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.