The secrets of being cool to people so they’ll be cool back to you (even if they’re trying to screw you over).
On today’s episode Russell talks about how being a nice guy and always treating people with respect has helped him avoid getting sued. He also talks about why you shouldn’t burn bridges because you don’t know what the future holds.
Here are some interesting things to listen for on this episode:
So listen below to find out why nice guys don’t necessarily finish last.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and I am driving home in the freezing cold but I want to welcome you to Marketing in Your Car.
Typically, I do these things on my way into the office but today, I'm driving home and just had a random thought to share with you guys today. Hopefully it will help you all a little bit on stuff you're working on. Notice I said ya'll. I've been hanging out with too many friends from Georgia, from Texas, and they're getting me to say words like ya'll. Anyway, I apologize about that.
I don't know how this is going to relate to any of you guys but hopefully for the right person, for someone, this message is a big thing. I had a friend. I'm not going to tell any names or anything because it's not important but he had a partner in a project. The project went sour. Because of that, he locked the partner out, thinking whatever, but he changed passwords and locked this partner out of his business.
That was three years ago or so. I just saw him recently and asked how things were going. He said that basically for the last three years, he's been in a lawsuit and almost on the brink of bankruptcy and lost everything, and all that. I was kind of telling the guys at work with me about that, and just we were talking about how lucky we've been that we haven't had anything like that happen yet.
I was thinking, “Why hasn't something like that happened to me before in the past?” and things like that. One of the guys who works with me said, he just made a comment, he said, “If you think about it, the reason is you just always treat people good, Russell. You don't screw people over. If something bad happens, you're the first one to walk away and let it be.”
I thought about that little. I thought, “You know, it's interesting, but it really is true.” I told partners this in the past. I don’t think they believe me at first but it's true. People always want a contract. I'm like, the only times I've ever been screwed over in business is when people, every time, it's been by the person who wanted a contract. It's really weird.
I don't know what it is. Mostly, I just work with a handshake. I always tell people, “Look, this is the deal. We're going to work together. If something bad happens, I'm just going to walk away from it because I don't really care. I’ll just give it all back to you.” People don't really believe me.
That actually happened earlier this year. We had a project that when all was said and done, we invested about $50,000 in it, never could get this thing to work, and I just gave it back to the person and said, “You know what? I've tried all I can do. I spent a lot of money. Hopefully this helps you. I'm just going to give the whole thing back to you.”
It was interesting because, this may be a bad example, but the person we were working with got all upset at me. I said, “Why are you upset?” She was like, “No, we were supposed to be partners.” I said, “I know, but we spent $50,000, I redid your site and your sales funnel, everything, and I just can't get it to really work so I'm going to give it back to you as a gift.”
It was funny because she kept trying to attack me like I was trying to do something bad to her. I'm like, “No, I'm really just giving this back to you. There's no strings attached. I'm not going to charge you any money. I'm going to pay all the taxes, the accountants to close out the books. I'll just cover it. I'm just giving it back to you.”
I don't think she ever believed me. I was trying to transfer the site over and she's getting all upset. When I'm trying to transfer the site back over, I'm like, “No, you don't understand, my entire team is here to help you. We're trying to give this back to you and help you.” I think it was so backwards because most people, they think that people always assume you're trying to screw them over.
I try to be the opposite way. I'm like, “I'm just going to, worst case scenario, I’ll just give everything back to you and hopefully left you off in a lot better place than I met you.” I think that all of us need to think about that more, especially if we have partners. I know in the internet business, we always have loose partnerships we throw around all the time.
I look back over the years, people, in fact recently, it's kind of funny with Click Funnels, we had a partner who was involved and the person totally, totally screwed me over. It was funny because I remember when I got the Skype message, or I can't remember if it was Skype or Voxer, the person basically told me, “Hey man, sorry,” it wasn't this many words, but it almost was.
It was, “Hey, I'm totally screwing you over, sorry, but this is just how it is.” I was like, “Huh.” I remember being so upset and so angry, wanting to go and backlash, and yell at the person, and do what my other friend had done, lock this person out of everything but I thought, “You know what? I'm just going to let it be.”
I said, “Alright, that sucks but whatever,” and just ignored it, and left it as it was, and kept going on with my day. Three weeks later, the person came back, apologized, and ended up becoming our number one affiliate by far, and also introduced us to about 20 other people. I would say indirectly from that relationship, we've brought in almost a million dollars and over this year, it will probably be two to three million dollars.
If I would have blown up and yelled at that person when they screwed me over, none of that money or income or anything would have been there. I'm just a big believer, not that you need to let people screw you over but if they do, don't burn that bridge because you never know when you're going to need it again. I have a lot of people in the past that bad things have happened.
I'm not going to say I'm perfect. I've had times where I've screwed up and I've burnt bridges but the ones that I haven't, multiple times, they've come back and turned into huge things later on. Again, I don't know if or who this is going to help but if you've got partners, if you're working with people, give them the benefit of the doubt.
If something bad happens, be forgiving. Let them off the hook. Do whatever you can, because I tell you what, having somebody burn you and you walk away from is way better than the opposite where you spend the next three years in court, and issues and headaches, and all sorts of problems that come from it. Like I said, I would say 50% of the time that someone has done something bad to me and I didn't do much, and I just let it roll off, because that's how I approached it, later on, it came back tenfold to me.
Just some thoughts, I hope that helps someone who is out there listening. Again, I'm not saying I'm perfect. I've screwed up. I've offended people more times than I ever want to admit but I hope just that thought, I'm hoping that one of you guys, someone out there listening to this who has a decision right now is going to make the right decision and just make your life and the other person's life a million times better.
I promise it will come back to you in a positive way. That's what I got. I'm at home and I'm going to go play with the kids, have some fun. I appreciate you guys, and thanks for listening.
How we did $23,000 dollars in sales in front of a live audience.
On this episode Russell talks about how when you do a live event you need to do cool stuff because people love it. He talks about a live webinar he did yesterday and why it was so awesome.
Here are some of the fun things you will hear in this episode:
So listen below to find out how Russell’s live webinar went during his live event.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and I want to welcome you to Marketing in Your Car.
Alright everyone, I'm sure you've been on pins and needles since yesterday's podcast, wondering what happened. Did Russell do the live webinar? Did it convert? Were there technical problems? What happened? Anyway, I'm going to tell you guys the story.
We started the event yesterday. It was really cool. It's funny, when I used to do my events back in the day, I would try to jam in every single thing I knew for two or three days, and people would get so overwhelmed, they wouldn't do anything. This event has been very focused on just one thing and digging really deep into it, and not just having training, training, training but trying to pull in other cool things outside of that to help facilitate, teach, and coach.
It's been a fun process. We started out the day with me on stage talking about stuff. I didn't go in a lot of depth about the perfect webinar script because everyone had seen that but I went in depth about how to create the offer, how to do the content section, and things like that. We dug really deep there.
They had some exercises which people got to create their offer, things like that, and then create their content pieces, the one thing in the three secrets. That was cool. Then after that, I had Liz Benny who is one of our webinar case studies who is crushing her webinar right now, she came on stage and we brought a couch up, and I just did a Q&A with her and asked her questions about her webinar.
People loved that. It was so cool. We spent almost an hour of her talking about it and her experience, the ups and the downs, and all the stuff that happened. I think it gave people a lot of hope and faith as they've been struggling and trying to get theirs done which was cool.
Then after that, I did a presentation on how to pitch because a lot of people can follow the script well but then they can't get up and actually present it well, so I'm teaching how to do tonality and voice inflections, and trial closes, and all these important things. Then we went to lunch. While everyone was at lunch, I got my laptop set up and we hard lined it into the event center.
I was so scared that the internet was going to crash or a million different problems. I had a webinar. We had about 1200 people registered for it. It was starting at two o'clock mountain time. We were going through it and I told everyone at two o'clock, come into the room. You got to be quiet because I'm starting live.
If you guys want, you can just watch me and learn from the way, seeing me actually do it. They're all coming in. We're getting ready. I was going to start 10 minutes early and get on there and start welcoming people, but 10 minutes early, I did one quick run through of my slides and it turns out none of my video files of my slides were working.
I'm scrambling, trying to get it to work, trying to get it to work and none of them were working. We had one minute before the webinar was supposed to start and they’re still not working. I'm like, “Oh man.” I throw out all the slides. I deleted all the slides of the video stuff, found the video files, and it was crazy.
Then it's top of the hour, supposed to be starting. I told everyone, “Okay, everyone, quiet, time to calm down.” I think we had 200 people or so on at the time, “Alright guys, here we go.” I clicked start and clicked record, and started going through the presentation. At first, it was super nerve-wracking because literally, there were 80 people in our event that sat in watching me.
I'm sitting there on a laptop, standing up in the room in front of the laptop giving this presentation. It was super awkward. I was telling people afterward, “I felt like I was on a date with a girl, and I just took her home and was going to kiss her for the first time at the doorstep, and her parents are standing out there watching me, just staring at me as I'm doing it.” That's what it felt like.
How do you do this? How do you perform under this kind of pressure? After about 10 or 15 minutes, I just got in the zone and totally forgot about everything else, did the webinar presentation, did the pitch, and it ended up going for an hour and 15 minutes, the whole thing.
When it got done, I did my call to actions. Then I muted myself. When I muted myself, I popped out of state. I turned around and the entire room was standing and gave me a huge standing ovation. They kept clapping for two or three minutes. I literally fell exhausted down onto the couch. I was like, “Oh.”
They sat there clapping and clapping. Then I was like, “Alright guys, let's take a 20 or 30, or an hour long, I don't know, let's just take a break for awhile. I'm beat.” We split up. It was so cool. I got so much good feedback afterwards, people that came back and they were just like, “Wow, I've been on webinars. I've tried listening to you teach about it but seeing it actually live and seeing how you do it, seeing all that kind of stuff took it to a whole new level and changed the whole paradigm.”
It was cool. I felt good about it. I think they all loved it. When all was said and done, we did $23,000 in sales from that webinar. That was my other big fear, “What if nobody buys and I look like I don't know what I'm talking about in front of everyone?” I was grateful I did $23,000 in sales, and then from that process, we had 140, from the little campaign, we had 140 people join Click Funnels, the trial.
Those all re-bill at another $14,000 a month recurring which is awesome. When all was said and done, it was a smashing success. It worked. After that, I did another presentation where I went back through my slides and walked everyone through some of the core things that I did that I wanted to make sure they didn't miss because there's some really cool ninja stuff that we're doing. That was fun.
Then we brought up Natasha Hazlett who is another one of our people who is just crushing it with webinars and live events, and had her tell her whole story about what she's doing and how she's doing it. People loved that as well. After that, I was beat. I said, “Everyone, I had another session planned but let's just go home and get a nap,” so we broke and everyone went out and networked, and had a good time.
The day was exciting. It was awesome. We had a fun time. That was yesterday. I'm driving in for today now. Today's event, we are talking about webinar registration process which is cool. I'm going to be showing some really cool things that we're doing I think people are going to love. That's going to be first.
Then I have a guy named Jason O'Neill who did his very first webinar last week and he crushed it. He made seven or eight sales and he was just going crazy, how excited he was. He's going to share his whole thing which is going to be fun, then we have a guy named Mike Neilson who Mike has been driving all the traffic for Liz's webinar.
He's the Facebook webinar registration ninja. He's going to show his whole process which is going to be cool. After lunch, I have three or four things I think we could go. I'm not sure where we're going to go though. We will see.
One thing we're going to do for sure is break things into accountability groups and get everyone accountability partners, stuff like that. That's what's been happening. For those of you who aren't in Boise, I just wanted to keep you in the loop on what's going down. For those who in the future are going to come to Boise, you got to come. This is like no other. We don't do what everyone else is doing. We go and take it to another level to try to inspire, excite, and to show you what's possible.
It was a lot of fun. For those of you who are here who went through the process, I appreciate you guys, and those who weren't, if you become an Ignite or Inner Circle member, we'll have all the recordings in the member's area for you guys. That's about it for today. My brain is so fried, you guys, I don't have too much more value to give other than if you're doing live events, do cool stuff because people love it.
That's about it, you guys. I appreciate you all. I will report back in the next few days on what else happens through the rest of the group. We have the second day of our Ignite event today, and then tomorrow and Thursday are our Inner Circle mastermind meetings. That's about it. I’ll talk to you soon.
The keys to a winning offer, and a few other cool things.
On today’s episode Russell talks about the event he has going on today with his Inner Circle and Ignite members.He also tells his story of his first experiences selling to large groups of people and what he learned.
Here are some of the cool things you will hear in this episode:
So listen below to find out how to be more prolific and specific.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson. It's six in the morning. It's snowing outside. I want to welcome you guys to an awesome Marketing in Your Car.
Hey everyone, so I hope that you are listening to this at a time that's warm and a normal hour because right now, I'm recording this at a not normal hour and it's snowing outside, and it's freezing but I'm here because today, we have our event. I'm excited. Those who have been following us for any amount of time, if you know, we have an Inner Circle mastermind group and we have an Ignite coaching program.
Three times a year, we get together and hang out, and we talk about cool stuff, and today is that day. I was up late working on stuff getting everything ready, and up early because I was nervous and excited, and had a chance to meet a bunch of our students I've been working with for six to eight months or so that I've never met face-to-face. That always makes me excited.
I'm anxious, nervous, and excited and everything all wrapped into one. It's going to be a ton of fun. I'm driving right now to the event center where we're going to be at, and I'm praying that I don't slide off the road and die because it's really icy out here and wet. This podcast could also be my last will and testament if I do. If I do, my wife gets everything and my kids. They're awesome.
I want to talk to you guys today about a couple of random things more so than anything because there's some stuff that's been on my mind that I think is pretty cool. I don't have any other format to share stuff like that, so here you are. You get to hear it. First thing I want to talk about was for yourself, I know all of us in our businesses focus on growing and what we can do, all that kind of stuff but my first question for you is what are you guys giving back.
I know some people who listen to this give back a ton, and some people don't do anything. I had a really cool experience yesterday. There's a little handicapped boy who goes to church with me. I talked about him on other podcasts. His name is Jesse, just one of the neatest people in the world.
He gets $20 a week from the state for food and for things like that to survive. Sunday, we took him to church. Everybody takes turns picking him up and taking him. We took him on Sunday. We got there, and as soon as we sat down in the seat, he pulls his wallet out of his thing and gets out his tithing, which is 10%, right?
Of his $20, he pulls out two dollars. Then in our church, there are a couple of other funds. There's one that's called a fast offering fund which is money that goes towards people who are less fortunate, helps feed them, and things like that. Then he puts five dollars into the fast offering fund, which was one fourth of the money that he gets to survive each week.
Then there's a missionary fund which helps missionaries to support themselves. He put two dollars in the missionary fund. What's that, five, six, seven, eight, nine, so almost 50% of his income, he gave back. He was so excited to do it. You should have seen him.
He was jumping around, so excited and so grateful that he had a chance to give to those who are less fortunate than him. This guy makes $20 a week. That's it. He struggles to walk and talk, and all these types of things. I just look at how many excuses that a lot of us have, especially as your business grows.
I still complain about government because they're a bunch of punks and they’re taking half my money. That's always frustrating. I try never to complain about church because we pay 10% of our income to the church. That number gets bigger and bigger and bigger. I hear people who struggle about that, and whine and complain. It's not fair, that's my money, things like that.
It drives me crazy. I look at someone like Jesse who literally gives everything, 100% almost of what he has. He keeps the last 60% so he can buy his food for the week but everything else, he's giving for the Lord. I thought that was a really neat thing.
I look at some of my friends in this business. One of them that always inspires me is Stu McLaren and his wife Amy. His whole mission of his business is not to make a ton of money. It's to be able to serve people and help people. They've built this charity out in Kenya. We had a chance to go out to Kenya a couple of years ago with them.
It's just inspiring to see people who are using what they're doing to help others as opposed to just helping themselves all the time. Anyway, that is lesson number one for you all today. Some other stuff, here's another one I was thinking about. The workshop today is called “The Perfect Webinar.” It's funny, I've been doing some version of webinars or teleseminars for over 10 years now.
I remember when I first started doing them, I would go and I remember the very first one. I was actually at an Armand Morin seminar. I signed up. I had $2000 I think for the seminar. I was so excited, my first internet marketing seminar. I was going to go meet internet marketing people which I was really excited about.
I'm at this event and I'm learning all this stuff. The first speaker gets up and he starts speaking, and at the end of his presentation, he closes. He tells people to run at the back of the room and go buy his thing. I look and I see people running to the back of the room. I had never seen that before.
I'm doing the math. I think he was selling a $2000 package. I'm doing that two, four, six, eight. I'm like, “That guy made $40,000 right there.” The next speaker gets up and does the same thing. Boom, he's selling a $5000 package, five, 10, 15, 20, “Dang, in an hour.”
The next speaker gets up. After three days of watching this, shy little Russell who didn't dare to talk to anyone, who loved my internet business so I could hide behind the computer was like, “I got to learn how to do what these guys are doing because I want to be able to do that,” and started being on this quest, this 10 year quest to figure out how in the world to sell from stage.
I remember the first couple of times, I was so embarrassed. I would try to mimic what people were doing. I go and do my pitch, and crickets at the end. Nobody would budge. I would be standing there at the front, and it would be so awkward. I literally would go up to my hotel room and shut the door, and just hide in there because I would be so embarrassed.
I seriously, there would be events where I would spend three days at the event hiding in the hotel room because my stage pitch bombed and I was too embarrassed to see the promoters or other attendees, or anyone. I would just be embarrassed and hide up there. This is me 10 years ago. This would give you guys comfort for those of you guys who are nervous to do this kind of thing. I was scared out of my wits.
I kept seeing people do it. I'm like, “Oh, I got to figure this out. They can’t be that much smarter than me,” so I started studying. I went through 10 or 12 different public speaking courses. I went to Dan Kennedy's and Bill Glazer's, and Armand Morin's, and on and on. Each time, I learned little pieces and little nuggets that would get me closer and closer to having the perfect webinar.
Anyway, I kept doing that for over 10 years now, just getting that webinar better and better. A little while ago, I put together a template for what I call the perfect webinar. I was putting together this template called “The Perfect Webinar.” It was basically all the pieces I had learned, I tried to sketch them out in one cool spot.
I think in the future, I'm just going to give that out. I think I'll do a free plus shipping on it. In the future, if you go to I think I own PerfectWebinar.com or ThePerfectWebinar.com, I'm not sure. It's not there today but in the future it will be there and I’ll give away the template for free. It's basically all these pieces put together to a really cool template that you can use, and you plug in the pieces.
After I built that, the first presentation I did was one called “High Ticket Secrets,” and I went and created the whole thing and launched it. We did 70 or 80 grand from the webinar. I was like, “That's not too bad.” Then of course, stupid Russell, when things work, I forget about them sometimes and don't do them.
Then I had some coaching clients who came through who I knew for what they were doing and wanting something, “You guys need this. You need to use the webinar script.” I gave them the script, trained them, and coached them on it. Person after person we gave it to, boom, knocked it out of the park.
It just kept happening over and over again. I was like, “This thing is really good. This is one of the best little pieces of paper I've ever put together.” Then about three or four months ago, I had to do a webinar. We had actually, it's a funny backstory but I'll share it with you guys because you are Marketing in Your Car fans and you guys are hanging out with me all the time.
Nobody else really knows this but when we launched Click Funnels initially, it was a smashing failure. You thought I was going to say smashing success. No, we launched it. It shocked me how few people signed up. We got people in there but my goal was at least 10,000 people.
I think from the entire launch, we got about 1000. I was like, “Are you kidding me?” I was sick to my stomach, spend a million dollars on a program, you want it to work. We were all frustrated. Then a month later, Mike Filsaime is like, “I want you to come to my event and you guys sell Click Funnels.”
I was like, “Right now, Click Funnels is a dollar, a free trial. How am I going to sell it? We got to package this thing up.” Two days before the event, literally, I'm like, “Okay, I got to start on a presentation,” so pulled out the perfect webinar script, and I just followed it to a T. I was like, “You know what? This is 10 years of work. I'm too tired and too worn out to try to reinvent this thing.”
I just took “The Perfect Webinar,” spent two days going through and plugging in the PowerPoint slides, following my script to a T. Two days later, I got to San Diego for Filsaime's event, stepped on stage, never gave this presentation before, super nervous, got up there and did it, and closed 34% of the room.
I was like, “Dang, I've never closed 34% of the room before.” We went home, we started doing webinars, and it's funny, we did the first webinar on a Thursday morning and we did $30,000 in sales. I thought, “That's not too bad but I thought we'd do better.” I had another webinar four hours later.
I went through all the questions that people had asked me during the webinar. I was like, “Okay, these are all the sticking points that I'm not explaining things well enough,” so I went back and we tweaked things, tweaked things, and got it better and better. Then four hours later, did the webinar again, same size audience, same everything, almost identical demographic, and did $120,000 in sales.
I was like, “Dang, this keeps working better and better.” I did that webinar four or five times, and wound up doing I think about a million dollars the first three weeks doing that webinar, and then what was cool was Dan Kennedy's company, GKIC, asked me to come speak at their event so I went out there and did it, the same presentation. We closed 49% of the room, almost 50%, one more dude and I would have tipped it over and had half the room buy.
Anyway, I was so proud. I couldn't believe that worked. I came back and said, “You know what? This whole perfect webinar idea, we need to focus more on it.” That's what's happening in the next two days here. Everyone in my high end coaching program is coming in for two days. We're going to build out perfect webinars.
50% is the script and 50% is the sequence. Today, we're going to be doing script, and tomorrow, we're doing sequencing. What's cool is that at this event, this is what I'm most nervous about is I'm going to go out on stage right after lunchtime and I have about 900 people registered for a webinar today. I'm going to sit up on stage live in front of everyone and do the webinar with a whole audience listening in.
I'm either going to bomb and make no money or I'm going to crush it and make as much money in front of everybody. Anyway, I'm nervous but you guys are going to see what I'm saying. I'm going to have 100 people in my audience here in Boise listening and watching me, and I'm going to stand up on stage for 90 minutes and do my pitch.
Hopefully, if I don't screw it up, I'll just close a ton of people. Anyway, it's going to be super fun. I'm nervous. I'm nervous because half the time, hotel internet doesn't even work so people might not even be able to hear the presentation. There are so many things that could go wrong but if it goes right, it's going to be really, really cool.
We're going to try it out. Typically, when I do things, I like hedging my bets. When I do things that can make me look stupid, I do them in private so that if a webinar bombs, nobody knows except for me but this time, there's everyone here so what can you do? It's going to be fun. We'll have a good time with it, right?
Hopefully these guys will be forgiving if I screw it up, but if I do it correctly and execute it right, I think it will be a good learning opportunity to have them see how I do it because it's so much more than just watching a webinar to get it. There's a lot about just the way you present and the way you pitch live. It's going to be fun.
The last core thing, I'm almost to the event center which is cool. I'm early. I'm never early to these kind of things. My wife would be very proud of me right now. The last thing, as I was going through my presentation last night, building my presentation for today, I've had a lot of people who have gone through “The Perfect Webinar” script and given it back to me.
The advice I'm about to share with you is important for perfect webinars, for video sales letters, for any kind of selling that you're going to do but they give it to me and they're like, “Here's my thing. I go through it, I watch it.” The difference between a webinar that makes you $1000 and one that makes you a million dollars is not much. It's a very fine line that gets you from one spot to the other.
The thing that I think pushes you over the edge are two things. It's being prolific and being specific. Let me elaborate on it. The first one is being prolific. This is one that's hard to teach. How do you become prolific? You're prolific or you're not. You got to think about that. How do you become prolific?
With this one guy I was critiquing, he had this big buildup about what his big secret thing was. The secret was in the back end. I'm like, “Man, everyone's secret is the back end. That's not a unique thing.” Your big reveal can still be the back end but you got to call it something different.
Being prolific is 90% how you name things. It can still be the exact same thing as everyone else is doing but just the naming it, what do you call it? If you call it the back end and everyone else calls it the back end, it's no longer exciting. I was telling him because the thing he was selling was very similar to something I was selling that we call the black box funnel.
I was like, “What you're doing and what I'm doing are very similar.” I said, “You called yours the back end. I called mine the black box funnel. Which one sounds more prolific?” The black box funnel, “Whoa, what is that?” You're very interesting and you got to figure that thing out. You can't just answer it in your head.
You can't be like, “Oh, it's a back end sales funnel. I've listened to 30 webinars and they talk about this.” That's the first piece is being prolific. The second piece is being specific. In this guy's presentation, he kept coming back to, “Oh yeah, and then you can do Google Ads or Facebook. You can do five different kinds of back ends. There's this or that, different things. There are a whole bunch of things you can do.”
That's the opposite of sales. What sales is, “This is the exact specific thing you have to do to be successful. If you deviate from this one iota, you will fail.” It sounds like I'm going over the edge but that's what sells, being very, very specific. Again, if you look at the Black Box Funnel, I think the video as of right now is still there if you go to BlackBoxFunnel.com, you'll see it.
I have a video there that sells. It's one of our front ends for our coaching program, and I'm very, very specific, “This is how you do it. This is what the first page has to look like. The second page has to look like this. This is how the ad has to look like.” I'm very specific. I tell them things in absolutes.
If you guys watch Star Wars where they say that only Siths deal in absolutes or whatever, it's very, very true. You have to be very specific and absolute. It can't be like, “Oh, there's a bunch of ways to do this.” It has to be there's only one path to success, this is what it is, do not deviate from it because that's what people respect.
That's what gets them inspired and to want to give you money, that there's a specific path. You've got it. Nobody else does. Even if there are other paths, you don’t tell them about it. You tell them about the path, the specific one that you want them to go on, and that's it.
For example, this whole perfect webinar thing, this is the only path. You notice that I'm very, very specific. If you look at the way we're selling this and teaching it, these are the slides, this is the order, do not deviate from it or you're going to screw it up, very, very specific. I think it's prolific too but we'll leave that.
We'll find out when this offer goes live and see how it works. That's the key, guys. When you're making any kind of content or sales presentation, whatever, always think in your head over and over and over again, prolific and specific, prolific and specific. Those are the keys. You can't be un-prolific and give people tons of options.
If you do, you're never going to be successful. This is a long podcast, guys. We're at almost 18 minutes but I'm at the event center. I'm going to go in and get things unpacked, get things rocking and rolling. I appreciate you guys listening. I hope you enjoyed this.
If you're not in our inner circle yet, what are you waiting for? Come on, now. There's nobody that gives as much as I do. We not only do events three times a year, you also get me live on Voxer, which Voxer is like a walkie-talkie coaching program through the phone, which means you can literally walkie-talkie me.
I have some guys in our inner circle that walkie-talkie me three or four times a day asking me questions. There's no one that gives as much as I do because there's no one that cares as much as I do. I care about you guys, so if you're not in our inner circle or our Ignite coaching program yet, it's time to do it. What are you waiting for?
Just go to Ignite.DotComSecrets.com. You can apply there and you can be hanging out with me at the next event. I appreciate you and I’ll talk to you soon.
The REAL way to scale a business from $0 to $10 million dollars a year.
On today’s episode Russell talks about why you need to set realistic expectations for your first webinar and be willing to make changes to create a masterpiece.
Here are some cool things to listen for in this episode:
So listen below to find out how to set realistic expectations to be able to achieve your goals.
---Transcript---
Hey everybody! Good morning! It’s raining here in Boise, Idaho, and I want to welcome you to episode 101 of Marketing In Your Car.
All right everyone, so what do you guys think about the new theme song, huh? Huh? Do you like it? So yes, as I told you in the last episode that’s what delayed me from recording any episodes for like a month.
So all I did was I went to Audio Jungle, found a sweet audio track, then went to VoiceJockeys.com, paid someone $60 to say that and boom! I got a jingle!
Anyway, it’s not quite as professional as the last one, but it’s also not quite as 1980s. So anyway, I’m in the office right now and I’m super excited for today, getting everything prepared for my live event that’s happening next week.
We have our two-day workshop for all of our DotComSecrets Ignite members, and for two days we’ll be focusing on webinars, and webinar sales processes and scripting and traffic and everything tied to webinars, which is going to be awesome.
And then, the second two days, we have our High-end Mastermind Group for our Inner Circle members.
So it’s going to be a ton of fun and I’m excited, and today while I was kind of getting ready and preparing for this, I was thinking about like what I should talk about on the podcast. There was one kind of theme that I’ve noticed in the last week or the last couple weeks that I want to address.
In our coaching group we have a lot of people doing webinars now, because I think webinars are one of the easiest ways to get started, to have an offer that you can break even on traffic or make a profit, a bunch of other things.
And the problem is that… Well, not the problem. The good part is we had -- I think this week we had eight or nine of our students who did their very first webinars, which was awesome and it was fun to see.
It was funny because some people finished the webinar with like… Anyway, every time they were finished, they would all Vox to me. Vox is like my communication channel with my coaching students.
So we’ve got Vox on the phone. They can Vox me. It’s kind of like a walkie-talkie, and they can Vox me any time they want throughout the day. And so, basically, they would Vox me after the webinar, and say, “Hey! This is what happened, and this what happened…” You know, they’d just kind of tell me, and about half of them had such a good attitude. They said:
“Wow, Russell, I did the webinar! I learned the script and I practiced it. Nobody bought, but I did it. And people showed up and people loved it, I good feed back, and they were excited.”
And they’re like, “Man, I’m so excited! I’m going to make some tweaks and changes, and then do it again and just keep getting better and better at it, and start making some sales in the future,” and bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, and those guys are like, “yes!”
That’s the right attitude, you know, like the very first time you do your webinar, your goal is not to make a million dollars. Your goal is to do your first webinar, right?
To practice the pitch, to get some feedback, to see what happens, to see how you feel in front of an audience, to see if people respond to the offer, all those types of things that you do the first time you’re doing one -- doing one live.
Obviously, your goal is to make sales, but not to make a ton of sales. On the other side of it, we’ve got people who -- and it’s probably because I get excited.
I’d share numbers that we do with our webinars and people that other of our students have done and things like that, and so they’re expecting to make like a million dollars in one webinar on their very first one.
And so, the other half wrote me back and messaged me and were just like all depressed, and “oh nobody bought, and only 20 percent of the people actually showed up.” It reminded me of like Eeyore the donkey like, “Oh, nothing’s gonna work.”
[Laughter] you know, like that kind of an attitude, and I literally had to go Vox everyone, and like get them excited and say:
“Look, you have to understand like, you just opened a store. This is Day One, your very first time you ever pitched it. Like most people do not make money on their very first webinar pitch. Most people are going to practice it, and like it’s such a good thing just to do it because you learn so much stuff.”
You learn, you know, did the registration process work? Did the process to get them to attend the webinar work? Boom, boom, boom!
You look through every single aspect, every single piece, because there’s so many different variables, and from that you can really dial in and figure out what tweaks and changes you need to make, okay?
I was telling one of the people, when we did the Funnel Hacks webinar the first time, we did the webinar and I got tons of feedback and things like that, and so the first time, I remember the first day we did it, we did it twice that first day.
The first time I did it, we had a big show up, and we did $30,000, which may seem like a lot of money. For us it was based on the number of people who were on the webinar. It was really, really low, and I was like “ohh!”
I just felt really bad, but I looked at the comments and the feedback, and I thought about like how I felt during each section. And I had my second webinar; it was like four hours later.
During that four-hour period of time, I was tweaking slides and changing and just moving things as fast as I could because I knew the next webinar was coming.
So then, I’d figure out all the questions that people were asking me, and I went and I tweaked those and added them into the presentation and move things around.
Anyway, I tried to get as close as I could to what I thought was perfect, and the second one I did we did $120,000 with the same amount of people on it -- so four times as much money just by taking tweaks and changes.
And so, the big thing I wanted to kind of mention on this podcast, and I want you guys thinking about, is positioning your expectations right, and looking at this as kind of the fun process that it can and it should be.
You know, for me again, I’m looking at we create this thing you’re putting out there, and now my goal is not to -- like I remember one of the guys, he told me, he said, “My goal is to make 20 sales at $2,000 apiece.”
He wanted $40-grand off his first webinar, and I was saying, “Man, if you get one, that would be awesome; like that should be your goal.”
You know, typically the products were selling on a webinar from $500 to $1,000, and so what I tell people I say, “Look, what you need to do is invest. For your first webinar and traffic invest -- if it’s $1,000 product, invest $1,000; if it’s a $500, invest $500 -- and you’re goal should be to just break even.
Make one sale and see if you can do that. If you can break even, make one sale, then boom! You’ve got it! Like that’s the only thing you should be focusing on right now, is just breaking even on your ad spent from your first webinar.
So that’s the expectation, and then from that, now we get so much data. Like insane amounts of data come back to us as soon as you do your first webinar, where you make tweaks and changes, and just all this stuff that you can't do until you do your first one.
Yeah, so I guess my big thing is setting expectations. You know, not trying to make a million dollars on Day One. Everyone that comes into our High-end Coaching Program, we always ask them what they’re goals are.
And the people who come back and say, “You know, my goals, if I can get to $15,000 to $20,000 a month, I’m going to be really excited,” those ones I like working with, because that’s a realistic expectation for what they’re doing.
People who come in and say, “my goal is to make $3-million my first year,” it’s not a realistic expectation, and all it can do is just stress you out. People are like, “Why? I need to set high goals!”
Like, yeah, you do, but you also set a realistic goal. So say, you know, my goal is to be able to get point. Like for me when I got started, I was like I want to make a million dollars a year.
That was my goal, but I didn’t say it was this year; I said I want to make a million dollars a year. You know, for right now, if I can make $10,000 a month, that would change my life so that’s what I’m running for.
So having your -- what do they call them in Good to Great? The BHAGS, the big, harry, audacious goals -- like having some BHAGS, but not like tying those to time. Do you know what I mean?
Like don’t say, “I need this done this year: I’m going to make $3-million this year.” Just say my future goal is to make $3-million a year and a million dollars a year would be really, really cool. But right now, my goal I’m running towards is, you know, what is it? Is it $5,000 a month, $10,000, $20,000?
In my last or two events ago, we did this little exercise with people, asking them like how much money do they want to make, and everyone was giving me these crazy numbers.
And then I showed them how, if you were making $20,000 a month, that you literally could live in a $2-million dollar mansion, drive a $100,000 car, and go on vacation every single month on $20,000 a month.
Like $20,000 a month is a ton of money, you guys, and it’s realistic to live off of that, right? - to have an amazing lifestyle off it, and a million dollars a year is just not realistic. That’s not something that’s going to happen for most of us.
So first off, setting your expectations right, from like an income standpoint, again you goal should be: “I’m going to spend X amount of dollars in advertising. I want to break even.” That should be the only focus when you first doing your webinar. That’s it. Nothing else should matter.
And the second thing is looking at this as the process. This is not like you built a… like I remember when one guy said, “Man, I’ve spent so much time on this, and I’m frustrated because I spent so much time and effort on this.”
I was like, you don’t understand. Like this is not a one-time shot. You’re putting this time and effort in to create this thing. You’re creating a masterpiece, and after it’s done then you keep tweaking it.
It’s like the analogy of like you have a big stone, right? And you’re chiseling away and chiseling away, and you’ve done a lot of work, and it’s looking good, but you keep chiseling and keep chiseling.
I’ve done the Funnel Hacks webinar, man, probably 20 times in the last two months. You know, we did over a million dollars in sales, and from that, every single time I do it, I’ve changed the presentation.
In fact I made like, I don’t know, probably 15 different slide changes yesterday, after the last presentation I gave because every time I’m feeling different things, and I’m tweaking it.
I’m changing it based on response and based on questions I’m getting. And things that don’t feel comfortable when I’m doing the presentation, I’m tweaking and changing and adding things, and every time it gets better and better and better, and so looking at this is a work of art.
Mary Ellen Tribby, some of you guys may know her, I talked to her one time, and she was talking about how us Internet marketing people, how dumb most of us are, and she went into like two different companies.
She went into Wise Publishing, and then also into Agora Publishing, and took the division she was responsible for from like three or four million dollars a year to like $80-million a year within 18 months. And what she told me that I thought was really, really cool is she said:
“All you Internet marketing people are brilliant. You make the most amazing offers in the world. It’s just, but what you do is like the equivalent of creating a play, right?
“You hire the best actors and screen writers, and you put this whole thing together, and you spend, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars, perfecting this play.
“And then, you live in Boise, Idaho, and so you go and you advertise it. A bunch of people show up, and you do the play, and it’s a smashing success, rave reviews, everyone loves it -- and then the next day you pack up and you start writing your next script for your next play.”
And she’s like, “The difference between what you guys do and what I do is,” she says, “I take that play on the road. Okay, it was a smashing success, and I take it from Boise to Salt Lake to Chicago to L.A and I take it on the road.”
And that’s how you have to look at this whole thing as, is this webinar you’re doing, like right now you’re testing in your local area, right? This is how the process is working, and you’re testing and you’re tweaking.
You’re making these changes and then you take it on the road. Each time you get better and better and better, and that’s how you have to look at it, okay?
So anyway, that’s kind of my goal of this presentation, this podcast, whatever you want to call it. Because it’s been on my mind and it’s kind of a rant, but it’s because I think everyone needs to get their minds’ right.
You know, everyone talks about mindset and goals and I think they do it the wrong way. They’re talking about, you know, “set huge goals and work towards...”
And those things are good, but it’s more paralyzing a lot of times than setting the realistic goals and good expectations and understanding what you should be doing and how this process works, that’s really the key in the game plan.
So anyway, I’ve been at the office in the parking lot. For like five minutes now I’ve been ranting, so I’m going to jump in and get to work, have a fun day today.
You guys have a good one as well, and I’ll talk to you guys all again soon.
We made one BIG change last year to our business, that seemed VERY small, yet helped us to more then double sales from the year prior.
On this special 100th episode of Marketing In Your Car Russell talks about reminiscing on the previous year instead of making new years resolutions and the one big change he made in the last year.
Here are some of the cool things you will hear in today’s episode:
So listen below to find out how to attract your dream client to your business.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and I want to welcome you to our 100th episode of Marketing in Your Car.
Hey everyone, so it's been a little while since I've done a podcast and to tell you the real honest reason, it's because I promised you all that I would have a new jingle for the 100th episode and I haven't got one yet, so I've been delaying and delaying. Yesterday, I actually messaged on Facebook to my friends who yelled at me saying, “Dude, you don't have a podcast episode. Where are you at?”
I'm going to repent and I'm just going to do one. Hopefully today I’ll figure out a new song for you. I appreciate you guys listening, and actually caring so that's really cool. Today, I'm driving actually to work out. I'm not sure if I’ll get my thoughts done by the time I get there so this may be one of those ones where I pause it and come back after my workout.
It's the beginning of the year for me right now. If you're listening live, it's just after the new year. If you're listening to the recording or listening later, that's when I recorded this. It's interesting because it's been fun. I'm not a big New Year's resolution person but I am big at looking back at what happened over the last year and looking at the cool changes that happened in yourself as a person, as a business, and as a company, and all these different things, and then setting big, huge – I think the book Good to Great calls them BHAGs, big, hairy, audacious goals.
I'm totally a big believer in that, setting huge goals for the years as opposed to resolutions. I've got some big goals we've set out. I started thinking over the last year and I looked at this time last year, where our company was at versus where we are right now. I got to tell you, it's like night and day.
We had relaunched our little coaching program a little over a year ago. Some of you guys know, we at one time had 60 salespeople and we were selling coaching, $5000 packages of coaching, and it was a huge nightmare to be honest. I shut it down and for three years, we didn't sell coaching. We kept getting so many requests for it, we relaunched it last year.
At the beginning of the year, it was really hard. We were trying to sell $5000 but the kind of people that we were getting in weren't that high quality, or the leads that were coming in. It was hard. I remember about this time last year making a conscious decision, thinking, “You know what? If I want to keep doing this business,” because I was burned out, I was turned, and I didn't really like it, “I've got to change the customers we have.”
I started looking at that. To change our customers, I've got to change the bait that I'm using. I looked at the bait I was throwing out there to the world to attract people in and what was interesting is most of the stuff I was sending out, most of our offers and things like that were all business opportunity stuff. It was attracting someone who wanted to start a business.
The problem with that is you're going to get some really good people who want to start businesses but you also get every person on earth who just wants to make a quick buck. It attracts the total wrong type of person. I was putting out these offers and putting out these landing pages and ads, and everything that was attracting biz op people. That's what I was getting.
It was obviously the type of customer that we didn't really want to keep having, you know what I mean? That's kind of where last year had started. We made the conscious decision, we need to get a different type of customer so to do that, we need to create a different bait. If you've been following me for any amount of time, you know the bait we put out.
We created a book called The 108 Proven Split Test Winners, and we launched it for free plus shipping, no continuity, nothing tricky, just let's give this amazing product out to the world and see what happens. We did that. Over the last year, we sold over 10,000 copies of the book, which you may be saying, “Well, Russell, that's not a big deal. It was free plus shipping. You didn't make any money on it.”
But us putting that bait out there completely transformed our business. We started attracting the right people in our coaching program, and we figured out a couple of things. First off, our high ticket product back then was $5000. Over the last year, we've raised our prices where right now, our lowest ticket product that we sell through coaching is $10,000 and we're about to raise that again to $15,000.
By increasing the price, what happened was the people that we didn't want to work with, the people who were struggling to pay $5000, they stopped signing up. What was cool was that the right person, the people that my bait was attracting, $10,000 was not that big a deal to them. They were people who had businesses, who had websites, who wanted to take it to the next level.
Man, I tell you, for me, that customer is so much more refreshing, such a better type person to work with. Again, we made that our low end as $10,000 and we added a $25,000, and last year, we sold I don't know the exact numbers, but we sold 120 people at the $10,000 level and 30 something people at the $25,000 level.
That's like what, one and a half million bucks in coaching sales. We did that with two salespeople, which is insane. We did it without that much effort. It all comes back to we changed the bait that we used to attract. We got the customers we wanted and customers who could afford coaching, those who wanted coaching. It's been pretty awesome.
I'm at the gym right now. I'm pausing this recording. When I come back, we will finish this up. Hey everyone, I'm back. Just for the record, I want to say that I'm not one of the New Year's gym goers. I've been going consistently three times a week for the last five years. I didn't go to the real gym. I have a personal trainer so it's just me and him. I don't have to deal with the thousand other people.
I'm not sure where I left off but I know I was talking about how we consciously picked who we wanted our dream customer to be. The second step then was go and create bait that would attract our dream customer. If we look at our Dot Com Secrets Labs, what's interesting about it is anyone who is a business opportunity seeker, if they saw that, they wouldn't know what it was.
They wouldn't even pay the $10 shipping and handling because they don’t know what a split test is. They have no idea how that's going to help them but my dream customer, somebody who has a website, who is trying to figure out how to take it to the next level, the person I want to be working with, the people who I know can write a check for $10,000, $25,000, or $100,000, they see that and it's the right bait.
I've had people who have tried this strategy, the free plus shipping things and they're like, “I attract crappy people because the price point is so low.” That's the wrong way to look at it. That's not true that you attract the wrong kind of person because of the bait you put out there. If you put out there a how to get rich quick product, you're going to get how to get rich quick people.
If you put out there a product that's going to attract your dream customer, you'll get your dream customer. It's very important to really understand that, that the bait is key. After you've created the bait, then you got to come back. The bait has been created. Now where are my dream customers at? Where is the pond that they're at, trying to figure out where that's at.
For us, targeting Facebook was big. We had to find other places, trying to find where are our dream customers. For us, when we were finding business opportunity seekers, it was way easier because the world is your ocean. They're everywhere. When we started identifying the right people, it shrunk our world down.
The universe isn't as big for us to go after but it's a lot deeper. Like I said, we got 30 something people that pay us over $25,000 this year. We have two people that paid us for our million dollar program where they pay $100,000 up front and 10% of their profits. I can't go as wide. There aren't as many people to target but I can go way deeper with those people.
Then the fourth step in the formula, first is find out who your dream customer is, what kind of bait you're going to create. Find out where to find those people, what's the pond you're fishing out of. The fourth one is where are you taking these people. What's the goal? I think I used to know the answer to this in my business and I think I was wrong in my goal was, “I'm going to get them into my high end coaching programs.”
That's not what I'm looking for for number four here. The fourth is what's the result you want to get for somebody. I have a graph. I don't know if I mentioned, I'm launching my first real book. I'm going to try to get on the New York Times' bestseller list in March. You'll see this is chapter one. I talk about this concept.
The fourth step is the result. Where are we trying to take this person? I have a picture of a mountain and me taking somebody up to the top of the mountain. For me, I look at my clients. Where am I trying to take these guys? What's my goal with them? What's the result I'm trying to get them to?
For me, each person is different. I realize that for me to really know that, I need to spend time on the phone with everyone I coach. We shifted our coaching program away from this cookie cutter thing that we pushed everybody through, and they got certain sessions, and had different coaches and started looking at I'm really concerned about these people's result.
The reason I'm in business is not just to get money. It's to get results for people. We shifted our coaching program where when somebody comes in, they get an hour with me where I help steer the direction. Then I hand them off to my team to help implement what we talked about, but then they also have live access to me through Voxer where they can Voxer me as many times as they want every single day.
Some people totally abuse it, and other people don't take advantage of it at all, but now I have the ability to help people daily and help pushing them towards their goals, and moving them forward. I tell you what, the paradigm and the change in our business has been amazing. From a profit standpoint, from a happiness standpoint, for myself personally, from results for our clients, it's just been a million times better.
What I wanted to do this podcast about for you guys today is to start thinking about that. We're at the beginning of a new year. I remember last year, Tony Robbins put this video out there. It was really cool because he said, “You know, it's the beginning of a new year.” It may be January 1st or whatever but he says, “It's a new year and because of that, you guys have a chance. If you're not happy in a relationship, change it. If you're not happy with your job, change it. If you're not happy with your business, change it.”
I remember thinking that. I said, “You know what? I can. Why don't I make these changes that I want?” so we just started making the changes. For you guys, I want you thinking about that. It's the New Year's here. If you're listening to this later on, then today can be your new year but just figure out what do you want your business to look like.
Who are the customers you want to attract? If you don't think about those things first, then you're going to attract the people you don't want, I promise you that. After nine years of experience with not my dream customer versus the last year with my dream customer, it all just came back to knowing first off who I wanted to serve and second off, figuring out the right bait that's going to attract my dream client.
For you guys, use this as a gift for yourself. Look at your business. Make the changes you need. Figure out who your dream client is. Create bait to attract them. Even if it means lower profits at first because you're going into unknown waters, and for us, we had a drop. The first year, we had a huge drop but at the end of the year, November, we had the best month of my entire business career, including when I had over 100 employees.
December, which is typically the worst month ever, we did almost as much in December this year as we did all of last year as a company. It can change rapidly. There will be kind of a dip at first, and then it's going to change. I want to give you guys this gift to make that change, and do it.
I'm back home. I'm going to go get ready for the day today. I got to go attract some more of my dream clients but I appreciate you guys listening. Thanks so much for being a Marketing in Your Car podcast follower. I will talk to you guys again soon.