How to Build Your Marketing and Sales Process Around Your Book with Leibel Sternbach

Full video transcript

What’s going on, Jarvis Nation, Darby here with Leibel Sternbach. Leibel is the founder of Yields4You.com, a financial education company. He is a financial advisor and the author of the Amazon best-selling books “Authenticity” and “Living with Financial Anxiety.” His advice has been featured in Forbes, Investment News, Reader’s Digest, Think Advisor, USA Today, and many other publications, and Leibel has joined us here today as a graduate of the Seven Day Book Challenge, one of the first ones we put on earlier this year.

He wrote a book inside of our challenge and has been using it ever since to grow his business. He’s going to share with us today a little bit of background on himself and what got him even into Jarvis in the first place, and I’m super excited to see where this conversation goes. It’s going to be kind of free-flowing; we’re going to jam on a lot of things, book related and otherwise. Leibel, thank you so much for joining me here today.

Thank you for having me.

We’ve come a long way since the early days of Jarvis and the makings of the first Seven Day Book Challenge earlier this year, and we’re in our final one this week, officially the November challenge. It’s a great group we’re going through, and it takes me back to all the people who’ve used Jarvis for the power of creating a book, and not only writing a book but using it for something intentionally, which is what I know you’ve done since you graduated the challenge. So before we dive into the fun Jarvis stuff and how to market the book, you’re in the financial services business right now. Give me a little background about what got you into this business and what led you to Jarvis.

So how I got into finance is kind of a funny story. I was running marketing; I built out the marketing department for a marketing company, and they asked me to take it over. This was right before the housing crash in 2007, so we were doing marketing for mortgage brokers, and then all of a sudden they disappeared on me. Banks froze loans and nobody knew what was going on, so I had to find some new source of income. Financial advisors at the time, specifically people selling annuities, were doing great because they offered guaranteed returns, zero loss, while everyone else lost 40-50 percent of the market. I eventually thought, why am I teaching all these advisors how to do it? Let me get my license and start doing it myself.

One of the things you’d think a marketer would be good at is copywriting, which I can do, but writer’s block has always challenged me. When I started down the journey of becoming a financial advisor and building my own practice, I was trying to figure out what my hook was. I’ve done marketing for hundreds of advisors, trained them, coached them, and we all say the same thing, so how do you stand out when everyone’s saying the same thing, even if you believe you’re somehow different? You’ve got to have something unique.

The way I got clarity on what unique value I bring to the marketplace, what I do that no one else really does, was by writing a book. When you write a book you’ve got to be crystal clear about where your customer is starting out and where you’re taking them, and take them along that journey. Writing that book gave me clarity. I knew a lot of the pieces but didn’t know how to fit them together or present it in a way that was easy to sum up in one sentence. Writing a book gave me that, and it gives me something I can hold and say, this is what I do, this is the value I provide, whether you work with me or not.

Did Jarvis help you come up with that philosophy and tie it all together? That’s a pretty big step. Were there any aha moments when you were writing with Jarvis?

There were a lot of aha moments. What I love about Jarvis is you put something in there and ask it open-ended questions, and it gives the most interesting responses. The responses are based on what the internet and the public have described, so it means there’s a marketplace for people having these concerns. There were a lot of moments where I read a response and thought, that really resonates with me, that’s a problem I’ve heard people talking about but never heard anyone address.

When you’re getting quoted in the media, you mentioned it’s a lot of people answering the same question and how you really stand out. Is there something like how someone from another industry, like real estate, could use the same process to get quoted in the media because they have a book?

The truth is that what works in financial services will work in any service-based industry, because ultimately we are the service. Our job as financial advisors, beyond the planning and investment management, is customer service: making people feel understood and helping them solve their problems using the tools we have available, whether you’re an accountant, a lawyer, or a real estate agent.

For getting quoted in the media, I use services where reporters are seeking out experts. There are a lot of reporters nowadays who need to produce an insane amount of content because everything’s online, and it needs to be relevant. The more you can provide the reporter, the more likely you are to get quoted, so I use Jarvis to answer a lot of their questions, basically half-write the article for them, and tell them where they should go with it. That’s number one. Number two, I’ll tie that back into my philosophy in my book, whether it’s the marketing side about authenticity and developing real relationships with people, or the living with financial anxiety side about addressing human nature. I’ll tie whatever I’m pitching into one of those two, and end it with, “and I talk about this in my book,” followed by my bio, which goes out with every email to every prospect: my name, my position, my top credential, and one or two paragraphs of bio.

When a reporter looks at that, they think, this guy gave me everything I need to write this article. That’s why we love Jarvis, because it gets us off the ground, and then I give my credibility for why they should quote me: I published a book, so I’m not just somebody with an opinion, I’m somebody with a book and an opinion. I’ve been quoted in the media by other people, I’ve got education listed, other media appearances, what I do, so they think, I’m not going to get in trouble for quoting this person and he really helped me out.

Just like writing a book, the value of the pitch isn’t that I get quoted; that’s secondary. The real value is that I now have a blog, a podcast, marketing copy and collateral I can use, because I take that pitch and turn it into a blog post or email. I’ll start it off saying, hey, so-and-so from whatever magazine asked, and this is what my response was. Even though I didn’t get quoted, I get credibility from it. That’s instant authority.

Yeah, and it’s not just answering the question, because they’re writing an article, so you need to provide the beginning of why that question is important, what to consider, and then the answer, and if they want to learn more, resources to follow up with. That’s why they’ve got to write two or three thousand words off of that, and I’m giving them two or three hundred.

That’d be a sweet recipe. Maybe we could work together putting something like that together; it would probably help me respond back to all these reporters a lot faster. I never even thought about using Jarvis to just answer all their questions and build a blog post response to it: find a helpful reporter, use Jarvis to answer their question, give a little background on why, here’s the answer, here’s some links to back it up, and oh by the way, I’m the best-selling author of this book, you should quote me.

Yep, and here’s all my credentials, here’s everything you’ll need to publish me, how to quote me, just like I provided for you. It’s like you get a full package, and of course I’m going to use this guy. And then, even if they don’t quote me in that article, they’ll use part of my content and try to quote me in another one.

Other than getting quoted, are there any other avenues you’ve used your book for or found it helpful in opening a door?

I’ve had two features on YouTube, full feature articles, both because people asked. One was because someone asked what my favorite business book was, so I quoted myself, and they called me back and said they wanted to do a full feature on me. Other than that, what I find, both from my own experience and my clients’ experience, since before writing my own book I helped clients who had written books and promoted them and built them into their sales process, is that when you make the book the central core of your sales process, it makes everything really smooth.

Usually the sales process has a whole education phase where you have to get people to know who you are, what you do, how you help, and what makes you different, and educate them on your philosophy, and only then maybe you have the opportunity to get them into an appointment. With the book, you just go out and say, hey, do you want to learn this process that I developed that solves this need, and instantly they think, oh, you’re something different. You get instant credibility; you don’t have to fight for it.

I used to get a lot of questions about why they should trust me, people challenging what I say. I don’t really get that anymore; they just accept it, and they come saying, what do you think about this, what do you think I should do, and they’re taking notes as I’m talking. It used to be, well, I don’t really think that, what about this, what about what so-and-so said on TV yesterday. Now it’s, they don’t, because I have a book, this is why, I say in my book. I’ll be honest, I assume that nobody reads my book. I take that as a given, and if they do read it, they’ll realize I’m using all the content.

Most people, I don’t think, are going to read my book, even though it’s short, so what I’ve designed is that when you read the table of contents, you should get the overall idea, and I assume that if anyone’s serious they’ll flip through and read the headlines. The headlines in each chapter tell a story, so if you just read the headlines throughout the entire book, you’d get my story and my philosophy, and then I reuse that content everywhere.

I think it accomplishes the same thing either way: some people are going to read the book and the same thing gets accomplished, but it’s like here’s the Cliff’s Notes, you get it. No need to fight anyone who doesn’t want to; convincing somebody to work with you shouldn’t be like pulling their arm off to make it happen.

And you could be the best, most amazing salesperson in the world and get them as clients through time, but you’re not going to want them as clients. Having written two books now, I’d consider the first one a complete disaster; it definitely wasn’t as professional as this. I’ve learned that when I write my next book, I’m going to write it with the intention that it’s going to be my marketing collateral, not just a book or a lead magnet. Literally, as I write each chapter, I’m going to take the extra twenty minutes to break it out into three blog posts, a lead magnet or two, and quotes and posts for social media, because you’re doing all that creative work anyway, and if you take a little more time up front, you have six months, a year, two years of marketing collateral without having to think about it. For me, that’s what I’m going to do; I do a million things and don’t have the time to be consistent about writing a blog and doing all the marketing I should be, but I can do a two-week chunk of writing a book.

Number two, Brandon King does a great job in his blog and on his website getting people to register for his free stuff and his mailing list. It’s literally like you can’t go more than two pages without him casually putting in there, if you want more information about this, if you want my blueprint of how to do this, go to my website, if you have any questions as you’re implementing this, just email me. So when you go through with the intention of giving people enough information that they can absorb, see how it will impact their business, and start to implement some changes, but there’s going to be more that they want that’s not in the book, and you provide that on your website where you capture their information. The challenge really helped me narrow that down; if I’d had that information beforehand, I could have easily done that within the seven-day challenge, probably in three days. The hard part is the intellectual part of figuring it out, which, for anybody doing sales on a regular basis, you already know, because that’s a conversation you have all the time. All you need to do is take your sales conversation and write it into a book outline: what are the talking points you need to take a person through, what are their objections, how do you counter those objections, what are the things that really cement in their mind why they should work with this person, why they have to make these choices. Your book should end on the note of, if you want this transformation, you need to make a choice, A or B. If you want to choose A, which is working with me, here’s how you get about doing it. If you want B, here are your resources for doing it on your own.

I guess that’s the website, the expert hub you’re driving people back to, and your book can literally populate that entire site, or it can just be a simple resource guide. What did you lead people back to in your second book?

In my second book, I kind of went a little more into detail than I want to, which is again me learning; when I write my third book I’m going to go into less depth, because I gave them too much of the how to do it and not enough of the why you should do it. What I really want to do is leave them at the conclusion of, if I want to do this, go to my website where I’ll give you free resources and point you to everything you’re going to need to do it yourself, or, what I really want people to do, opt into my training or course where I’ll teach them how to do it in an intensive learning process. You need to write the book from the emotional standpoint of where you’re going to take them: they understand the problem, they feel like they can solve it, but they don’t quite know how. Either path leads to the same end: go do it yourself, and I’ll give you the resources, which means come to my website, opt into my list, and I’ll market to you long term so that when you get to your darkest hour of failing on that first challenge and going on the hero’s journey, I’ll be there to help support you, and if you get to the finish line as one of the few people who can do this themselves, I’ll applaud you and be your greatest cheerleader. But if you’re like the vast majority of people who can’t do it on their own and need an expert to either do it for them or guide them, then here’s the other path, which is going down my route.

Now it makes sense, and the vast majority of people are going to need additional help, because the right coach at the right time solving the right problem can create a big breakthrough. So the book and any of your messaging, your philosophy, is positioning you as being able to help support people at the right time, and just being there with the offer whenever it makes the most sense.

It makes a lot of sense, and again, your job, your goal, is to support them; you want them to succeed, whether that means doing it themselves or working with you, you’re going to support them either way, but the book isn’t designed to solve those problems; that’s off the book.

Leibel, thank you so much for sharing your process here, and I’m really keen to chat about that reporter pitch recipe; I think a lot of people in our community would get a kick out of that too, especially if it helps people get quoted from reporters. If someone wants to reach out to you and connect, learn about what you do in the financial services industry, or just say thanks for connecting, where can people find you?

I’m on LinkedIn, so you can reach out to me there, and you can also email me: leibel at yields4you.com, the number four, the letter u dot com.

Awesome. Well, thank you all again for showing up, Leibel, thank you so much for sharing that; it’s been really cool to see the evolution of the book, and I hope to see you, if not in January, at some point in another challenge getting the next book out.

Yep, see you then.