Some dude snapchatted me and check out what happened next…
On today’s episode Russell talks about how having proof of the results you give people will help you gain more sells. He also talks about a new event that will be launching a practice run with inner circle members in two weeks.
Here are some interesting things on today’s episode:
So listen below to find out how proof is power.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson, I think I’m going to change the name of our podcast to Marketing During Snow days. We just had Snow day number 6. I’m at the house in the snow and yes, I’m praying that the snow melts so our kids can go to school. Plus we’re supposed to have three trucks bringing all the stuff for the new Clickfunnels office today, and they all got stuck in the snow. So we’ve been delayed another day in getting our office finished and moved in which makes me want to cry a lot.
Some cool stuff, though, while we’re hanging out. Steven came over. He’s been reading the Expert Secrets book. He’s the first person to actually read the final, the almost final draft. I’m curious your thoughts so far.
Steven: it’s pretty much going to change everyone’s life again. You know how the first book changed your life. Get ready to change it again. You were seeing in color, it’s actually going to be more vibrant.
Russell: We’re going to color.
Steve: it’s really good though. This is fantastic. I sit next to Russell and I hear him say this stuff and now I’m actually reading it like, oh my gosh. Oh my gosh! I’m not going to sleep tonight.
Russell: I’m so excited. This book has got twice as many pictures or more. And yes, we’re working right now. So we’re launching a new event called the Funnel Hackathon event, or FHAT for short. Our FHAT event. We’re going to be doing a test run, is it two weeks? Or three weeks? In two weeks for some of our inner circle members and it’s going to be amazing. It’s basically going to be a three day workshop style, where everything in the Expert Secrets and Dotcom Secrets books, we plug in and actually build it with you live.
Kind of a good example, most people, this is how I kind of learned as well. I’ll go through and read a book or course and I’ll immerse and go through all this stuff, and I learn so much of it and I’m like, “I gotta go implement it. Oh wait, I gotta get back to the real world.” And then you never do. It’s interesting, I was talking to Brandon and Kaylin, who are inner circle members who are crushing it. And what he’s said, the way he did it, which was different. I was like, it’s different but I think it’s right. He said that they sat down with the book and the audio and everything. We listened to part and paused it. And then we stopped and figured out that piece. Then we push play again. Listen to it, stop, paused it and figured out that piece. What we did, after we were done with the book and training, we had our attractive character built out, we had our soap opera sequence, all the pieces were done.
Most people don’t do it that way. Most people learn it and try to go back and implement. They forgot stuff, or don’t have time now, all sorts of things. We wanted to make an experience where people leave their environment. Actually we wanted to make it even cooler, we wanted to make this a pilgrimage. The Muslims do a pilgrimage to Mecca once in their life. They go and do their thing.
When I was wrestling in high school, we used to do a pilgrimage, called it the pilgrimage to Iowa, because Dan Gable, the greatest wrestler in our sport ran wrestling camps in Iowa. So our whole high school career, everyone saved up money through a pilgrimage to Iowa so that I could be coached by Dan Gable. My junior year in high school I finally made. I saved up my money and went. We went to practice with the Iowa guys. We met Dan Gable, shook his hand. I was like, “I just shook Dan Gable’s hand. There’s no way I can’t win.” It’s done, it’s over.
So I want to make this a pilgrimage, people come to Boise to get their funnel done. We keep talking about how you’re one funnel away from whatever it is for you. We want that to be, “you’re one funnel away, come to Boise and we’ll build that out.” In this event. So we’re doing our first FHAT event for the inner circle members in two weeks. So Steven is working on the workbook right now for that. And then that’s kind of the initial game plan. And then if it goes well, as we think it will, we’ll start doing those more often here in Boise and have people come back. So that’s what we’re working on today, which is fun.
So anyway, hopefully all of you guys will want to come do your pilgrimage to Boise, because it will be amazing. With that said, I wanted to share with you guys something amazing. It’s been interesting, over the last month or so, we’ve been reworking some of our offers. Our certification program, for one. We launched it at the first funnel hacking live event. We brought a group through and then we closed it for an entire year. At the second Funnel Hacking Live event we reopened it up, brought in another group of people and then a couple of months later we opened it up, we’ve had people coming in more consistently. If you haven’t gone through the certification program, I don’t care if you’re a business owner or if you are someone looking for a new business opportunity, you should come through it. If you go to cfcertified.com you can see info about the certification program.
But as it’s been another year and we’re trying to rebuild the webinar and change things, we’re looking and all these success stories of people who have come through in the last year. We’re looking at all those things and we’re like, “Man, we could literally just have a webinar, here’s 50 people that have made their money back, plus more. Or have doubled their money or 3x’d their money. Or have built huge careers on the back of this now, because we have so much proof that this process works. It just works like magic.
So we’re like, “What if we just, instead of trying to sell this and work really hard at it, what if we just did a proof webinar.” Like, “Hey, if you’re thinking about getting certified, here’s 50 people who have done it. Here are their stories.” And that was the webinar, how interesting. It reminded me of rewind back in the day. John Reese, he launched the first internet marketing product, which made a million dollars in a day. It was called Traffic Secrets. He did the big launch, in fact, if you go to archive.org, they have this thing called the wayback machine. You can type in www.trafficsecrets.com into there. And then look at, I think it was in 2005, 2004, whenever the initial launch was. You’ll see this sales letter. It’s this big, huge long form sales letter with testimonials, it was amazing.
Then after the initial launch they shut it down and a year later they rrelaunched it. And when the relaunch happened the sales letter was completely different. All it was, was a big headline that said, “Proof.” And then it was 150 pages of testimonials of everybody who had success with the program. That’s all it was, then order button at the bottom. Then they relaunch it and made as much, if not more money the second time. It was like, “Here’s proof of the thing you heard about, actually is legit.
So anyway, I was thinking about that. What’s kind of cool is we tested this and it wasn’t on purpose. We didn’t mean to do this on purpose but, dang it worked really, really good.
So I’m going to share with you. So some of you guys know Dan Henrie, who is in the Clickfunnels group. He read the Dotom Secrets book. And then he did a perfect webinar. He just, how long ago was that? Do you remember?
Steven: Um, I think it was 5 or 6 months.
Russell: Yeah, 5 or 6 months ago. So he launched the perfect webinar and he just passed it, or is about to pass it?
Steven: Just passed a million.
Russell: So he just passed the million dollar mark. And this a guy who prior didn’t have any of those things happening. So reads a book, does a perfect webinar, makes a million bucks and it’s awesome. So we’ve been teasing him relentlessly. “Hey you should join the inner circle.” And the inner circle, a lot of you guys know, it’s usually full. There’s 100 spots, so for the most part we don’t advertize it at all anymore because it’s always full. People re-up year after year, which is really cool and kind of a testament of how good of a program it is. But every once in a while we get someone who doesn’t re-up for whatever reason. Sometimes it’s….whatever. Everyone’s got a reason. Some people feel like, they’re good now. Some people just don’t re-up because, honestly I have no idea. I can’t fathom why people wouldn’t. But there’s some people who don’t.
So usually it hover around anywhere from probably 95, 93, members that are in there. So we always have a couple of spots that are there. So we don’t do any active promoting, but people just kind of trickle in. They hear about it on the podcast and they apply and if there’s room we let them in. If not we say, “sorry.” And put them on a waiting list. Every once in a while we’ll open up a waiting list. For the most part, we don’t advertize anymore, it’s just there.
So right now, I don’t know how many spots we had left, I would say probably a handful, 5 or 6 spots were still left. I was like, “Do we turn ads back on to promote?” or whatever, I was thinking about it. Then Dan Snapchatted me and he was like, it was a picture of his Stripe account for the day and he made $25,380, something like that. He said something like, “Finally decided to join the inner circle and take the plunge, I’ll just use today’s earnings from my webinar to cover it.” Or something like that, it was really cool.
So I took a screen shot of it on Snapchat and posted in our Facebook group and just said, it had his picture from Snapchat and it said, “Step one, get the perfect webinar script for $4.99. Step number two, get Clickfunnels. Step number three, join Russell’s inner circle.” And it had a link to russellbrunson.com, which is where people apply. So I posted that to our Facebook group and that’s it. And what’s insane is can you guys guess, before I tell you the number, I want you to guess how many applications that we’ve got in the last, what is today? Thursday. So it’s been 2 ½ days. So in the last 2 ½ days, guess how many inner circle applications have come in from that one post? I just laugh because it’s so hilarious. What’s your guess? I don’t want to tell you yet, I want you to guess.
Okay, on the count of three, you’re going to say your number out loud. 1, 2, 3 blah. What did you say? Did you guess 5, did you guess 10, did you guess 20, 25, did you guess 30? Well if you guessed 30 you are way too low. We ended up from that one post in our Facebook group, with 43 new applications for inner circle, which is insane. Because we literally, I think we’ve got 3 or 4 spots, I don’t know the exact number. But 3 or 4 spots are open before our next set of meetings.
Isn’t that crazy? And it wasn’t me selling anything, it was just proof. Boom, here’s proof. So for you guys, I want you to start thinking more and more about that. Most of us are amazing at getting results for the people we serve, but we’re horrible at getting, capturing the stories of that. It doesn’t have to be this huge thing. It can be just capturing it. A good example is in December we launched our Funnel Immersion Fire Sale, Some of you guys may remember that. We sold a ton of them.
In our Facebook group everyone started commenting, “This is amazing. This is the greatest thing in the world.” People were like, “Shut up and take my money.” Everyone commenting about how good it was, so anyway, we ended up closing it down and what we did is made, we turned that into an upsell for one of our products. And it’s a $300 product, so normally for a $300 product I have to have a really good video to convince people to buy it. But we didn’t have time for that, so all I did was, we had a video of me like, “ hey, if you want this other course, it’s really cool. You should get it. It’s $300” then underneath the video we just had screenshots of other people’s Facebook things talking about how amazing it is. And right now that upsell is converting probably about 2 to 3 times higher than I thought it was going to for a $300 offer, which is insane.
Again, it’s just proof, tons and tons of proof. What I would say for you guys is start gathering proof. That’s the key. That is the key to this game. Gathering proof, gathering testimonials. People say something nice on Facebook, snap, screen shot it. Somebody Snapchats you nice things, screen shot it. Somebody does something amazing, pay for them to fly to you and capture it on video.
If yo look at how we sell the inner circle, initially I went and served and worked for Drew Canoli for free, gave him a huge result, built him a funnel which by the way, I just found out that funnel’s done over 25 million dollars since I hung out with him, isn’t that crazy? I should charge more for the inner circle, it’s insane.
But 25 million bucks he’s made with that funnel so far, and it’s still cranking. All he did was made a video and talked about the result we gave him and that video is what launched inner circle. A little while later someone named Liz Benney saw a good looking picture of Drew Canoli, applied for inner circle, came in and we gave her a good result. And when she came to Boise, we captured that result, posted that video online and that video has continued to fill inner circle. But it’s all come down to proof.
It’s funny, if you look at Liz’s testimony, go to russellbrunson.com and look at Liz’s testimonial. She never once talks about how money she made, no income claims, no nothing, just her talking about her experience with working with me. That’s it. And that has filled our inner circle and you can do the math. It’s $25 grand to join the inner circle, times 100 people. It’s a good program and it’s built off of proof. So become fanatical at getting results for people and then in return capture those results. Not only are they going to be okay with that, most of the time they are excited by that. It’s you talking about how great they did, and us as human beings, we happen to like that.
Remember a couple of episodes ago we talked about significance. We all like it, even if we hate it. It’s there, so don’t…..get people their significance. If they’re doing good stuff, they want to tell their story and most people would love to have you share it, so capture it in whatever format you can because that’s the future of sales. Someone asked me on a podcast interview a little while ago, “What’s the future of internet marketing as you see it.” I was like, “I think the future is a lot less selling and a lot more us showing results of people we got.” Because that’s believable.
People inherently believe Facebook posts, so those look good. People inherently believe videos that are emotionally connected. Those things are belief because they’re real. So focusing on that.
Anyway, that’s what I got, I gotta get back to the book because I have to finish this book this week or else it won’t be published in time for the launch date of April 18th. So I’m hustling. Hopefully this gave you guys some value. Go capture some proof and if you want to get in inner circle, there’s 43 people online, but if you hurry maybe you’ll be a better fit than one of the other people. So go to russellbrunson.com if you’re ready for that. That’s it you guys. Appreciate you all, have an amazing day and we’ll talk to you all again soon.