“Is TeleSeminar Secrets By Alex Mandossian REALLY Worth the Time And Money?”
Here’s a review of TeleSeminar Secrets by Alex Mandossian – by someone who actually took the course – and spent the time and money.
By Robert Goodman, MBA, Ceo and Chief ImpleMENTOR, Ceo Resource LLC
Aggravated?
Aggravated, and turned off, by all the endless hype you see online by all the “Internet Marketing” gurus and “experts” who seem to fill your email box with outlandish claims of quick and easy money?
Me, too.
There are so many who tell you how easy it is to make a fortune on the Internet – that you may think you are the only one left who hasn’t. To hear them tell it – the hardest thing you will have to do is figure out all the ways to really spend that much money.
Hint: It doesn’t work like that in real life.
How do I know? I’ve spent the last three decades starting and operating four dozen of my own companies and working closely with 2,000 diverse client companies and entrepreneurs in almost every conceivable industry – learning each company’s detailed, inside moving parts and helping each of them slay their own multitude of dragons.
Many of The Two Thousand clients have asked me if any of these marketing experts are worth the time and the money – and would they really help the start up company or entrepreneur-run company improve their marketing and sales results.
I’ve taken so many marketing and sales courses that I’ve lost track of how many. However, this is my candid, unvarnished critique of one I took about two year ago: TeleSeminar Secrets by Alex Mandossian.
TeleSeminar Secrets by Alex Mandossian – A Review
This is a critique of TeleSeminar Secrets – an eight module training course produced, directed and starring Alex Mandossian.
I took Alex’s course two years ago and again last year and wanted to offer a reasonably objective review of his course and my analysis of its cost-effectiveness for other entrepreneurs and start up companies.
Who Am I – And What Are My Credentials For This Critique?
My day job, Virtual-Exec.com, taps my personal Compound Knowledge, which was earned from the unique compounding of Engineering Physics and MBA degrees, starting four dozen of my own companies, raising $25 million from investors and experience from working one-on-one with over TWO THOUSAND CEOs and entrepreneurs – to realistically define & implement the right action plan for their business.
My night job is being a published author.
So, it is through these combined eyes that I try to objectively evaluate the two thousand plus dollars that I paid Alex Mandossian to take his TeleSeminar Secrets course in December 2007.
So Much Hype – So Little Real Content – With So Many Others.
Have you noticed the overwhelming number of so called “Internet Marketing Experts and Gurus” who are all after your wallet share? I seem to get pitched by dozens of them a day.
In so many cases, it seems like so much hype – so little real content and little applicable, genuine experience.
Often, these are the “Wannabes” – they want to be who they claim to be – but really haven’t made it yet.
Alex Mandossian is NOT one of these.
After three decades of starting and running dozens of companies, I’ve met and worked with a lot of great folks. I can candidly say that none of them has impressed me more than Alex when it comes to really understanding the sales cycle.
He is also superbly literate and a great speaker – which makes the content much more interesting – and a great trainer – so you learn and remember – at least until you reach overload.
What Did I Learn From Alex Mandossian?
With all of my experience, I sometimes think, for a moment, that I have seen it all.
Reality usually shows me, within minutes, that I’m wrong. And, trust me when I tell you, the older you get, the more you know you don’t know – and the more you know you will never know it all.
Isaac Newton said, “What we know is a rain drop – what we don’t know is an ocean.”
I am an operations, CEO / COO kind of guy. I connect the dots. I find the missing puzzle pieces. I develop strategies and tactics as if they were a huge chess game. I develop the “deviled details” action steps required for genuine implementation – to take a client’s vision and turn it into a reality.
But I am not, nor have I ever been, a marketing or sales expert. These personal capabilities were missing from my rain drop.
I know what needs to be done and how to find the talent that can get the job done. But doing it – well, that’s something I have too often delegated to others in the past. So, I wanted to learn for myself how to take a lot of product and service ideas I have and convert them into marketable assets.
I also wanted to learn more about this area to better help my own clients implement these same steps for the benefit of their own company.
To say that I learned a lot from Alex Mandossian is an understatement. Some of what I learned include:
- How to CAPTURE the names and email addresses of prospects and suspects from the hundreds of thousands who visit my web sites each year. I am embarrassed to say that I have gone for YEARS without doing this. Dumb. Very dumb.
- The list of all that I learned is very long – but some of the topics include:
- Autoresponders – how to use them to automate client follow up.
- Shopping carts – how to automate product and information delivery.
- Online audio – increasing the client connection with voice.
- List building beyond the opt in – dozens of ways to build your prospect list.
- Ask Campaigns – how to let your clients and prospects tell you what they want you to sell them.
- Setting up a real blog – you know you should have one.
- Bridge lines – how to mechanically set up your teleseminars.
- Setting up affiliate programs – to leverage sales on a commission only basis.
- Outsourcing – how to leverage yourself and your time by outsourcing “the heavy lifting.”
- Traffic generation – how to attract the traffic to your web site.
- Traffic capture – how to convert that traffic so you gain wallet share from your visitors.
- Etc.
Yes, TeleSeminar Secrets is a course about teleseminars. And, the list is very long about all you will learn about teleseminar-related topics. But do you notice how very little of the above long list has anything, directly, to do with teleseminars?
Instead, this is the stuff most entrepreneurs need to know – even just to get started. If you don’t know some or all of this, you need Alex’s course – even if you never plan on doing teleseminars. This is one of the reasons that I recommend TeleSeminar Secrets to many of my entrepreneur clients.
Training and continuing education – and even all of life – offer epiphanies galore to those who pay attention.
Epiphanies are those “ah, ha…” moments of insight that help us both converge and diverge on new goals beyond our current expectations. I created a 36 page Word document full of epiphanies I gained from taking Alex Mandossian’s TeleSeminar Secrets.
One To One / One To Many
The other major thing I learned from Alex was how to move away from my typical “One To One” coaching, mentoring and consulting – and instead develop a “One To Many” approach.
One To Many is developing products and services that let you leverage your time so you aren’t just swapping hours for dollars with one client at a time.
I personally love One To One with my clients – helping them, individually, slay the specific dragons that stand in the way of their vision. But I also know my fees aren’t always affordable by fledgling entrepreneurs. (They are actually fantastically reasonable considering my Compound Knowledge – but they aren’t cheap.
The great thing about offering One To Many is that more folks can benefit from my experience and expertise in a much more cost-effective way. The other great thing is that I make more net dollars for the same work.
Since taking Alex’s course, I learned how to re-purpose my existing content, add new audio for enhancement and produce a digitally delivered information package that cost-effectively conveys what many entrepreneurs desperately need to know.
I call it Funding Foreplay ( www.FundingForeplay.com ) – a four module audio training course that is designed to teach start up company CEOs – how to properly prepare and present the dozen documents they must have to successfully romance and seduce angel investors and VC to invest in their company.
I condensed and distilled down what is required for funding foreplay – techniques that have taken me three decades to acquire and fine tune with real companies and real deals. Funding Foreplay is a one-of-a-kind curriculum that includes over five hours of audio and over 390 pages of real life, highly confidential, documents you can use as guides for your own dozen documents – all for under $400.
Enough of the sales pitch – you get the idea of how beneficial One To Many can be. And it is another example of how I personally benefited from taking TeleSeminar Secrets.
Downsides / Things I Didn’t Like About Alex’s TeleSeminar Secrets
There really weren’t many things that were negative issues.
- West Coast Time – Each class started at 8PM EST and 5PM PST. That is complication enough for those of us who do business in the States. However, in my TSS Class, Alex had clients from all over Europe, Australia, India, etc. For me, here in Florida, starting at 8PM meant the class and the follow up Q/A weren’t over until after 2 AM sometimes. And, yes, every session is recorded including the Q/A session that follows each week’s course – so you could miss a session or bug out early for bed. But you find attending class is like watching a football game – it’s just more exciting if you attend in person. Plus, you get to ask Alex your own questions.
- Speaking of football, it’s on Monday night and is in direct conflict with Monday Night Football. OK, so it doesn’t matter if the Cowboys aren’t playing – but others might find this a deal killer.
- Alex warns you that his full intention is to provide so much content and so many action items that the faint of heart may feel overwhelmed. Having run multiple companies for the past three decades, I am NOT faint of heart and I do not get overwhelmed easily.
However…
- My wife jokes all the time that my brain goes 1,000 MPH…which is why I usually limit all work stuff after 7PM so I can slow down to less than 100 MPH by bedtime. Unfortunately, Alex’s seminars go from 8PM EST to 2AM – and while I have the choice to listen to any or all of the teleseminar via MP3 a couple of days later, I usually don’t want to wait. (For most entrepreneurs, patience is not a virtue…it is a waste of time.) The corollary problem is that with all the stuff that Alex covers, my brain is usually up to about Mach 3 at 2AM…and heading toward Mach 4. There are only eight of these sessions, so eight lost nights of sleep is just part of the investment on what becomes a GREAT ROI.
- I was initially miffed that Alex spread the course out over 10 or 11 weeks. I wanted to take the course, learn it all, implement it all – and move on down the path of success with the incremental knowledge. However, once I saw how little of this stuff that I really knew – once I saw how intensive the course was – once I started all the steps required for implementation – well, Alex was right – spreading the course over so many weeks was a very good idea.
In those cases where I just couldn’t wait to learn about the next lesson, or a particular topic, Alex even gives you a way to cheat his system: He gives you, as a bonus, an MP3 player fully loaded with ALL of last year’s full course. So, you can be as Type A as you want to be.
Another downside is that Alex ONLY offers this course once per year – starting between Thanksgiving and Christmas and going until February. If you miss it, you have to wait another year before you can take it again.
Meeting Alex
Most all my business is over the Internet. I’ve got clients in virtually all fifty states and in over 40 countries, on six of the seven continents, worldwide. I am used to virtual business and business relationships. So, taking TSS that way was a natural.
However, Wife Janet and I had a chance to meet Alex in person at a convention nearly two years ago in Orlando (about two months after the end of TeleSeminar Secrets) and we enjoyed several relaxed hours of one on one time with him. Since then, we have been to his Teleseminar Secrets Reunion in San Fransisco and Alex has become a client of my own Virtual-Exec Services for his fast growing company.
One thing you gain from working with tens of thousands of people over three decades in business: the ability to read people and read the subtext between the lines. I am pleased to say that I found Alex to be the same authentic and genuine guy in person as he is on the phone and the net.
My candid evaluation of Alex, the person, is that he is totally ethical and trustworthy. Regrettably, these are NOT traits that I have found very often during three decades in business. But with Alex, I would completely trust his handshake. Janet would, too.
Is TeleSeminar Secrets Really Worth The Cost?
Bottom line: It’s a great value proposition. We are talking about 4-6 hours each training night. Two hours of training – and two to four hours of Q/A – with Alex answering the questions posed by the students.
I can be a very impatient fellow – but I never found any of Alex’s training sessions to be tedious, boring or a waste of time. Just the opposite, the epiphanies gained during each session had me busily taking notes into a Word document during the entire 4-6 hours.
On top of the 4-6 hours on Monday, you also get a two hour FAQ group call on Fridays to answer even more questions – especially for the newbies. The FAQ calls are not with Alex – but with someone who has taken the course a multitude of times and applied the teachings in their own business.
In addition to the class time, Alex includes a dozen or more bonus gifts – including a pre-loaded MP3 player with last year’s full course plus training videos.
My conclusions on value and worth:
- Absolutely the best seminar / continuing education money I’ve ever spent – not counting my Presidential MBA from Pepperdine.
- With Alex’s guarantee, you can attend half the course and still get back all of your money if it doesn’t exceed your expectations.
- You get an MP3 player with last year’s complete course on it. You could theoretically, and unethically, consume the entire course, send back the MP3 player and ask for a refund. I am sure Alex gets ripped off by the unethical student occasionally. Most everyone in any business does from time to time. But the connection you build with the group and the process and with Alex himself – will usually convince all but the most unethical that it is a fantastic value proposition – worth every dollar and minute invested.
- In spite of that, if for whatever reason, you can’t “get it”, you can’t keep up, or your find it is TOO overwhelming with too much content, then ask for the refund – up to half way through the course.
- Even if you are on the fence, jump over it in this case and start the course. With the payment plan, it doesn’t even cost that much to taste test it.
- You get recordings and transcripts of every teleseminar and recordings of every Q/A session so you can download and listen to them on your computer or MP3 player for as many decades as you want.
- The great thing: as an alumnus, you get to attend every subsequent year’s TSS for ZERO cost. There is so much content, there is so much to learn and implement, that it may take two or three times to learn just a majority of the sales and marketing insights that you can gain from taking Alex’s course.
My wife Janet and I will be repeating the entire course again this year – our THIRD time through it. Even with all the valuable content we got out of TSS our first and second time through, we know we missed a ton – and we hope to gain at least half a ton more this time through.
Being “an alumnus for life,” we get to keep taking the course as many times as we want for no charge.
Take TeleSeminar Secrets By Alex Mandossian…IF…
- If you need to understand Internet sales and marketing, take TSS.
- If you want to learn new ways to re-purpose and sell your existing content, take TSS.
- If you want to learn the power of audio – and how to integrate it into your own sales pitch, take TSS.
- If you are just starting any kind of company, and don’t have any background in marketing and sales, take TSS
- If you want to start your own company, but don’t even know what kind of business to start, take TSS.
- If you are an author, take TSS.
- And, of course, if you want to actually use teleseminars in your business, take TSS.
Warning
Now – Or A Whole Year From Now?
Sound intriguing? Sound like sales and marketing training you and your new company could benefit from?
Judge for yourself. The next course starts December 7, 2009. This will be the seventh time this 8 module course has been offered – so it is well tuned and flows well.
If you miss this opportunity, you will have to wait a whole year before you can consider the course again. My intuition is that your incremental sales during that delayed year would have not only paid for the course – but you will have missed a GREAT ROI from your increased sales.
Can you afford NOT to take TeleSeminar Secrets right now?
Invest In Yourself
Ongoing, incremental improvements in yourself and in your company are some of the key differentiators between success and failure.
Continuing education in a course like TeleSeminar Secrets is a GREAT way to gain tremendous incremental improvement.
If ANY of these are true, signing up for TSS should be a no-brainer decision. If more than one of these is true – sign up right this minute so you don’t risk being locked out. Time is running out. Empty slots are running out.
JUST CLICK HERE OR ON ANY BANNER TO GET MORE INFORMATION AND SIGN UP BEFORE IT IS SOLD OUT!
As I mentioned, I have established a highly regarded, international reputation working with entrepreneurs and start up companies for decades. In all that time, this is the first endorsement I’ve made like this for ANY company. But I am willing to stake my personal reputation that you will find every word, every recommendation, that I’ve made on this page to be 100% true.
Best wishes for stellar success,
Robert Lee Goodman, MBA
Ceo & Chief ImpleMENTOR
Ceo Resource LLC
www.Virtual-Exec.com
PS: If you need help with your own implementation steps from all you learn from Alex, please email me so that we can discuss your needs.
PPS: Just to be totally transparent, note that if you click on ANY BANNER, I get paid an affiliate commission. Also know, this review would be written exactly the same whether I was paid or not. If you found the review worthwhile, click the above links. If you didn’t find this review helpful, I still strongly urge you to sign up with Alex. Please click here if you prefer that I receive zero compensation. Either way, do yourself a BIG favor – try his first four sessions absolutely risk-free.
PPPS: Contact me today to discuss how my mentoring and Virtual Executive services can help you and your company better succeed.