Success Secrets E JOSEPH COSSMAN

SUCCESS SECRETS FROM TOP COSSMAN STUDENTS In this e-book marketing guru E. Joseph Cossman shows you the same 10 steps he used time and time again to sell over 20 million Cossman products ... and, three Cossman students show you how they applied these 10 steps to starting and building their own businesses, selling three completely different kinds of products. © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net INTRODUCTION E. Joseph Cossman and his son Howard bring a combined experience of 75 years in manufacturing and marketing to Cossman International, I n c o r p o r a t e d . T h i s e x p e r i e n c e i s based upon the national and international sales of 20 million Cossman products ... ranging from toys ... to household items ... to art prints ... to insecticides ... to sporting goods. Cossman Inter national was built using “entrepreneurial” methods. This enabled us to make each dollar spent do the work of 50. It minimized our risk and allowed us to enjoy extreme profit margins. And, although we never had more than a handful of employees at any given time, we were able to take a substantial market share from companies hundreds of times our size. Over the years, we sold over 20 million Cossman products. And, no matter what type of product we were selling, we always followed the same 10 steps, which are presented to you in this e-book. This e-book also shows you how three different people, Bob Hall, Debbie Young and Dr. Murray Davidson, used our 10 steps to start and build their own successful business. © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 2 10 STEPS FOR MAKING MORE MONEY IN YOUR OWN BUSINESS Welcome to this special E-Book of E. Joseph Cossman’s 10 Steps to Success”. By reading this e-book, you're taking your first step to success because in this E-Book Mr. Cossman is going to show you how you can start and build your own business, doing something you really enjoy. Mr. Cossman's 10 Steps are not business theories or economic guess work, they are based on proven practical steps that produce success. They produce financial independence, wealth, personal freedom and security for people all over the world. In this E-Book, you’ll see that you don’t need education or special skills to be successful. You don’t need business experience or contacts, and you don’t need a lot of money. All you need is to know what to do and how to do it, step by step, and that’s exactly what Mr. Cossman will show you in this E-Book. The 10 steps you'll be reading worked for Mr. Cossman and they're working for countless other people, people from all walks of life and all around the world, and by the end of this E-Book you will know beyond a shadow of a doubt that they will work just as well for you. © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 3 Hello, my name is E. Joseph Cossman and in this E-Book, I’m going to show you some little known secrets that enabled us to sell over 20 million Cossman products. I know that sounds like an a m a z i n g s t a t e m e n t , but by the end of this book, you will know 3 things ... You will know how we did it, you will know how our students did it, and most important of all, you will know how you can do it. In addition to those rewards, you will get something else by reading this E-Book, if you are Locked into a 9 to 5 job this book will show you how to break out of that mold and start an enterprise on your own, without quitting your job. If you are in your own business, this book will show you how to increase your business without increasing your overhead. And if you are starting in your own business for the very first time, regardless of your age, or color, education, financial condition, this book will show you how to take your abilities and turn them into an enterprise that will support you in style for the rest of your life. I came out of the Army after World War II, I had no money, maybe $200 to $300 dollars, I was married and had a baby girl, and I felt very lucky in finding a job for $35 dollars a week. $35 dollars a week, and I felt lucky getting that job, it was back in the 1940’s. And with my first pay check I put a down payment on a typewriter, and I began writing letters to people that I met overseas, asking if they had any need for American merchandise. I’d work at my job for 8 hours and I’d come home and on my kitchen table, peck out these © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net PAGE 4 letters. I did this for one year, I went down dozens of dead ends, I could never connect. Then, at the end of the year, only using postage and stationary, mind you and a very limited budget (how much can you spend on $35 dollars a week with keeping a family), a very limited budget at the end of the year, I found 30,000 cases of soap, being advertised by someone in New York City, I found it in a little classified ad in the New York Times. And, Working off my kitchen table, I got the rights to that soap and using postage and stationary, I sold that soap. And, while I’m holding down a $35 dollar a week job, I made $30,000 on that order. And that was the first revelation in my life, not that I could make $30,000, but for the first time in my life I realized I didn’t have to work for other people. You take the average person, they think the only way you can go through life is to work for others. But here I was 28 years old, no money, no education, and no contacts, no connections and yet only using the American postage stamp and an envelope I took in 30 grand. What would $30,000 be today?...that would be a half a million dollars today. So, if you ask me, does it take any skill, does it take education, does it take knowhow does it take contacts, I say no, because I speak from experience. All it takes, believe me, is direction. You can have the best product in the world, you can have the best motivation in the world, you can have best education in the world, you can have all the money in the world, but if you don’t have direction, you’ll never go anywhere. And that’s what I teach, I teach direction. © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 5 EXCLUSIVE RIGHTS Well first let me define exclusive rights. When you have the exclusive rights to another person's product or service you literally own that product or service even though you’re not manufacturing it, or you don’t own the tooling, but every time that product or service is sold anywhere in the world part of the profit comes back to you, because any sale has to go through you. So, you literately control the product. And this is the basis of what I teach, how to get exclusive rights. You never pay for exclusive rights, some people may try to charge you for the rights, walk away, because there are more products looking for people like you believe me, than people like you looking for products. Don’t get loaded with an inventory. If someone tries to load you up with 15 to 20,000 of his widgets, walk away. You don’t have to pay for exclusive rights, you don’t have to buy inventory. What you are doing is making a contribution of your time, effort and experience. Let me put the shoe on the other foot, let’s assume that you are a manufacturer and let’s assume that you are manufacturing a new unusual neck tie (this is an example), and you're selling the neck tie to stores all over the country and selling it to wholesalers all over the country, I call you and I ask you , are you selling your neck ties to mail order houses? ... and you’ll say no. Are you selling your tie to consumers by direct mail? ... you’ll say no. Are you selling your tie to military commissaries? ... you’ll say no. Are you selling your tie overseas, outside of the country? ... 96% chance © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 6 you’ll say no, because only 4 companies out of 100 sell to foreign markets.” Now you go down the 22 ways I teach you how to sell a product and you query that manufacture and the chances are in your favor He will say no I’m not hitting these other markets. Now, what if I come back to you and Say “Can I have the exclusive rights to your neck tie in fields you're not covering, non-competitive fields?” And the minute you sign the agreement with that manufacturer, and incidentally in our marketing program we have a 2 page agreement which is the exact agreement we made with the people who make Fly Cake and you're welcome to copy it if you want, but once you sign that agreement with the manufacturer, you own his factory. You can call the product Cossman Product, you don’t have to call it his name. Now there are many ways of getting the Exclusive Rights, aside from contacting a manufacturer. I want to quickly go through ways we got Exclusive Rights, and you can apply them to your own needs. As an example, how did we get Exclusive Rights to a product called Fly Cake, which was a fly killer, an insecticide. One of the things I stress in our program is not to touch a product or service unless every time it’s sold part of the profit has to come back to you. And to get to this stage it means that you must have the Exclusive Rights to a product or service. Now how do you get the Exclusive Rights to a product or service. Well in our program we show you 17 ways to do that. Let me just show you one of those ways. Would you believe I made a million dollars, reading the classified ad in the © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 7 newspaper? Let me explain. A few years ago I opened the classified ads of the Los Angeles Times. And I saw a little three line ad, it stated, send us $1.00 and we will send you 2 Fly Cakes, it kills flies. That’s all the ad said. I sent $1.00 to these people and I got a rather unusual product, shaped like a donut, when a fly touched it he died. A solid insecticide that would last a year. I called up the man who made this product and I asked him, how do you sell this product? He said for the past 20 years we only sold it one way, we sell it in the classified ad section of the newspaper. I couldn’t believe my ears, here was a man with an incredible product. Only selling it one way. I asked him for the Exclusive Rights to this product and I told him I could sell it 22 ways. We entered into an agreement, he gave me a letter saying I had the Exclusive Rights to Fly Cake, which meant that no one in the world could buy Fly Cake, unless it cleared through me. And every time Fly Cake was sold no matter who bought one, part of the profit came back to me. I packaged the product, I called it Cossman Fly Cake, and you couldn’t go anywhere in the world without finding Fly Cake. I want to make it clear that I didn’t pay a penny for the Exclusive Rights and I didn’t have to buy any inventory. The manufacturer made the product, I sold it, I carried the account but it was my product because I had that piece of paper saying I had the Exclusive Rights. Here’s a tremendous product going to waste. So I met with him, and I said can I have the rights to your product? And I will put it all over the world. He said, will you give me a guarantee? © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 8 I said what do you want? He said will you guarantee to sell 50,000 a year? I said no, I won’t guarantee to sell 50,000 a year but I will make this guarantee, you give me a years trial, and if I don’t sell 50,000, I’ll give you back everything I've done on your product. He said fair enough. He gave me that piece of paper, I packaged the product, I called it Cossman Fly Cake, and in three years I sold 8 million Fly Cake. You couldn’t go anywhere in the world without finding Fly Cake. Now that was my product. He manufactured it, but if an inquiry came to him, he had to turn it over to me. Now that's classified ads. Another example is reading newspapers. How many times have you seen a story in a newspaper, you say to yourself, there’s a great product and then you turn the page. Don’t turn the page, contact the person. How many times have you read a newspaper or a magazine and found a story in there describing an interesting product or service. And you say to yourself, that would make a good product or service to put on the market, and you don’t do anything about it, you just turn the page. Well that will never happen to you again after reading this E-Book, because I’m going to show you an example that will stay in your mind for the rest of your life. What is it? Sometime ago I was reading an article in the paper describing a product called Halt, used by mail men to prevent dog bites. A ferocious dog approaches the mailman, the mailman merely squirts this in the dog’s face, it disorients the dog for ten minutes with no ill affect to the animal. I wrote to the people who made this © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 9 product and I asked them, could you make a similar product for me called Rebuff? I want women to carry it in their purse as a deterrent, in case they get mugged. The people on the phone said no problem, we will put it in the same container, we’ll even put your name on it, and you’ll look like the manufacturer. I want you to know that in 6 months we sold 300,000 ReBuff, at $2.98 each. On my word of honor, I never met the manufacturer, I never visited his factory, all I did was send him labels and he did the drop shipping for me. Now, could you do something like that with my direction? You certainly could. Sometimes you can open up a trade magazine and you see an interesting story on close outs, I found a man in North Hollywood who had a product called a Spud Gun, it shoots potato pellets. He had the tooling laying in his cellar for 10 years, 10 years, and he had a 100,000 guns laying in his cellar for 10 years. I said give me the rights for that gun, what do you want for the tooling? I’m ashamed to tell you I bought that tooling for $500. I sold 2 million Spud Guns. It was called the Cossman Spud Gun, I didn’t invent the gun, I didn’t make the tooling. Another way you can do it is to create a product yourself. I’ve had 20 big winners in my life time, and I only created 2 of them, one of them I created was the ant farm, almost everybody knows what an ant farm is. Well, when I came out with the ant farm there were 50 manufactures in ant farms in the United States. What made my ant farm different was #1 it was wasn’t made of glass, it was made of plastic, all these other farms were made of glass, and © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 10 they didn’t keep abreast of modern technology, you can take my ant farm apart and clean it out, but what really made it big was no matter where you bought an ant farm I come up with the idea of supplying live ants. It was a coupon in the ant farm and you mailed it to us, we shipped you 15 live ants. We were selling a million ant farms a year, at almost every school in the United States. That’s a case of where I now had a proprietary right, an exclusive right, and it was my product. Now I know many people reading this E-Book are saying to themselves, look, I work at a 9 to 5 job, I’m making $300 a week, I have a couple of children in school, why should anybody give me the exclusive rights to their product? Well if you will follow my direction they will give it to you. Now I don’t want to insult your intelligence and say you can pick up the phone and call a large manufacturer, and say I want the rights to your product, you have to talk intelligently, you have to let him know that you know how to proceed. And that is the basic premise of what we teach. To have you learn how to proceed intelligently. I want to go back and say I mentioned in your field of interest, because if you get involved with something you don’t enjoy, it’s a hard way to make money. So look into yourself and see what you enjoy doing. One of the principles I stress in our Programs, is to do something you enjoy doing. If you try to make money doing something you're not enjoying, it’s a hard way to make money. To stress that point, I'll give you a good example. My son is an artist, he’s a pretty good artist. What did he do? He took his © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 11 artwork and created a clock. Instead of numbers, he put in the 12 faces of cats. Alright, he had a product, now he wanted to put it on the market. What did he do? He created a mail order ad and only using postage and stationery, no other investments, he solicited mail order houses. One mail order house ran this in their catalog. They gave him $150,000 worth of business. Other mail order houses also gave him business, and he also sold his artwork on the internet at http://home.earthlink.net/~hcossman/index.html ... But, the point I want to stress is, here’s a man who did something he enjoys doing and then turned it into a commercial venture. Now could you do that? You certainly could. Let’s assume you're an avid fisherman, you work 9 to 5 everyday for your bread and butter. You don’t particularly like your job but you need it for survival. But every chance you get, you go fishing. Because you’re an avid fisherman, you would be one of the first to recognize an unusual new product in the fishing field. Okay, you would find these new products in Trade Magazines that cater to the fisherman. Let’s assume you open up the fishing magazine and you find an unusual fishing pole. A transistorized fishing pole. It attracts fish to that pole. And you would say to yourself, this would make a good product. What is my next step? The next step is to contact that manufacturer. Now if you can convince that manufacturer that you can take his fishing pole and sell it in markets he’s not covering, he will welcome you with open arms because your selling it to a noncompetitive market. You're increas© 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 12 ing his business without competing with him. But the criteria, the only rule you should follow, the only rule, is to never touch a product or service unless every time it is sold, part of the profit has to come back to you. As I look back on my 25 years of successful marketing, I realize that was the only rule I followed. Now I’ve had 20 big winners in my lifetime, I call a winner any product I sold a million or more of. Out of those 20 winners, I only created 2 of them. The other 18, I found from manufacturers in a manner I just described to you. And anyone can do it. Anyone can do it. Remember, you must have Exclusive Rights to a product. It’s the foundation to the 10 steps. Exclusive Rights put you in control. Then your working for yourself. Now lets get to know our 3 Cossman case studies. First, you should know they had little or no business experience when they started out. They had no money and 2 of them didn’t have much formal education. But after learning Mr. Cossman’s 10 steps, and using his direction, each of our case studies started doing something they really enjoyed. And each one has a business now, that’s making them financially independent. And once more, it didn’t take them very long to do it. First, let’s meet Bob Hall. Before he discovered the Cossman Program, Bob had a dead end job. Very little education and a family to take care of. He was tired of working hard for someone else, and not making enough money. He wanted to change his life. Mr. Cossman’s 10 steps turned out to be all the education Bob needed. By following the 10 steps, he found a plastic wheelbarrow, in a Trade Magazine. © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 13 Then he got the Exclusive Rights to market that wheelbarrow for all of North America, free. Simply by writing to the manufacturer. That was the beginning. BOB HALL: I started with a few samples, started taking them around and as a result, picked up some orders, started delivering the wheelbar rows, starting to have the checks come in. And that was it. The 1st year we sold, in dollars and cents, a million dollars. In the next 2 to 3 years we developed that, so now we’re selling 3 1/2 to 4 million dollars a year. Whether its the wheelbarrow, whether it's a cart, whether its a widgit of any kind, I mean the whole idea the program is what works, not the product. Sure its nice to have a product that blends in, but if the steps are followed, if you cover the program, as its laid out, you know, how to find a product, how to test the product, how to then take it and set up your marketing strategy. This program works, you can actually program it all the way through and say here’s where we are. I would not have dreamed to be in the house that I’m in, in the location that I’m in, to drive the kind of car that I’m driving, to have the travel and the experiences that I’ve had over those last few years. Just on 1 single product. DEBBIE YOUNG: I have a new cosmetic invention out on the market. It's a cream for women that pluck their eyebrows. It's a rich moisturizing © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 14 cream so that when you tweeze your eyebrows you don’t feel all the pain, or all the discomfort. The 1st step was just to make a black and white flier, I sent it out to all kinds of experts in the cosmetic trade, and waited for their response. And, I got a tremendous response, so I was ready to move onto the next step, which was making the product, cause I didn’t even have a product at that time. Everybody was asking for it, asking for samples, and wanting to do stories on it. I didn’t have any product, I just had the idea. When I knew I had a winner, I went ahead and developed a product. And now, that product, Amarine Eyebrow Care, is being sold from coast to coast. And, although I've only had this product on the market for a little over 3 months I've already sold a little over $300,000 worth in that time. Our next Cossman case study, Dr. Murray Davidson, was a successful foot specialist. One day his son came home from playing football with such painful heels, that he could hardly walk. Dr. Davidson tried every product and remedy that he could find. And nothing worked. DR. MURRAY DAVIDSON: I developed a product that we call Tulis. And Tulis shock absorbers for the heel are just little ribs that collapse on im pact and they absorb the shock of the heel walking and hitting the ground. I made a couple of sets of these little heel cups for my own son, because his heels would hurt when he © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 15 played Pop Warner football. After using the heel cup I created, his heels didn’t hurt him anymore. But then something else funny happened, his friends parents started coming to my office, wanting to buy a pair of these magic little heel cups because their kids had sore heels. And I recognized at that time that I did have a product, but I surely really didn’t have any idea what to do with it. We did reach a point where that little back room in my office was starting to produce enough dollars that I could drop down and out of my podiatry practice. As much as I loved to practice podiatry, I loved this business life more. Today, our foot care business grosses about a million dollars a year. There's some large drug store chains that we’re connecting with now, through various reps and distributors. And, I expect that we’ll at least double the business we did last year. And, the Foot Locker Chain is accepting us as the heal cup of choice for their stores. Foot Locker has 1200 stores, so again, if they help and sell a few dozen heal cups a week, we’re going to be evolving into some larger numbers. E. JOSEPH COSSMAN: As I look back on my business career which was very successful, I realize that subconsciously I was following 10 steps and if you follow these 10 steps, you will find yourself with financial security also. The 1st step is to realize that you want to go into your own business. Make a commitment. You can start at © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 16 home. Don’t quit your job. Clear off your kitchen table and make a little space in your home that’s going to be your office to begin with. And immediately get some business stationery printed, maybe 500 letterheads, they aren’t expensive. Why do I want you to get letterheads printed? For 2 reasons, 1st, you can’t communicate with the people whose names I’m going to give you, and with the magazines I’m going to give you, on tablet paper. You have to look like you’re in business. But once you develop a letterhead and start sending it out, the only thing people know about you is you’re letterhead, they don’t know your color, your religion, your economic status, if you're married or divorced. Your letterhead speaks for you. The second reason I want you to make a commitment is to start, many people say there going to start today, or next month, but they don’t start. Make the commitment and you’ll be surprised how quickly things will flow your way. BOB HALL: Actually the session one is really laying a foundation. The foundation of a business is to have stationary, have business cards, have envelopes and letterhead. So, when you are asking for the exclusive rights to a product, or you're asking for information from a manufacturer, you must look like you are in business. You want to present an image on paper to that manufacturer, so make it look good. Invest a few more dollars on a good stationery package, as Joe Cossman lays out in his program. © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 17 DEBBIE YOUNG: I made sure I had some business stationary made up, so that I looked like I was in business, even though I wasn’t in business. If I had some stationary I could look like a professional. DR. MURRAY DAVIDSON: The first thing I had to have for business was cards, stationary, envelopes, and catalog sheets. We developed a logo with a flying wing over the T in Tulis, and we also had to have a basic business resale license. BOB HALL: If you do correspond with a handwritten note, it looks like you're not in business. The businessman you're communicating with may have a big operation. My wheelbarrow story is a fine example, these people have been in business for 35 years. One of the largest wheel barrel manufacturers in Europe. DR. MURRAY DAVIDSON: With the step by step process that Joe defines in the program, you start off by trying to sell into a certain market and then you identify that there’s more than one market, that there are a number of markets you can sell a product to. And, as you sell each market your business grows and eventually your goals become much higher, as they are today for me. E. JOSEPH COSSMAN: For the second step, you must have something to sell. There are only 2 things to sell in this country, and that is a © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 18 product or a service, There are only 2 ways to get the product or service, one way is to create it yourself and the second way is to look around at manufacturers who are making a product or service in your field of interest, I emphasis in your field of interest, because if you get involved in something you don’t enjoy, it’s a hard way to make money. And, when you do find an interesting product, contact the manufacturer and ask him for the Rights to their product, in fields they are not covering. I show you 22 ways to sell the same product and when you enumerate these ways to a manufacturer, you’ll find out that the average manufacturer only uses 3 of these ways. He will sell to a wholesaler, who sells to a storekeeper, who sells to the consumer. Yet, there are 22 different ways to sell that same product. In fact, I’ve had 20 big winners in my lifetime. I call a winner any product I sold a million or more of. And out of my 20 winners, I only created 2 of them, the other 18 I acquired by getting the exclusive rights. "Would you like to visit Europe without leaving your home?" "Would you like to go to Hong Kong without leaving your office?" "Would you like to go to Taiwan without leaving your easy chair?" Well, you can make all these trips with overseas trade magazines. When you take my maketing program, I show you where to get 25 incredible magazines printed in other parts of the world, full of products that are looking for distribution in the United States and Canada. And © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 19 printed in English. Let me just show you a few of these 25. Here is a magazine called Trade Channels, published in Holland, listing products from all over the world. Looking for American and Canadian distribution. Here is a product called Taiwan Yellow Pages. All the l a t e s t p r o d u c t s m a d e i n Ta i w a n . L o o k i n g forAmerican and Canadian distribution. An incredible overseas publication Made In E u rope. It comes out monthly and it includes all the latest products made in Europe, looking for Canadian and American distribution. Hong Kong Enterprise is another incredible source of new products. Looking for products made overseas? Use the trade magazines as your outlet. They are the least expensive and the quickest way to find an overseas product. And, in many cases, it just takes a letter on your part, to get the Rights to those products. BOB HALL: Joe Cossman shows you how to take other people's products, get the Exclusive Rights, and market that product. The manufacturer may already have prototypes, they may already have literature done, they may already have a whole bunch of research done, and you can capitalize on all that. There’s so many products out there that manufacturers have that have not seen the light of day. And I can go to manufacturers now, in fact I do, I go to some plastics people or, I go to a machine shops and I have to © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 20 almost hold back, because everybody has a product. You know, how many small manufacturers have products sitting on their shelf that they're not doing anything with. And all you have to do is understand how they can go about getting those Rights. And, if you know how to ask for them and how to present yourself properly, you can get the rights to incredible products. And there’s not a shortage of products out there, there's a shortage of good marketing people. And what Cossman has tried to do is to show you how to market a product and what to do after you find it. DEBBIE YOUNG: Joseph Cossman took a product that mailmen used to deter vicious dogs. He turned that same product around, putting it in different packaging and calling it Rebuff. He sold it for women to ward off attackers. I did the same sort of thing. I knew of a product on the market already and I sort of changed it around. I heard that instead of going for the expensive treatments, some women took a teething gel and used it to numb their eyebrow area when they plucked their eye brows. But, the ingredients in the teething gel could be really harmful to you and very harmful if you get it in your eyes. So I found a way to give the same affect as that but to find ingredients that can’t hurt you. So its really nice product. I never would have thought there are so many products on the market that's really just been changed around a little bit, or put in a © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 21 different package. I realize that now because I know how to look for that sort of thing now. When I approach a store, I know how to look for that type of thing because of my exposure to the Cossman program. BOB HALL: It builds your confidence when you start getting letters back from manufacturers and some of them you recognize as fairly large and they’ve taken the time and the trouble and also are interested in my business. They don’t know I’m working from my basement or from my garage operation. They’re interested in me marketing their product. And that really makes you feel good. Most manufacturing operations can’t go out and hire a bunch of sales people and marketing people. If you're not able to invent your own product, then find somebody whose already got one, whether its a manufacturer , whether its a relative, whether its a friend. And always get the Exclusive Rights for that product. Start with that, and then build your little business by selling that product or that service. E. JOSEPH COSSMAN: Okay you have a product or service, the next thing you want to do is protect it. Now I don’t need to walk into an attorneys office and leave $5,000 or $10,000 for patents. There are many inexpensive ways of protecting a product or a service. One that comes to mind is a copyright. You can get copyright for $30.00. A copyright is good for your lifetime plus 50 years. Another one that © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 22 comes to mind is a disclosure document. Make out a written description of your product, send it with $20.00 to the Patent Office in Washington, DC, in about 3 or 4 weeks, you’ll get back a disclosure document number identifying your product, or your invention. What does this mean? The government will keep it in their files for 2 years, it is not a patent, but you now have the government on your side. If someone steals your idea, the government will now testify that on a certain day you were the first to think of that idea. Another interesting way to protect something is with a copyright. When you have something copyrighted in the United States, you can prevent its importation from a foreign country. Some time ago I came out with animal heads for children's rooms. I spent about $8,000 with a sculptor, creating 3 animals heads, a leopard, a tiger and a panther. After I tested it, and found out it was a good item, I went into production. I copyrighted my 3 animal heads. Very few people are aware that you can copyright a 3 dimensional work of art. I put it on the market. About a month after it was on the market, someone came into my office and ordered 12 of each head. Then, I heard through the grapevine, they had sent them over to Hong Kong and they were making those heads overseas. And then, I heard from my customers, that the heads were being offered to them at half the price that I could offer them for. Well, I was desperate. I went to about 8 attorneys and I said here's a man whose stealing my product, it’s copyrighted, what can I do? You know what the eight © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 23 attorneys told me ... well what can you do, it’s being made overseas. Well when I’m in trouble I go to the government, when they're in trouble they come to you. And I went to the government and I asked, can I get any help? And they said sure, get a block entry. I went to the Treasury department and they said, make us one thousand photographs of those animal heads and we will police the ports of entry into the United States. And, when a hundred thousand heads came from the competitor into California from Hong Kong, they were sent back, because I had the copyright. Now that’s how you protect with little money. It's no trick to protect something if you have 50 or 100 thousand dollars. I show you how to protect it if you have limited funds. DR. MURRAY DAVIDSON: Protecting your product in my particular case is a very important step, because once I had my product and it was successful, it would be very easy for somebody to copy my product and end up in competition with me. Joe Cossman teaches you how to apply for and get trade marks, how to apply for and get copyrights and even how to apply for and get your own patent. You can write a letter to the government with a drawing of your product, or your idea, or your proposal, and the government puts that on file, and for a period of time you are protected in that manner, which is the real inexpensive way to protect your product for the short term. DEBBIE YOUNG: No matter who I approach, if I approach somebody © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 24 to make the boxes or the formulation, which I subcontract, There’s a disclosure document right in the course that I can copy from. I don’t have to get a lawyer or spend any money, I can just copy that disclosure document and I make anybody who’s involved in Amerine Eyebrow Care sign it, and then I’m protected. DR. MURRAY DAVIDSON: I feel the patent, the copyright, and the trademark session in Mr. Cossman's program are worth the whole price of the program. For the person who can’t afford to hire a patent attorney, they can follow Joe’s course, item for item, and they can get copyrights, trademarks and patents. E. JOSEPH COSSMAN: After you've protected it, through copyrights, patents or trademarks, you now want to test it. I charge $1000.00 an hour for consultation and I’m worth it, because I can save people thousands of dollars and many months of hard work. About 75% of the people who come see me, and they fly in from all over the country to Palm Springs, about 75% of those people come because they did not test. They had an idea and before they tested it, they made tooling, they made molds, they made inventory. I’m talking about testing the marketability, whether it’s going to sell. And, to find the answer to the marketability, you only need one thing, you need one sample. That’s all. With that one sample, which I call a prototype, you can show it to buyers, you can offer it to mail order houses, you can put out publicity releases and you can get feed © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 25 back on whether your making a mistake, or whether you should go further. I think that testing is one of most important steps in my program, because if you don’t test properly, you can go through all your money before you even have your product on the market. I can tell you horror stories, that people have put a lot of money into something because they didn’t test, they got hurt. And you know, one of the ten steps in my program is how to test a product or service before you put it on the market. Now it's no trick to test something if you have 50 or l00 thousand dollars to play with, but what if you have very limited funds and you want to test a product for a few dollars, before you invest in tooling or molds and inventory. Let me give you a good example of how I do that, this is the famous ant farm. Ant farms today are in almost every toy store in the country, but it wasn’t always like that. The ant far m first started as an idea in my head. All I knew was that there was a market for an unusual product like this. The tooling at that time would have cost us 15 to 20 thousand dollars for this product. What did I do, I called in an artist, I said we want to come out with a product called an ant farm. We don’t even know what it looks like. Would you make some sketches. And, right in my office, that artist made a sketch of what he saw was an ant farm. We changed it, we added to it, we detracted from it, and his sketch was so beautiful that it is still being used as the art work on the ant farm box today. © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 26 Now what did we do with this painting, we took it to a commercial quantity photo house, and we ordered 500 photos of this painting. We then sent these photos to the 500 largest mail order houses in the country. We said were coming out with a product called an ant farm, as described on the enclosed photograph. Tell us where and when you want to advertise it, and we will see that no other mail house runs in the same issue of the magazine that you're in. Would you believe we got back over a 100 thousand dollars in advertising commitments. We’ll, if we knew $100,000 was going to be spent on mail order ads, we’d have to sell 50,000 Ant Farms, and only then did we cut into to steel, and make the investment that was necessary. Here is a very prime example of how you can put a product on the market with just a photograph, and not the tooling, and not the molds, and not 10,000 inventory. So, you if you are ready to put a product or service on the market, look at that product or service and see how you can test it inexpensively. Keep in mind, you'll only need one, you don’t need a 1,000 to get the answer. DR. MURRAY DAVIDSON: My original test, of course, was with my own son. It's when I made these prototypes of this product, still to be named. These heel cups that took care of his problem. In effect, I tested it on my own son first and it worked. Now that is not a market test, that was a test of whether the product was worthy mechanically. That still wasn’t enough of a test, the second test happened © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 27 again passively to me, its when his friends parents came to my office wanting to buy this product for their own children. But more importantly, it was my first market test. Because the mothers and fathers that came into my office, were willing to pay any price to get this product. I followed many of the items that Joe talks about. Of course, every items specific, and you don’t necessarily go through all them, but I used most of the check list routinely. This philosophy never changes. I don’t think it changes for the inventor from his garage and I know it doesn’t change for IBM. The first thing they do when they have a new product, and the first thing I do for every new product, is I make a small number of the product and I go out to the market with them. The consumer tells you whether to go ahead or not. If the consumer doesn’t like the product and doesn’t buy the product, there’s something wrong. And it's time to go back to the drawing board. You can’t take these steps lightly. The largest companies in the world don’t take these steps lightly. You can’t waste money and stay in business very long. BOB HALL: Depending upon the product, you're going to talk to friends and you're going to talk to neighbors and you're going to talk to people in stores. I used to take my wheelbarrow to a store and I’d get the store manager. I'd go to Lawn and Garden people. When you walk by the cashier you walk into their store with a wheelbarrow, they haven’t seen before, they would say “who is this nut” you know. © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 28 But at the same time they got the idea of taking your product to somebody that maybe is knowledgeable either about the market or about consumer products. You take it around, you find out what people say you take it to buyers, and you get their opinion. I’ve seen individuals who have spent thousands and thousands of dollars developing a product and if they had taken the time and the trouble to survey it a little bit, They would have found out that it's already been out there. Maybe in a different form, maybe in a different package, but its doing the same thing. And they're trying to reinvent the wheel, and as a result, they end up just wasting their money. DEBBIE YOUNG: It's one of the most important things, testing. You've got to know before you put any money into it, or any time. Make sure it's something that's a saleable item. Don’t fall in love with your own ideas. Joe teaches you that as well. He teaches you how to go about it. He tells you what retailers expect out of it, and what your sales reps expect out of it. And, if the product costs you X number of dollars, you simply multiply with a ratio. Mr. Cossman gives you and you’ll come out with your wholesale price and your suggested retail price. DR. MURRAY DAVIDSON: I had no idea what I could sell heel cups for to the market place. When I looked at other products relating to the foot, I was a little frightened because all the other products were low in price. I found out what I had to anticipate though, and from what © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 29 Joe teaches you in this program, that I wasn’t going to take the heel cups out in the back of my car and sell them to people on the street for X amount of dollars. What you have to decide is how you're going to sell your product, and in my particular case, it sells through agents, jobbers, distributors, and an actual retail sales clerk. And, each of those people have overheads in their businesses and have to be compensated for their efforts of selling your product. If you don’t have enough dollar value in your product for these people, your product will not be handled by these people and it won’t be sold. So, you have to learn by following the program, how much money to build into the product, so that it can be sold on a retail level. If your product falls in the mid line, or the low line of profit for these individuals, you are going to get pushed to the back of the deck. You have to offer these people a good fair profit to sell your product. BOB HALL: Sometimes in your testing, you tell them a higher figure to get their reaction, not a low figure. You want to go high and then when you come in lower, the buyers think they have got a winning situation. Other criteria I look at is whether the product has appeal, is the packaging right, is there good presentation to the product, does it have a good chemistry, is it something that people are going to want. What kind of a segment is going to get it, is it going to get the higher end people, is it going to need dealerships to sell it? © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 30 E. JOSEPH COSSMAN: I now want you to get free publicity on your product or service. You know very few people are aware if you open up any magazine in the United States or Canada, about half of the stories talking about products or services in those magazines half of those stories are free, the advertiser didn’t pay for it. It is called a publicity release, so I want you to milk your product for free publicity before you spend any money on commercial advertising. A lot of magic happens when you put out a publicity release, I have launched many products with the money I got back from my publicity release. There are 2 kinds of magazines in the United States. There's a trade magazine and there's a consumer magazine. The consumer magazine is the kind of magazine you find on the magazine r a c k s , i n s t o r e s . Yo u h a v e t o s u b s c r i b e t o t r a d e m a g a z i n e s . Trade magazines go to the business field. They cover a narrow field, there are 3,000 trade magazines. There are trade magazines for toys, for neck ties. I just saw a trade magazine the other day for Christmas tree ornaments, imagine how specialized that is. When you put out the release and you are published in a consumer magazine, you start getting orders from the consumer who sends you the full retail price for your product, and you ship your product directly to the consumer. But, when you get inquiries from the trade magazines, you're getting inquires from wholesalers, store keepers, sales representatives and people from other parts of the world, who want to handle your product on a wholesale basis. So, milk your product © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 31 for free publicity. I probably have one of the most complete business libraries on the west coast, I estimate I have over 10,000 books on how to make money, how to get started in business, how to motivate yourself, self help books, and I can truthfully say that out of those 10,000 books, I only put value on maybe 100 of them. Why? Because most of these books or courses are written by people who did not experience themselves what they are writing in their books. I’m proud to say that everything in our marketing program is something that I actually did, I did not do research at the library, and I didn’t read somebody else's work, it’s things that I actually did myself. What I’m leading up to is that one of my subjects is how to get free publicity. And if you will follow my direction I can show you how to get into dozens of magazines and newspapers, radio stations and TV shows, by following my direction. I’d like to tell how one step allowed me to take a $500 investment and turn it into a quarter of a million dollars, all in a 6 month period. I learned through a trade magazine that a gentleman had come out with this spud gun 10 years ago. What is a spud gun? It’s a little toy pistol that works with a potato. You put the tip of the pistol into the potato, scoop out a little piece, and it shoots it 50 feet, and the potato is perfectly harmless, because it’s 98% water. Even if you get shot right © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 32 in the face, it won’t even sting! And best of all, you got 300 shots from one potato. I learned that the man who had this gun still had the tooling. It was in his cellar and believe it or not, he had 100,000 guns in inventory. I contacted that man and I bought the tooling from him for $500. Now anyone can do this, if you keep your eyes alert and watch what is happening in your field. I learned it through reading it in a toy magazine. Ok ... I had a gun and I didn’t know what to do with it. I’m a firm believer in not spending money until I see the end of the tunnel. So I called the Department of Agriculture and I asked them what was the situation on potatoes. He said, it's odd that you asked, usually there's a blight, or a frost. There are 100 potato producing areas in the United States. This year, every one had a bumper crop and potatoes are wholesaling for 1/2 cent a pound and there's a surplus on the market. I xeroxed a letter to the 100 potato producing associations and I said I’m out to popularize the potato, and I’m going to do it with this gun. We estimated were going to sell a million guns. We figured an average child will use 5 lbs. of potatoes before he gets tired of the gun. So, were going to move 5 million lbs. of potatoes, which will help all the potato producing areas. All we want in return is a sack of 500 lbs. of your best potatoes, sent to the hotel in New York where the toy show is taking place. Well, I didn’t get response from them until I left for New York. Then, I get to New York and there’s 50,000 lbs of potatoes waiting for me. I’m paying about $300 for 2 sleeping rooms full of potatoes. When © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 33 Railway Express called and said we have a 1,000 lbs. of potatoes for Cossman, I said he won’t be in for another week. I didn’t know what to do with these potatoes. But, I learned 2 things in my life ... Number one, expose yourself, and Number 2, multiply yourself. If you remember those two little mottos, it will give you a lot of direction. I called up an orphanage in New York and I asked them if they wanted 50,000 lbs of potatoes. They said yes, we’d like to have them. I said I’d like to use them for the toy show, after the toy show I’ll give them to you. Meanwhile can you loan me about 25 of your boys and girls, I want to dress them up like cowboys and Indians and I’d like them to meet me in front of the hotel on Saturday at noon. I’ll give each one a gun and a potato. She said "yes we’ll be glad to do that." At 12 o’clock noon on Saturday, I had a 30 foot trailer loaned to me by a potato grower with 8,000 lbs of potatoes in that trailer, and we dumped them on the sidewalk in front of the hotel. Prior to that, I had called radio and TV and newspaper people. We dumped all 8,000 lbs right on the sidewalk, and, I got arrested. I didn’t get arrested for dumping potatoes on the New York sidewalk, I got arrested because I violated an old city ordinance. You can’t bring a trailer into Manhattan on Saturday. So ,they took me down to the police station and it cost me a 50 dollar fine, and as I’m leaving the station, the phone rings and it’s one of the major TV stations in New York. Do I want to appear on their show on the next day, Sunday? And I asked them, where is their show broadcasted? They said, "we go into 50 © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 34 markets across the country from 5 to 5:30." Well even if you have money, you can’t buy time like that. That’s the best time for children. So the next day I went over to the TV station with 500 of my best potatoes, and they gave me 20 minutes to talk about this gun and "how it’s going to eliminate the potato surplus." The next day was the first day of the toy show, my room was 20 rooms from the elevator, you couldn’t get into the other nineteen rooms. People were jammed into the hallways. I had girls in potato sacks serving coffee to the people there. When you came into my room you were greeted by a narrow corridor, which was made by sacks of potatoes. At the end of the corridor was a Hollywood pin up of a girl. When you came into the room my girl gave you a gun and a potato, and you took a shot at the pin up. If you hit her, you got 2 lbs. of potatoes, if you missed you had to take 4. That show lasted 5 days. We sold 300,000 spud guns in those 5 days, and after 6 months, we sold 2 million spud guns. But all of those efforts were done by publicity. In fact at the end of the campaign, we went through our scrap book to see how much publicity we got on newspaper, radio, TV and other places. It would have come to over 100 thousand dollars if I would have had to buy that advertising. We got it all free. That's the value of knowing how to use publicity with your product or service. BOB HALL: I’ve not spent 5 cents on paid advertising in 4 years. And yet I’ve been in every publication in my industry. I’ve been in all © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 35 the hardware magazines, I’ve been in the Home Center magazines, you can see some of the awards that I’ve won for being at shows, in having got publicity on my product. I’ve been on television. I’ve been on radio, I’ve been in newspapers, in magazines, and the good part of it is the free publicity goes a lot further than the advertising. The paid advertising does not get you the response. I can show you stacks of responses and people interested in my product, that re sponded to a non-paid ad. If I had paid for all the write-ups and the publicity and everything, it would have come to over $200,000.00 in just free publicity. This is money I have straight out saved and that has gotten me exposure. Like I say, I’ve been on television, in a number of cases where I’ve gone to trade shows . And you see, the thing is you can’t be afraid to ask for that free publicity. One trade show the National Hardware Show, the television camera men were walking down the aisle and they thought wheelbarrows weren’t too interesting at first. But then when I started bouncing in it and jumping in it, and they took the television camera right over to it. It showed up the next 2 days on 7 news casts. In the Chicago area for exposure I couldn’t have bought, I couldn’t have paid for that. And there's so many other people at the Hardware Show that were paying for advertising. Here I am on 7 spots over 2 days, vital days, right at the show and I didn’t pay anything for it. © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 36 Joe tells you how he got his publicity. All you have to do is be a little creative and adapted to your product. He is a master at free publicity. And if you don’t learn from him, who are you going to learn from. DEBBIE YOUNG: I felt confident because they didn’t know who I was, they didn’t know I was working out of my home or where I was working from. All they saw was the literature that I sent out, that looked just as professional as any business could send out. And that's all they knew about me, they didn’t know if I worked out of a big warehouse or a small apartment or what. And I had every reason to be confident they would like the product and they were interested in the product. Like I said, when my salesmen started approaching the stores, because I’d sent out all this literature and tried to get all this free publicity, the stores were already aware that Amerine eyebrow care was out there. They were just wondering who was carrying it. My salesmen had the doors open for them when they walked in. When I first sent out my literature, it was a few hundred dollars, it was nothing for the black and white literature that I first sent out. I’ve never had a talent for advertising or putting out an attractive flier of anything. Joe gives you all those samples. It was very easy to follow. I couldn’t have made such a beautiful flier if I didn’t have anything to follow. © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 37 DR.MURRAY DAVIDSON: It's the key! As exciting as it is to you, I’ve lived through the excitement and I’ve done the things that Joe tells you how to do. In the beginning when a toothpaste company puts out a new toothpaste, they spend X millions of dollars advertising the new product on the television, in the magazines, in the newspaper and they even have people standing on the street corners giving free samples and they have the free samples in your mailbox. As a new company and as a product developed by an individual, its impossible to afford that kind of exposure. The only way a new product can gain exposure is through the free press release media. Now free press releases are thoroughly covered in part of Mr. Cossman’s program. And I can tell you my personal experience. Any city that I ever traveled in, if I called up the television or the radio station or the newspaper, and told them that I was in town promoting a new product that was good for people who had sore feet, sore back, sore knees, etc., and that I was the doctor who invented it, I had very few refusals for an interview. The interviews were often held and played during the news time of the TV show. Its time that you couldn’t buy for any amount of dollars. Newspapers would sometimes give me 3 or 4 columns, six inches long and a picture of my product on a news release. Something that the public was interested in. They really want this material, its public interest, its current news, new products. But you have to go out and seek it, you have to ask. I did it exactly as Mr. Cossman said. If you don't know how to do © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 38 something, you do have to follow some example. And, his examples are very successful. I’d be a fool to vary from that example. Nobody believes it when I tell them, but I’ve never spent any money on publicity. It would absolutely bankrupt a new company not to follow these basic steps. I can assure you that if you’re careful and your products good and you follow the Cossman program, you have a good chance at success. But if you don’t follow the course you have a great chance of failure. E. JOSEPH COSSMAN: You shouldn’t have spent more then a couple hundred dollars on your product, up to this point. Now I want you to start marketing that product, I show you 22 different ways to sell the same product or service. 22 unusual different ways. When I had a product to put on the market, I would go through the phone book, yellow pages of the phone book, and I would look for all the outlets that my prod uct could fit into. Now one of my products is Fly Cake. It was an insecticide, it kills flies. Well, when I sold my Fly Cake, I put on sales reps for different fields. I call it cross pollinating a territory. I don’t know who else does this in the United States. I had a sales rep who just goes to super markets, a sales rep who just sold to hospitals, and when I talk about a sales rep, I’m not talking about one man. A sales rep is an organization with many salesmen in it. Super markets, © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 39 hospitals, farms, premiums, I even had a private label sales rep. What's a private label sales rep? He’s a man who finds a competitor who wants to market your product under his name. Rexall contacted us, Rexall Drugs and they said can you make a Fly Cake under our label? And I said sure, we made a different color Fly Cake, we called it Fly Walk and they became a competitor of ours and they had to buy all the merchandise from us. They became one of our biggest accounts. Very few people know about private label. I show you 22 different ways to sell the same product or service. 22 unusual ways that very few people know about. I bought the tooling for this gun for $500.00. What is it? It shoots potato pellets and its a children's toy. Would you believe this lay in a man's cellar for 10 years because he didn’t know what to do with it. He put a fortune into the gun. I bought this tooling for $500.00 and used my 22 different ways to sell the gun. I sold this gun to government post exchanges, I sold this gun as a premium to potato growers, who offered it with every bag of potatoes. I sold this gun to auto supply stores, I sold this gun to super markets, I sold this gun to toy stores and I could go on with another 15 or 20 ways I sold the gun. And you could do the same thing. I can show you 22 ways to sell something, so you can pick up tooling like this for © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 40 nothing, and apply these 22 techniques. And do the same thing I did. I sold 2,000,000 of these guns, with an investment of $500.00, not because I was any smarter than anyone else, but because I knew 22 ways to sell. The average manufacturer only sells his product 2 or 3 conventional ways. He sells it to a wholesaler, who in turns sell it to a store keeper, who sells it to a consumer. That is 90% of how products are sold. What if you create or develop a product that can be sold to the mail order market? What should you do? Well, if you came to me for advice, I would not allow you to run a mail order ad on that product. It is very difficult to break even and even make money on a mail order ad today because mail order is very sophisticated. What do you do if you have a mail order product? Offer it to mail order houses and let them run the ad on your product, let them put it in their catalog. There are over 12,000 mail order houses in the United States and Canada covering every type of interest you could think of. Let me just show you a few of those 12,000. There is a mail order house that only specializes in different do it yourself clocks. You want to make a clock out of a record, out of a piece of stationery, out of anything else, here is where you buy the parts. HealthWorks, a mail order house that only specializes in health items. Health exercise, health clothing, health vitamins. Hold Everything, if you develop a new type of glue, a new type of hanger, something that can be used in the home or the office or the factory, give it to this mail order house and let them run with it. The Pet Catalog. I’ll bet © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 41 everyone in this audience, watching this program, has at one time or another thought of a product or an idea that can be used by a dog or a cat or any other type of pet. What do you do if you have a product like that? Go to the mail order houses who sell pet items. Now what I just showed you very quickly, multiply by 12,000, and that is the market to sell your product. Don’t sell it to the consumer through mail order ads. It is a dream to think you can run an ad in an expensive magazine today, sit home and open up envelopes and take out dollar bills. Those days are gone forever. I am the grandaddy of mail order. I was one of the very first in the whole world to inaugurate mail order after World War ll. At that point anybody could sell anything by mail order. Because merchandise was in very short supply after World War II. And mail order was one way of getting merchandise. Today mail order is controlled by very large multimillion dollar firms. They have fringe benefits you don’t have. And they are happy to break even on an ad in order to add a new name to their mailing list. So take advantage of this and if you have a product that can be sold by mail order, offer it to mail order houses. DR. MURRAY DAVIDSON: I knew I wanted to sell it in more areas then the medical market, and by reading Joe’s program I was able to really identify areas to sell into. Now, as a consumer, we’re all aware of the fact that there are mail order catalogs coming to our home. And its hard to relate your own product to selling it to that mail order © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 42 media. We all realize that department stores carry products but how do you get to a department store to have them carry your product? In my particular case, I wanted to sell my product overseas. Well how do you sell a product overseas? If you follow Joe’s program, you can find 22 markets as Joe outlines it to sell your product into. And I think today we probably sell into most of those 22 markets by following his advice. We have a whole army of people selling our products. It’s just the way Joe says in his program, you have to replicate yourself many, times to sell your products. You have to make yourself into many thousands of salesmen. And the way we do this, is the way Joe says to do this in the program. I have a distributor that covers all the sporting goods industries throughout the United States. Now I sell product to the distributor. He in turn warehouses the product, and he has salesmen throughout the United States that call on the individual stores. So everyday, there's probably, simultaneously, hundreds of calls being made trying to sell and show my product to different store keepers in different industries. DEBBIE YOUNG: I use a number of his ways, as compared to most businesses which usually have 1 or 2 different ways of marketing. I use a number, to name some, first of all I have my sales reps out there, all over the country which is great coverage. I’ve also approached mail order houses. Cosmetic mail order houses. These people will send out a few hundred thousand fliers, maybe once every three © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 43 months and I’ve approached them, and they put my product, Amerine Eyebrow Care in their flyer. And they are in turn soliciting for me, a few hundred thousand people every few months and it doesn’t cost me anything. My salesmen work on commission, the magazines give me free ads for my direct marketing, the mail order houses put it in their own catalogs and don’t charge me anything for it. I don’t have to pay for anybody to go out there and sell it for me. I have files, thick files so big, people are begging to sell my product. Companies sending me their resumes, its like they're applying for a job to little old me, it's just great. I didn’t have any trouble finding people to sell for me. BOB HALL: Within the first year, following Joe’s steps I was able to set up a network of agents, sales agents, right across North America. I had every state, I had every province covered with some kind of representation. In some areas I had 2 organizations, one hitting a select market , the whole advantage to that is that all of a sudden I don’t have to do t myself. I don’t have to make all the sales calls, I don’t have to make all the telephone calls, I don’t have to make all the presentations, you have other people working for you.into the door. E. JOSEPH COSSMAN: With direct mail you use a rifle instead of a shotgun. You go specifically to a qualified buyer. I don’t care what © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 44 product, or idea, or service you have, I can show you where to get at least 500,000 qualified buyers for that product, service or idea. Here’s another example how I made my money. I came out with a fishing lure, a rather unusual product. It worked with a baking powder pellet, and the lure swam under water for 1/2 hour or more. I sold 300,000 of these in the United States at $2.98 each. Then, I was looking for new worlds to conquer and I heard about a little known service of the United States Government called Trade Lists. These are lists of people in other parts of the world who handle products like yours. So I bought 6 Trade Lists from the government, of people who buy fishing lures overseas. Using my English circular and nothing more, I mailed my circular to the names on these lists. Would you believe in less then 6 months, I sold 200,000 fishing lures. Now could you do that? If I told you how to contact the government, how to get these Trade Lists, how to send out your literature, could you do that? Certainly you could. DR. MURRAY DAVIDSON: People that are overweight, for instance, people men at work that weigh 260 lbs., they happen to be on lists of people that buy heavy clothes, heavy weight clothes. Now that particular mailing list would be advantageous to a company like mine, because people that are overweight seem to have more foot problems, because their weight puts more pressure on their feet. © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 45 E. JOSEPH COSSMAN: After Direct Mail, I now want you to go into trade shows. Trade Shows are incredible. When you go to a trade show, 2 interesting things happen. About 1/3 of the products on display are being shown for the very first time, because many manufacturers use trade shows to introduce their products. And a 2nd amazing thing is that a Trade Show is the only time throughout an entire year when you can speak to the man or woman in that organization who can make a decision. Usually the rest of the year they're hidden behind a barricade of secretaries and receptionists. Here’s that man or woman standing right behind the table and he can say yes or no if you ask for the rights to his product. If you are exhibiting in a Trade Show, your most important customers are the other exhibitors, not the people who come to this show. The other exhibitors’ because they are in a similar field to yours. But they're handling a non competitive item. When I worked a Trade Show, I would leave someone at my booth and I would make it a practice to spend 2 or 3 hours every day, visiting the other booths and trying to sell my product to their company. When I came out with Fly Cake, I was looking for these 22 ways to market this insecticide product. And, one of the 22 ways I teach you is a Trade Show. Well, once we got the product established, I was looking for additional ways of selling it. I heard about a poultry show, a poultry show in Memphis Tennessee. A national poultry show. What am I doing at a poultry show? Well I figured anywhere there’s chickens there are flies. Where © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 46 there's flies, they need Fly Cake. So I went to this show in Tennessee and during the show I noticed 20 men running around the show wearing bright red jackets and they dominated the show and I followed one of the men back to his booth. And these are 20 salesmen for a very large company who was selling brooding equipment for the farmer. It was an automated piece of equipment that carried the eggs from the time they were laid until they were put into a box. The cheapest one ran $35,000.00 to $40,000.00 a very expensive item. So I come over to that booth and I asked, "is the president of the company here?" "Yes, it's that gentleman over in the corner." I went over to see him. I asked him, "do you know who I am?" He said" yes, your that fellow down the corner who had those 2 girls dressed up like big flies." I said yes, and the reason I have them dressed up like big flies is, I sell Fly Cake. And I want to give you the thoudsands of dollars worth of business that I wrote during this show." And he asked me "why are you giving me these orders?" I said, "well, we don’t have distribution in the agriculture field, the farm field. You sell a very expensive product, imagine the advantage you have of taking these $5,000 worth of orders giving them to your 20 salesmen and let them deliver the Fly Cake . Its a tremendous door opener to get into the farmers house and talk about the mechanical products you sell." He said "a great idea, we’ll take it." So I called my office in Los Angeles, and I said, "immediately put 20 sample kits on a plane, I need them here tomorrow morning." I rented a room at the hotel © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 47 and invited the 20 salesman from all over the United States, who were at that one location in Tennessee for the show. I talked about my product. I gave each one a kit and the next morning, they went to the four points of the United States and I had national distribution in 48 hours. That distribution would have taken me 6 months to a year to accomplish. I did it in one day at a trade show, and anyone can do it. BOB HALL: The benefit of going to the trade shows is that you meet buyers, you meet agents, you meet the press people, you can get exposure by letting even some of the consumer shows where the people can come in and touch and feel and handle your product. It gets you into your industry, you see what the competition is doing, you see what is happening in the market place, you read about the trends within your industry and within your market. So, trade shows to me are a way of really knowing and developing your product. But more than that, it exposes you to other products. And there isn’t a show that I don’t go to that I don’t see a half a dozen products, not being marketed, I mean they're standing there at the show but they're really not doing a whole lot with it. And they are people that are approachable, and you can go to them and ask them for an exclusive right, maybe in the mail order business, maybe in a select market, maybe for premiums or incentives, fields that I already know a little bit about. © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 48 DR. MURRAY DAVIDSON: Now, you can write to your chamber of commerce as Mr. Cossman says and you can get a list of all the trade shows coming up in your area for the next 6 months or a year. Now you may not want to participate as a booth owner at all these trade shows but, I did what Mr. Cossman said. I took some product in a brief case with lots and lots of catalog sheets and I dropped in on a trade show in San Diego or Los Angeles or Nevada, and walked around the trade show and looked for people that were selling products that were either similar to mine or had the outlets that I wanted. And I would stop at their booth and I would quietly show them my product and also give a few of my catalog sheets. And more than once, I’ve picked up some very good distributor outlets from this type of method. DEBBIE YOUNG: You can utilize a trade show if you're starting out and you don’t have money. You can go there and meet buyers and get to know who people are by walking around. And, most of the time at the trade show, you're talking to the top guy there. It is usually the president, or the purchaser for the top people that are at the trade shows. I just presented my idea and told people about it and I got a really good response. So you know, you don’t have to set up a booth to get business, you can go and solicit different people and talk to them, just walk around, passing out things. DR. MURRAY DAVIDSON: Unbelievable, I mean you go there and you © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 49 talk to the presidents of companies and I mean if you’ve done the very first stage in the Cossman program properly, you've got good looking cards, and you present yourself well, and you can give the impression that you’ve been in business for 15 or 20 years, just based on the material and the information that Cossman gives you. Because, if you follow his program, you’ve been in business for 25 years. Because you’ve had his experience. And so you start talking to other business people in a way that shows you're knowledgeable. If you use trade shows well they will boost your product from an unknown to a known almost overnight. Initially, I went to the medical trade shows myself, meaning, that I rented a booth space at a medical trade show, presented my product, and during that show, I gained sales. Later on, I went to a sporting goods trade show, and at the sporting goods trade show I also displayed my product at a booth and I found out that I had lines and lines of people at the smallest booth in the trade show wanting to find out about my product, and that brought distributors, because if you have lines around a small booth that means some of the distributors for other lines of large products are interested in your product. they want to sell it. E. JOSEPH COSSMAN: After trade shows I want you to lean on government services. It annoys me that the average citizen in this country, does not use the services that he has payed for through his taxes, but if you go to any large corporation in this country, you’ll find people on © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 50 that payroll who’s only job is to look at these services and how they can be applied to that corporation. The same services are available to you as an individual. One very quick example, if you have a product and you want to introduce it overseas, you can get help from the Department Of Commerce, and for a very little amount of money. They’ll ask you what country do you want to hit. O.K., I want to introduce my product in Japan, or I want to introduce it in France, or I want to introduce it in Italy. For very little money, they will knock on doors and they will find you 3 agents who are interested in your product. Normally this would cost you thousands of dollars, but from the Department Of Commerce, you can get it for less than $100.00. The United States Government publishes more books on more subjects than anybody else in the world. They run the gamut from infant care, to space travel, to blue jeans, to auto mechanics, to history, to geography. How do you keep track of this tremendous outpouring of beautiful books? Get their catalog, of U.S. Gover nment Books. Over 500 beautiful books, hard cover, soft cover, ranging in price from .50 to $10.00. they are an encyclopedia of infor mation that you can delve into and create your own products from. They also put out wonderful publications on how to do business in other countries. I'm holding in my hand, “Marketing in Canada”. It tells you what magazines are in Canada, what trade shows take place in Canada, what merchandise do they buy from the United States, what do they sell, what kind of a distribution © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 51 services do they have up there, what discounts do they offer, and so on and so on. If you want to break in to a foreign country, get in touch with the United States Government, and find out the publications they have that will give you this information for those countries. And what do I hold in my hand? I hold the bible of overseas marketing put out by the United States government, "Business America". It comes out every other week, and what is in "Business America"? Who is visiting United States from foreign countries, what hotels are they staying at, what are they looking for, what do they want to buy, what they have to offer, what countries overseas are looking for products in the United States. What countries overseas have products they want to bring to the United States. What inventions in other countries are looking for distribution in joint ventures in the United States. And so on and so on. This is an incredible publication if you want to know what's happening throughout the world. Now these three books that I just showed you represent a small sampling of the tremendous out pouring of publications that are yours as an American citizen. They are all covered in our marketing program and in many cases it just takes postage and stationery on your part to receive many of these publications. DR. MURRAY DAVIDSON: It's an absolute windfall. Let me give you a few examples. The United States Department Of Commerce publishes a journal called "The U.S. Department Of Trade Journal". Which © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 52 is in effect a free advertisement for your product in all the embassies of the United States around the world. You see, the United States as you know has a trade deficit at this time. And our government recognizes this. So, they are trying to get us to export more goods to foreign countries. So they're willing to help the small businessmen, such as myself, who really can’t afford to hire a raft of foreign salesmen to traipse around Europe, Asia, or South America, selling my product. So, in effect, what happens is, for a small ad, and a few 8 X 10 glossy photographs of your products, and catalog sheets, you can get a space in "The U.S. Department of Commerce Trade Journal". Which again is published and sent to all the embassies the United States around the world. When the embassy gets this trade journal from the United States they in turn publish it in the l a n guage of the land that they're in. And, in the first publication that we advertised our heel cup product, I got 415 responses from traders around the world who wanted to carry my product. Out of the 415 responses, we got 8 good distributors in foreign countries who sell thousands and thousands of our products per year now. And each year the list is growing. DEBBIE YOUNG: If I want to sell in another country, there's a consulate © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 53 from my country that's out there to help me sell. They set up and help me find the contacts that I need to find and the doors that I need to knock on. They’ll point me in the right direction. And its all a free service. I never thought there was anything like that available. The average person on the street doesn’t know that. All these big corporations that are making so much money, they take advantage of these government services and we pay for it out of our taxes. And, so why not let a little person like me come along and take advantage of something like that, instead of all the big companies . But, they are available, and people just have to learn that they're there. That's what the Cossman program teaches you. I learned how to find all kinds of free services that would have cost me thousands of dollars, money that I didn’t have when I first had the idea, That's all it was, an idea. I approached a research foundation in the country and I had a chemist work on it because, I’m certainly not a chemist and then to top it off, I got a government grant which paid that chemist for the work he did, and I don’t even have to repay that. That's not a loan, its a Grant. They paid for my idea and the research on my idea. I never have to pay them back. DR. MURRAY DAVIDSON: We applied for and received numbers from the government. Contract numbers for the Army. Contract numbers for the post office, contract numbers from the V A Hospital. All these are government run type facilities, that require you to apply for © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 54 contract numbers, and get on their list in computers. And then, you become part of the system that buys for these large organizations. Right now, in Dallas, the Army Testing Center, they're testing our products for installation in the Army's boots and shoes for all of the people that are in the armed services. E. JOSEPH COSSMAN: After government services, I now want you to get into Foreign Trade. Why foreign trade? Because foreign trade as I teach it only requires postage, stationery, and effort. And, with today's internet, international manufacturing or marketing is easier than ever. I’m not interested in your bringing in 10,000 widgets from another country and putting it in your garage. I want you to act as a catalyst. I want you to get the rights to a product made in your country and market to countries all over the world ... or in reverse. I want you to get products made overseas and market it to outlets in your country. Only 4 companies out of 100 sell their product overseas. Why? Because the average company looks on foreign trade as difficult as selling to the moon. But I speak from experience, its easier to sell 20,000 of something to a company in Tokyo then it is to sell 500 of the same thing in Chicago. Why? Because number 1, when you deal in foreign trade you deal in large orders, not little dozen orders. Number 2, you always get your money in advance in foreign trade, your customer opens a letter of credit. That money is on deposit in your city, there's no credit problem. Number 3, if you pursue foreign trade, © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 55 with the help of government assistance, you have tremendous tools at your disposal. Tools that would normally cost you thousands of dollars, if you sold domestically. Dr. Murray Davidson: Most companies are afraid to do foreign trade. They think it's complicated and involved. They think its very difficult to do. Foreign trade is no different than sending a product to New York, or Washington, or Ohio. There are people in this country called freight forwarders. You take your product, box it up, make an invoice and get a freight slip ... and, they take care of the customs , the duties, and the shipping for you. It's just as simple as doing business in the United States. Debbie Young: I'm Just starting to get eyebrow care in different countries. I found out it is a lot easier even than marketing in my own country. When you're dealing with people from a foreign country, they don't know you and they don’t know if you work out of an office, or if you work out of your home. All they know is the letterhead that you send them. And, to them that's your business. And that's all they know about you, so I mean you can be working from your home, and all they see is your letterhead. Dr. Murray Davidson: The Cossman program offers you a variety of ways to do foreign trade. Go to your local Department of © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 56 Commerce, they’ll help you with trade lists. Putting ads in various foreign and international magazines is one way. You can also get P.R. in these various magazines and periodicals. The most successful way for me was using the U. S. Department of Commerce Newsletter. E. Joseph Cossman: These are the 10 steps, How To Start, How To Find A Product, How To Test it, How To Protect it, How To Get Free Publicity, 22 Ways To Sell it, How To Use Direct Mail, How To Work A Trade Show, How To Get Free Government Services, and Foreign Trade. If you use these 10 steps, you can increase your business by a minimum of 10% , without increasing your overhead. Its not because I’m giving you any magic potent. Its because I’m giving you techniques you have never used before, very few businesses know how to use direct mail. Very few businesses know how to work a trade show. Very few businesses know how to milk the government for free services. Very few businesses are selling their product overseas. And if you will take some of these things I’ve already done, and I explain them to you in very simple language, and apply them to your own business, I don’t care if its a service or a product, if you apply it, you can increase your business by a minimum of 10% without increasing your overhead. Now I didn’t invent these steps, if you looked at the way Ford sells its automobiles or General Motors or look at the way anything is sold in the United States and Canada, they are using some of these 10 steps. I merely brought them down to gut level for the average man or woman who can read and write English, That's the only requirement, to take these 10 steps and adapt them to your own needs. © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 57 THE NEXT STEP ... If you’re serious about building a successful business, please visit our website at: http://www.cossman.net © 2001 - COSSMAN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING - www.cossman.net - PAGE 58