNSN write such better copy than… Well, it’s because Claude and Chad, they’re trained on the entire internet, so they’re gonna be, you know, they’re gonna have a lot of crap in there. so we just gave it nothing but the good stuff.
Focused nothing but this, right? And then came the magic, the s- the magic sauce. Then we said, “Okay, the writing is rewriting and copywriting.” That’s a phrase Jon Carlton made popular. Uh, I have a whole course on editing copy. So I said, “What if we took that same approach with, with AI?” So we have one AI agent that does nothing but give it humanization.
Then we have another AI agent that comes in and strips out everything that’s AI, like the ubiquitous, uh, th- the, you know, em dashes now, or the, the absolutely horrible rhetorical questions that AI loves to ask. Like, “Are you ready to get rich?” “No, man, I’m so happy being poor.” I mean, they ask the dumbest questions imaginable, right?
And, um, so we, so we just strip all that down, and then we do another pass. So we do, like, four passes before you ever see anything. And so we’re… This, uh, I, I could show you on the screen here. Some- sometimes the books that we write, like in Book Builder, are, like, six to one. So for every one word you see, it’s took us six to, to write it, right?
And so the copy’s the same way. Three to one is what we shoot for, but sometimes it’s four or five to one and it has to be right. And so we’re paying a lot more than what we’re charging for. So we get… we charge you for words on the screen. We don’t charge you for words that are in the background. And so it’s a very different billing model, and it’s one that, that i- it’s, quite frankly, isn’t as profitable as, as some of the competitors that we use.
Which is why they can, you know, charge ridiculously bad, low amounts of rate for a really crap copy. It’s, it’s, it’s that simple. It really is. So to do it right, y- in other words, to do it right, it has to be rewritten over and over again, and then, then it will be okay. But it is, it’s, that’s the only thing.
And so we created this thing called Chains, and then that became… By the way, this was the birth of agents. This is before agents. So we had chains. They were static, so chain would pass thing off to one thing to another, to another, and it would grade on a test. And so we’ve been, you know, pretty, pretty cutting edge with what we’ve been doing.
D- not out of, like, trying to be techy, but out of trying to get the best possible product. And that’s, that’s how it works, man. But I’m totally with you. Most of it’s, most of it’s crap
Mike: I love that I love the you know six words to create one I think you know people who actually do a lot of writing for a living will kind of relate to that And maybe
Jon: Mm-hmm.
Mike: six to one but you know you certainly write a lot more words than ultimately you produce just pivoting a little bit here you know the
Jon: Mm-hmm.
Mike: on the podcast are in the B2B sector and you’re obviously from a a consume more consumer background
Jon: Mm-hmm.
Mike: B2B copy’s got a pretty bad reputation for
Jon: Mm-hmm.
Mike: you know very dull very corporate I mean what’s your view about B2B and what should B2B copywriters be doing to make their copy and make their uh VSLs
Jon: Yeah I, I have a very good friend, Matthew Stafford, and he’s one of the top guys in B2B, uh, marketing and copy and, he said this to me ’cause he goes, “There’s something I, I saw you say in a, on stage once, and I just, I took it back and we implemented it and really did really well for us.” I said, I said, “There’s no such thing as selling to a business.
It doesn’t exist. You’re selling to a person at a business. A business is ne- never will buy anything from you. You’re selling to a person, period.” And there’s always one person at the end of the chain, always one. But the person reading your email, there’s not a group of people sitting around reading your email.
And this is what business to business, B- B2B guys think, that, that there’s this team of people that they have to talk to and about their team of people. No, it’s, it’s, it’s not that way at all. And so once you strip this down to what the human element to it, again, it’s, it’s all being about human. It’s like what’s the pain points of the business?
And how does your business solve their business’s pain points? They don’t give a damn about your business. They don’t care a la- No one cares about your offer. No one cares about your product. No one cares about your business. No one. They don’t care. What they care about is can you relieve the pain that they’re experiencing?
That’s it. And once you understand that hard, brutal truth of reality, as a- as AI would say, now I can no longer say brutal truth ’cause of AI. Um, once you understand that, it, the life becomes a lot easier. Then you get out of your own way, and you stop talking about yourself. So I will challenge, like, when I was t- doing a lot of copy teaching, and, uh, BNSN kind of teaches you as it goes along as well, which is, I think it’s important to, to know copy.
Otherwise you don’t know if it’s good or not. but one of the things we teach people is, it to do is to write an entire piece of copy without ever mentioning your, what your business does once. It just is an exercise. Just as an exercise. Like, nothing specific about your business at all. Just as like, and so people will like, especially the B2B guys, they’ll go, “I, I, I can’t do that.”
It’s like I, it, it, it’s a T-shirt. Uh, how do I do that? It’s like, “Okay, why do people want a T-shirt?” I, I don’t know. They want a T-shirt. No, why do they want a T-shirt? You know, it’s like, I don’t know. Look good. Oh, okay, so to look good. So your, does your T-shirt help them look better? It’s like, well, yeah, ’cause it’s got this, this polyester cotton blend.
No one cares about that. No one cares about that. I said, “So you say, ‘Look, look, we designed something to help you look better.’ And it helps you look, it h- it helps every man that puts it on look better. That’s what everyone says. Just read the reviews below. It makes you look better, makes you look tighter, f- more fit.
I know you don’t got time to go to the gym, neither do I. So we, we had to figure out something, and this is what we figured out. So much easier than going to the gym.” Okay. Uh, do you see where I’m going with this? This is not, uh, it, for, for a copywriter, this is just easy, right? But for a B2B guy or a marketer or, or a guy that is so proud of the, the stainless steel polyester blend that they just put together in this shirt, right?
That, that, that’s what they’re really thinking about. Or is it this, or the M5 chip in the Mac. It’s, no one cares. No one cares. It’s, it’s what, they care about what it solves. And if you just… And so as an exercise, talk about only what it solves, the only what it solves, then all of a sudden now you can start- talking about your business, but only after you talk about that.
It’s like, this is, if you’re anything like us, you are tired of X, and X, Y, and Z. It’s j- it’s dragging your business down. And we talk to people all the time who are in the same exact position. It’s like, what do you do about it? Well, we have an answer. I’d love to share it with you. Do you have five minutes?
I, this is, I didn’t mention anything. I didn’t even tell them what it was. I was like, it’s, so I, I guarantee you that will get more response than, you know, here at Acme Incorporated, we pride ourselves on, ugh, geez, I’m already asleep, and I’m talking
Mike: And that sounded just like a lot of copy you see so you know absolutely right
Jon: Yeah
Mike: mean y you know here at the agency we talk a lot about you know you’ve obviously gotta remove the pain Somebody’s got a problem you gotta fix the problem
Jon: Right
Mike: in B2B I think one of the big things one of the things you can really deliver to your customers is to get them promoted if you do something that helps them get promoted they’ve not only you know fixed their problem but other people in the organization have recognized that as well
Jon: Mm-hmm. Yeah. It’s, it’s … That, that is a massive push right there, a massive push. So the whole, um, solve this and you’re a hero kind of l- mentality, uh, yeah, that, that’s a really good PS, by the way. That’s a really good PS. And by the way, I’ll just give every- everyone listening a tr- a, a trick to use, a trick.
When I say trick, it’s … It comes across as deceptive, but it’s not at all. Um, th- guess what people read in a subject line, i- in an email rather
Mike: So what they read um
Jon: thing, the highest point of readership in an email? What is it?
Mike: Well
Jon: What do you think it is?
Mike: line cause a lot of people never open the email right
Jon: Well, okay, so, so you have 100% subject line read. So, you know, you know, anyone that opened the email read the subject line 100% of the time, either that or they’re clicking on autopilot. So you got that, right?
So what do you think that your first link should look like?
Mike: Wow that’s a great question I don’t know I mean
Jon: Your subject line.
Mike: that first link Yeah
Jon: Repeat your subject line. They just opened it. It’s like
Mike: Yeah
Jon: so it’s really cool. So you, but guess what the second most read thing in, in an email is? It’s the PS. People skim down the bottom, especially longer emails. So guess where you put all your good stuff? “PS, look, this is making guys like you,” or people like you, or whatever, uh, uh, whatever their titles are, “look like freaking rockstar heroes.
I mean, I know one guy who just got promoted just ’cause he shared this idea, so here, click, uh, be sure to reread this if you didn’t. If you missed the third paragraph, I- that’s where I give you all the good stuff,” and it makes them go back and reread the email. Tell them it’s in the third paragraph. Make them go find it for…
Mike: Love that
Jon: so as, these are just, these are, like, I, I wr- I wrote a book on this called Open Click Buy, and it’s all about, uh, how to get more response with emails. But little things that you ask and how you ask it makes … It just, there’s no business to business in that, in, in that comment that I just said. The, it, it’s just person to person, and it’s all selling is people to people.
Mike: I love some great tips there I just wanna change a little bit you know with There’s a
Jon: Mm-hmm.
Mike: questions we always like to ask people um just to see you know how they approach things and the first thing is you know we ask what’s the best bit of marketing advice that’s ever been given to you
Jon: Hmm. Uh, that, that one’s easy. Uh, best bit of marketing advice is, uh, write like you’re writing to one person, because you are.
Mike: Really clear
Jon: You are. Yeah.
Mike: Love
Jon: That’s, that’s, yeah. That, that, and it ties perfectly into the B2B mythology of like, oh, we’re writing to a company. No, you’re not.
Mike: Mmhmm
Jon: You’re
Mike: No
Jon: Yeah
Mike: And then you know obviously things are changing very fast AI particularly has had a huge impact on marketing What would your advice be to be s to someone who’s maybe a graduate and just starting their marketing career
Jon: So I, I, I’m not trying to sound dire, I’m not trying to sound, uh, hyperbolic. Ag- uh, there, there’s no hyperbole in all, in anything I’m saying right now. if you are just getting started in this business and you do not know AI, and I’m not talking about Chat, I’m not talking about Claude, I’m talking about, uh, legitimate AI.
not … By the way, those are both really good companies, and we use both those companies, so when I say legitimate AI, I mean, I mean AI that is, that is i- basically an employee, that is basically, um, a, a partner. that is, that is the promise of these, these, uh, web-based applications that just can’t hold a candle to something that’s on your own machine.
Um, so that i- i- if you tap into that power, you become superhuman. And, and, and there’s not even a … It, it’s not like, “Oh, this is someone that I might hire above somebody else.” This is someone that will be hired 100% of the time, uh, every single time above somebody that doesn’t know it. If you come into a, an operational meeting or an interview or whatever you wanna, whatever it happens to be, and you say, um, ” I kn- I know this, I know this, I know this.
Oh, and by the way, I can do this with AI. In fact, I can have this for you tomorrow,” y- you’re gonna get hired. It, it, it, it’s, it’s like the people that I, I have at my company and I continue to hire at my company are the people that understand this and the people that use it. And the people that don’t are fired.
There, there, there’s no, there’s no place for them because it’s impossible. I, I used to say it’s like saying that, that I refuse to have a fax machine in 1980, but it’s more like I refuse to be on the internet in 2000 It’s, it’s that level of complete discombobulation from reality.
It’s like if you re- if you’re like, “Oh, I’m on the fence on AI” because all you know about AI is ChatGPT, well, well, I, I can understand that. That’s a- ChatGPT is a chatbot essentially. It’s a, it’s a very intelligent one, but it’s, it’s, it’s a chatbot. But if you don’t know what’s underneath the layers of that, if you don’t know what’s going on inside, you know, uh, Clod Code, OpenClod, uh, Codex, uh, the more of the m- more of the heavier machinery involved in what we do in AI, then, uh, it’s
It, it freaks people out. I- if I can give you one story. I, I could do … I could give this every single day I could give, give a different story. But just yesterday, one of my good friends I’ve known for 10 years, he’s a, a trainer. He trains trainers
well, he came over to visit our, at my house. He goes, “I saw what you’re doing.” He’s like, “I, I, Is that really going on?” I go, “Yeah.” I go, “So, uh, of course, it’s going on.” It’s like, so he said, “Well, do you have any ideas on what I could do for my, my trainers?” I said, “Yeah, just imagine this for a second.
Every single one of your trainers, like for example, um, they, they sometimes they follow up with their c- their clients.
Sometimes they do it once a week. Sometimes they’ll text them like, “Hey, how are you doing?” Like, you know, I’m a, I’m a competitive athlete, so a fitness competitor, so, so my coach will text me. He’s like, “You doing all right?” You know? Totally cool. Imagine if they got this. And what I did is I just grabbed one day or one week of my eating and out of, like, uh, my food diary, and I just dumped it into Isaac as my clone.
So I said, “Isaac, uh, I want you to build me a presentation. Use my Eleven Labs audio key. Uh, make it look like this. Uh, go.” So what if you gave them this on autopilot? I would set up a, a, a recurring command, so I didn’t even have to do that. It’s like every single Monday a video would be produced and be sent to them, and I sent him this video, and he’s like, “You’ve got to be freaking kidding me.”
It was beautifully animated. It’s like, “Okay, look at what you did this week. Your, your goals that slid in. Your goals did this. You hit you this much protein in this. Here’s what we want to tweak for the next week. We need to get you down a little bit here. What I suggest is here.” Imagine that from a trainer, but they didn’t do it, and you could not tell this was not me.
So this is like… Ch-ChatGPT won’t do that for you folks. It’s not possible. So but the- these tools that we use will, and, and that’s what people are doing with AI. And, and that’s a very… That was a five-minute fix. Extrapolate that into a business where you, you build a tool that your business needs that no one else has, or a method of delivery that no one else has thought of.
That’s what’s possible with AI. That’s why it’s, it’s, it’s not, it’s not an option. You have to do it. So that’s my plea to you to learn this stuff, man.
Mike: I love that That’s such a good example It’s so easy to to understand I mean Jon this has been amazing We’ve we’ve covered so much more than BNSN I feel like we’ve covered an awful
Jon: Hmm
Mike: way of some of the ideas and tips you’ve been given wanna find out more I mean where do they go and maybe how do they get a hold of you
Jon: So we have a couple of free things for people. If you go to YouCloned, Y-O-U-C-L-O-N-E-D.ai. YouCloned is my method of cloning myself. And so I cloned myself not just once, but like 10 times over. So I’ve got like 10 of me helping me run a business, which is kind of cool. Um, needless to say, we, we’re growing a lot, uh, because they don’t sleep.
So I show you– I, I give you a PDF. Here’s the PDF. Here’s what I… Here’s the stack I’m using. Here’s how much it costs me. It’s the cheapest employee you’ll ever have, but it’s like with an IQ of 600. So it’s, it’s just ridiculous not using it, right? So that’s cool. And if you wanna know more about the marketing side of things, if that’s in, in your, your wheelhouse, then we have freebuyerprofile.com, which gives our, uh…
It gives you a free, literally a buyer profile. In other words, who’s your ideal buyer? Rather than trying to sell to everyone, sell only to one group of people for a while. Like this– ‘Cause that one group of people will absolutely make you a multi-multi-multi-millionaire. Sell to them. They will feel incredibly special.
They will feel incredibly heard. You will resonate with them because they’re already in your value list. They’re already aligned with your values, so you don’t have to worry about all the, the hassles that come with bad customers. So we teach people how to do that, and, and then if you wanna use our AI to do it, w- it can do it for you
Mike: That’s amazing Jon it’s been fascinating I feel like we could talk for, you know hours on this but
Jon: Yeah
Mike: you so much Thank you for being so generous you know sharing your insights and your ideas and thanks for being a guest on Marketing B2B Technology
