Customer Reviews

The Great Formula: for Creating Maximum Profit with Minimal Effort

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

WARNING: "The Irresistible offer" and "The Great Formula" are the same book in different words. My guess is a business move to milk more money out of the same cow by changing its name and painting it's patches on in a different pattern. Buy one, not both... your welcome ;-)

This is more valuable than any textbook I've read. I received an early version of The Great Formula to review...The book is broken down into two sections...the first section begins with a quick review of The irresistible Offer (TIO) and how TIO works into a business plan, and more importantly, how the business plan can leverage The irresistible Offer.

Here's where Mark has cracked the formula...you see, TIO is about making a sale while The Great Formula is about sustainably growing your business. Your most expensive proposition is acquiring a new customer. Now, how do you nurture this relationship to create a life-long customer? Mark is asking us to think two products ahead...to think about not a sale but an ongoing relationship with a customer.

The second section of the book, the smaller section, is on case studies from users of TIO. This is greatly useful...I get to see tactics and thinking of how to transform a tactic into a strategy. Of how a single sale consistently became 4 sales for one retailer.

I wish all my clients read this book. I would be able to build on this premise with ease. You aren't looking to make one sale...You want to make a lifetime of sales. I see this book as a practical tool kit for a dirty word in marketing...branding. I know, more money has been wasted in the name of branding than just about any other ego driven rationale, but there is something in that concept of branding...building sustainable profitable relationships with your customer...selling them. Then sell them again. THIS IS BRANDING when done well, because you are developing a RELATIONSHIP with each customer.

Selling is getting the resistance out of the way...Branding is about nurturing that inclination to buy. What happened to ABC? Always be closing...hey, if you have closed this sale why aren't you working on closing the next sale? Now...sometimes the best way to close the next sale is to properly say thank you for this sale. In an attention economy, getting somebody's attention is the first step to a sale...that's TIO, and it works best when you can identify a thirsty audience.

The case studies detail how readers find their thirsty audiences. When you know you have a thirsty customer, offer them a second glass. This might seem basic, and it is, but I find this strategy under-utilized.

If you are in marketing you need to be selling...sell! Now, be smart about your selling efforts. The great formula is not about selling harder, it is about selling smarter.

The book surprised me negatively. I expected something more developed not just basic outline of marketing process and some case studies (some of which are totally missing the point). Nothing useful for someone experienced in marketing.

I'll gladly admit it! Among my huge pet peeves are books that sound like they provide real insight on a subject but turn out to be nothing more than a collection of fluff pieces by various authors plugging their own books. Tree trashers, I call them.

Besides that, if 30 people wrote the book, why not say so on the cover? It would save me time, disappointment, and several dollars.

I usually reward the perpetrator by promising myself never to buy another book from this author - no matter how good the sales piece promoting the book.

My heart sank when I saw that Mark Joyner's latest book contains about 30 pages of solid content followed up by a series of essays by Internet marketers. Nevertheless, reviewing the essays, I discovered that every one provides valuable insights into the practical details of making "The Great Formula" work.

Well, it's true - rules are made to be broken. And when the next Mark Joyner book comes out, I'll gladly plunk down the purchase price.

Highly recommended - for all its pages!

Phyllis Staff, Ph.D.
author:
"How to Find Great Senior Housing," and
"128 Ways to Prevent Alzheimer's and Other Dementias"

Who doesn't want to put in minimal effort to create maximum profit? The reality is that this book can't really help you do that. You're probably wondering why I gave this book five stars if it can't help you do what it claims. Well, it can't help you do it if you don't also know the lessons learned in the author's other book, The Irresistible Offer. These two books work together and they are definitely ten stars when taken together. (Too bad Amazon.com won't let us give a book ten stars... I'd do it for these two.)

This book goes deeper into the Great Formula that is introduced in the Irresistible Offer. The book also includes many profiles of individuals who have applied the principles with exceptional success.

I have now read both of these books three times and I'm sure I'll read them more.

[...]

I gave Mark's prior book, The Irresistible Offer, 5 stars, and The Great Formula deserves at least that many, if not more.

This book is so practical in it's explanation of Mark's brilliant - but deceptively simple! - ideas on marketing. It includes several case studies written by contributors who have very successfully used Mark's concepts, and they also include many brilliant ideas of their own. I don't think I've ever dog-eared so many pages in a book before! (And - this is a true story - my girlfriend was wondering why I keep a separate copy in every bathroom in the house!)

I highly recommend this book, not just to marketers per se, but to ANYONE who must market or sell anything, be it a product, a concept, or themselves. That applies to salespeople, politicians, singles, teachers, you name it. If you have something to sell, this book will increase your results big-time.

Mark is one of the best authors I've read at being able to keep marketing simple. With some marketing books out there I've ended up feeling like I was reading a software manual, but his style is so far from that. He makes it easy to understand, and the way he uses case studies really helps bring it all home. The best thing I can say about this book, and also `The Irresistible Offer' as well, is that while he keeps things simple, more importantly he's very thorough, and doesn't leave me feeling overwhelmed. He has my vote on this being the simplest explanation of what works in business ever written.

You can learn exactly what makes the Great Formula within the first few pages of the book. It's a simple concept and once you read it--you see that it's basic common sense.

What's great about the book is that it is jam packed with advice from numerous business successes and how they applied the Great Formula to their businesses. You get to hear from people like Yanik Silver, Jason mangrum, Joshua Shafran, and best of all, Lee Benson.

Most, if not all, of the guest contibutors com from making big money on the Internet. If you have an Internet based business that sells products (and I guess services, to a point), you should really get your hand on this book! In fact, I'd reccomend you buy this with the Irresistable Offer and you'll probably never even need another marketing based bok.

I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did, but in the end, it's just another internet information marketing book. If you read Dan Kennedy, Joe Vitale and others like them, you won't find anything new here. As a matter of fact, Joe Vitale is in this book.

Mark shows his brilliance through simplicity yet again. By distilling business strategy to an intuitive formula, he helps shift your mind in a new direction.

Simple, as in chess is simple.

The Great Formula clearly outlines the "moves": the core fundamentals of the system are summed up in only three, yet it will take many books to fully explore the topic.

Just like in learning chess, studying the moves of masters is one of the best ways to learn. After giving you the moves, Mark then calls on over 20 experts to show how they've applied these techniques to their own business.

"Would you like Fries with that?"

From a practical standpoint, one tip I learned (p121) has already brought me a number of additionalorders. That's a tip from Lee Bensen to modify your order form with a secondary, related product and a checkbox to allow ordering at the same time.

Edit: At the risk of not doing the technique justice (it's hard to summarize all the intricacies of the topic in a sentence), I added what I learned to the above paragraph - as some people seemed to feel the review wasn't complete with just a page number. Your better off getting the book and reading the full description, as I've oversimplified here.

I would have liked to hear more from Mark, though. The first 12 chapters writng by Mr. Joyner are a bit thin.

Otherwise, highly recommended.