Copywriters Podcast

My all-time biggest hit was a direct mail sales letter for Abacus Travel Management that generated $40 million in new business. I wrote this pretty early in my career as a copywriter… over 20 years ago. One of the biggest challenges I had was getting into the way of thinking that ran through my prospect’s minds. My prospect was an entrepreneur who had a successful company and bought a lot of travel. I had never met anyone like that before, so it took a lot of research and a lot of mental effort before I could zero-in on who this person was. What I found out was, because they were so successful, nobody would cut them any slack. Everyone assumed the successful entrepreneur had no problems, since it seemed like they had endless amounts of money and other people did all the work. The reality, of course, was quite different – these people worked harder than anyone else at their company. And what good was money if you didn’t have any time to enjoy it? So eventually I came up with the perfect headline. The idea was,