Until you’ve cycled at least once, I can’t be your business partner.
On today’s episode Russell talks about why successful people aren’t as cool as they think they are. He admits to falling into this same pattern and how he has been able to be a lot more humble.
Here are some fun things you’ll hear on this episode:
Listen below to hear why you aren’t as cool as you might think you are.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and I want to welcome you to another exciting, emotional, awesome Marketing in Your Car.
Hey everyone, I just got out of the gym today. I was thinking a lot. I actually did a podcast last night but we're going to do another one because I just want to talk about something that I think is very important for everyone to hear, especially me, especially pretty much everyone.
The moral of this podcast, I’ll tell you the moral first and then we'll dig into the actual nuts and bolts behind it. The moral of the story is you are not as cool as you think. It's funny, in the world that we live in, the world that I'm in, it's amazing to me how impressed people are with themselves. It drives me insane.
I don't know what it is but when people have a little bit of success, they just become super impressed with themselves, and rightfully so but there comes a time I think in most entrepreneurs' lives where you realize that you're not as cool as you think you are. The sooner that happens for you, the better.
If it hasn't happened for you yet, I want to give you the blessing of letting you know that you're not as cool as you think. I remember when I first got started in this business, and things started happening and started making money, man, I thought I was the coolest thing in the world. I was unstoppable. I started making stupid decisions because I thought I was invincible, and grew my company really, really quick, and then lost it all because of stupid decisions.
You think after almost losing it all once, I would have been a little bit smarter, but no, instead, I got a little more success again, things came back, and the second time I built it twice as big. We had 100 employees and I was so impressed with myself. I was so awesome. I loved telling people how many employees I had.
Then guess what happened? I made some more stupid decisions, and I lost it all again. I remember for a long time being really depressed about that. Then one time, I was in Mexico hanging out with some really cool marketers. There was this guy named Robert Hirsch. We were talking about our businesses, our careers, and our paths.
I was telling him about my two ups and downs in my business so far. He goes, “Oh good, you've cycled twice.” I go, “What do you mean?” He's like, “Yeah, you've cycled twice. I refuse to work with entrepreneurs who haven't cycled at least once.” I'm like, “What do you mean?”
He's like, “Every business has these ups and downs. When you have your first up, you think you're invincible and you drink your own Kool-Aid and you believe it.” He said, “I refuse to work with entrepreneurs that way because they still believe they're cooler than they are. They don't understand that there are so many things external from them that make them successful, and it's not themselves. They're not as cool as they think they are.”
He said, “The fact that you've cycled twice means that you hopefully have learned from the second time and the first time, and hopefully you don't think you're as cool as you think you are.” I remember when he said that, I was like, “You know what? That's pretty powerful.”
I think it's important to understand that. I've tried. Again, I'm not perfect by any stretch of the imagination but I've tried since my last cycle to be a lot more humble and to realize that it's not me. It's people around me. It's our customers. It's all these amazing things. I take it way more, I don't take it for granted. I'm a lot more appreciative.
I try to be careful when I make decisions now, and things like that. That concept has reared its head this week on the whole marketer's cruise. Before we went on the cruise, supposedly, I didn't even know this, but some guy messaged Brent on my team and said, “Hey, I'm going to be on the marketer's cruise. I’d love to meet you.”
Brent is like, “Cool, yeah, come find us, we'd love to meet you too.” That's where it left off. We're on this cruise, 700 other marketers mind you, plus 1300 guests, so 2000 people here. I first off didn't know who the guy was, didn't know he was supposed to meet us. Brent has messaged him on Facebook for 30 seconds maybe, didn't know his name or picture, just some guy.
I probably got at least 15 to 20 people before the cruise who said, “Hey, I want to meet you.” I'm like, “Alright, I'm there, come find me.” Supposedly, this guy was pissed off and upset because I didn't come and find him. Again, I have no idea who he is from Adam yet he obviously knows who I am.
Anyway, the last night I guess, he bumps into Todd, one of my partners in Click Funnels and was all yelling at him and pissed about the fact that we've been ignoring him. Todd is like, “I don't even know who you are. Who in the world are you?” so Todd tries to calm him down and everything.
I guess when all was said and done, all he really wanted was an affiliate link. Todd was like, “Okay, we'll get you an affiliate link.” Yesterday, this guy Facebooks Brent, yelling at him about how we all ignored him, how rude we were, and all this stuff. We're like, “We don't even know who you are. We were there every night talking. You know who we are. We had no idea who you are. Why wouldn't you come up and talk to us?”
He comes back and he's like, “No, it was not that you guys didn't know who I was. You were purposely ignoring me. I'm so big, I got this and this. I'm so famous, blah, blah,” all this stuff. It was so weird. I remember thinking back and saying, “Wow, this guy, because his ego is so big, because he thinks he's cooler than he is and because he believes that, he just missed out on some amazing opportunities.
Had he come up to me and said, “Hey Russell, I'm so-and-so. I messaged Brent. I’d love to meet you,” I probably would have hit it off and become good friends. I remember in the guy's Facebook message, he's also pissed because I did meet a really cool guy. There was this guy who runs a karate thing back east. His name is Jeff.
We hit it off. He's a jiu jitsu guy. I'm a wrestler. We actually wrestled twice. We went to the yoga room on a hardwood floor, laid out some yoga mats, and wrestled twice. I still have bruises on my knees and bruises on my neck from choking me out because we had so much fun, and hit it off with this guy.
Man, I love this guy, I love his family, I love everything about him. We're trying to help him and serve him, and how we can take his business and him to the next level. We're doing everything we can now to serve him because he didn't think he was cooler than he is. He's just a cool guy who got to know us at a personal level, and we got to know him, and had a great time with him.
Because of that, the relationship he's built, I would be shocked if the relationship we have with him now, if he doesn't make millions of dollars in the next couple of years from that. It wasn't because again, he was saying, “Oh, do you know who I am? I'm the biggest karate guy in the east.” He didn't do any of that. It was just because he was a cool guy.
It was just a reminder to me. I think about the people I deal with in business and I think about myself. I think about other people, and I just want to make sure everyone knows that you're not as cool as you think you are. This stuff is happening, these are blessings that have been given to us. Don't take those things for granted. Be grateful for them.
Never think that you're too big to talk to someone. Never think that people should acknowledge you and know who you are. It was funny, on the cruise, every person I met, I tried to introduce myself and say who I was because some people, it was funny, you see some people who are just like, “Oh, you don't know who I am?” and they walk away.
For me, I don't assume that people know who I am. I assume that they don't and I try to get to know them. It's just a better way to live. My encouragement for today, you guys, is understand first off that you're not cooler than you are. You probably are pretty cool but just remember that all entrepreneurs cycle.
If you haven't cycled yet, you're going to. If you're dumb like me, you'll cycle twice, and hopefully it doesn't happen to me a third time but I'm sure it might. I just want to be humble enough to accept it when it comes, and to dust myself off, get back up, and make sure I take care of other people around me so that when we go for the next round, the next cycle, the people that I love and care about are still there.
I hope that helps you guys. I hope you have an awesome day today. Go inspire people. Go change the world in your way, and see how you can serve people. If you do that, everything you want and need in life will come back to you. Thanks again, you guys. We'll talk to you on the next Marketing in Your Car.
Three awesome lessons from a hardcore funnel hacker!
On today’s episode Russell talks about an upcoming event called the Funnel Hacking Event and what kinds of things will happen at the event. He also talks about the power of identifying your dream client.
Here are some cool things you’ll hear in this episode:
So listen below to find out why you should be busy identifying your dream client in order to make more money.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and I want to welcome you to our 105th episode of Marketing in Your Car.
We've had the new theme song for five episodes now, and I hope you guys like it. I got some feedback from my man Stu McLaren. He said that he misses the old theme song as an outro, so I was thinking wouldn't it be cool if we took the old theme song and made it more retro and cool, and did a cover version of it, and had that as an exit, just for nostalgia for those who remember the old show, who remember the old thing.
I want to say hey to everyone. It's been a little while since I've done a podcast. I had a chance to go on the Marketer's Cruise last week which was amazing, got to meet a bunch of people. We had a chance to go and feature Click Funnels there and get a lot of people involved. It was just really cool.
For those of you guys who were there, I had a great time meeting you guys. I'm not really sure. There are a couple of cool things we had talked about today. I'm actually driving to my haircut so I have a little extra time today than I typically do. I was trying to think what would be the coolest way that I could serve you guys today.
Just thinking about a lot of different things, I think, let me walk you through some cool stuff that's happening. That might help open up some cool direction. We've got a couple of cool things coming up. One thing is I just finished my new book. We got it printed. I got first pre-release copies here in my office.
I ordered 250 of them so I have 250 of them sitting in my office. It's like the coolest thing in the world to have that and to be able to have a chance to start sharing it with everyone. I want to encourage you guys to watch as we do the roll-out strategy. There's going to be about 10 years worth of ninja hacking skills all going into this roll-out.
The entire sales funnel will be built inside of Click Funnel. It's going to be worth buying, first off, because the book is going to be amazing, but second off, just to see the process. I've told you guys this before and I’ll tell you over and over again. You'll learn as much by watching the process as you will from purchasing the product.
Make sure you do that. In fact, when you're buying any product, you guys, make sure you're not missing that lesson from me or from any marketer in any market. Watch the process you're going through. I tell you, that's the most valuable piece of what we're going to be doing. That's one thing that's super exciting.
We also are going to be doing our first big live event in the last few years. It's been probably five or six years. We're going to be doing it in Vegas. We're going to have about 500 people there, and the event is going to be called Funnel Hacking. I'm excited because hopefully you guys have a chance to have seen the Funnel Hacks webinar.
If not, go find one when I'm doing the next one and register for it, and be on it because it's kind of cool. Our last event here in Boise, we had our workshop here. It's cool because funnel hacking is becoming a verb in people's vocabulary, “Oh, I'm going to go funnel hack him,” or, “Oh, you should funnel hack him.”
That's good. I want people thinking that way. Instead of, “Oh, what should I create? What kind of funnel should I do?” thinking like that, I want people thinking more like the funnel hacking method where it's like, “Let me find someone that's successful, see what they're doing, and let's model the look, the feel, the layout, and the price points of their funnel.”
That's kind of what funnel hacking is. We talk about it a ton in the webinar. That's been fun. We decided to do the entire event called Funnel Hacking. This event is really cool because I wanted to show the core different types of funnels inside of Click Funnels.
For example, Perry Belcher who is one of the coolest guys is going to be coming and speaking on how to do a tripwire funnel. He's the one who invented that term and that concept. He's going to show and talk about what he's doing and show a bunch of examples.
After that, we're going to have a bunch of different people inside of Click Funnel who have tripwire funnels get up and show their funnels and be like, “This is mine, this is what I did, this is how I modeled. This is what I did different, this is what I did the same,” and then go through and show five or six, or ten people who do tripwire funnels.
Then we'll get up and talk about webinar funnels. We'll have five, 10, 15, 20 people, whatever, all talk about tripwire funnels. We'll go from funnel to funnel over two and a half days. It's going to be the coolest thing. I'm so excited to share this stuff with you guys.
One of my goals, I'm not sure if it's going to happen in time for the event but I'm hoping, I know a lot of you guys have seen our split testing book. If you don't have it yet, it's free. Go to DotComSecretsLabs.com. You can get it for free but it has 108 proven split test winners in that book.
I think it would be cool to make a book that's like 108 funnels that you can hack. I'm trying. My goal is to get it all put together before the event, and then anyone who is at the event will get a free copy of it which would be cool. That is just another cool thing we're doing.
On top of that, obviously Click Funnels is growing super fast. It's been such a fun time in business. I hope you guys are enjoying your businesses as well with that. I think the biggest thing I want to talk about today with you guys, outside of you guys doing funnel hacking and things like that, is just the power of the right front end offer.
I've talked about this in past podcasts. I know some of you guys are just listening now for the first time. Some of you haven't listened to all 105 episodes. It's a recurring theme that keeps coming up with my coaching clients. I think it's worth repeating.
If you look at my business two years ago, it's funny, I don't like sharing numbers. I'm not doing this to brag but just to put some perspective. A year ago, last January, as a company we did about $300,000 in sales. This January, we did over a million dollars in sales, more than three times as much.
We didn't do much. I didn't launch anything in January this month. It was just from all the different things we had done. When I look back at what's the one big change we made over the last 12 months that's had the biggest profound impact on our company and on what we've been doing, it's that I really stepped back and I asked myself a couple of questions.
First off, I was looking at who we were attracting at the time, who our customers were, and for me, they were business opportunity seekers. There's nothing wrong with a business opportunity seeker. I was a business opportunity seeker. I'm guessing most of you have been as well.
The problem with the business opportunity seekers is typically, they don't have a business yet. They don't have anything so you spend so much time in the beginning phases that you don't get to get to the growth phases. I was talking to Mike Filsaime about this. He was talking about when he and Andy launched their new company.
He said they walked in the room and had a big whiteboard. They drew a line down the middle of the whiteboard. On the left-hand side, they drew a zero. On the right-hand side, they drew a one. He said, “We want to create products and services that will attract people who have made at least a dollar online.”
If they've made at least a dollar online, it means they've figured out how to set up a website, how to get traffic, how to do all these kind of things. He said, “There's people out there. There's a big market for people who are helping you make your first dollar online but we don't want to be in that market. We want to focus on the other side of the market which is you've made at least a dollar, and now how do we scale that and turn it into a big company.”
He even talked about when they launched the Webinar Jam product, initially, the messaging was all about how much money you could make with webinars. He said, “If we do that, if we try to pitch the argument for webinars, the problem is we get people who are business opportunity seekers. We're convincing them that they can make money online with webinars. That's not what we want. We want people who are already doing webinars to get them to just transition to our products.”
They changed the messaging from how to make money with webinars to, “Hey, if you're already doing webinars, this is a better way to do them.” From that, they attracted the right customers. With us, it was about a year ago we launched Dot Com Secrets Labs which was our 108 proven split test winners. What's cool if you think about it, we designed that on purpose because if you look at that, it was created in a way so it would literally repel the customers we didn't want to get.
Someone who is a business opportunity seeker, who has never had a website, who doesn't have anything, when they see that book, it doesn't make sense to them. They're not going to buy that. They don't know what a split test is. They don't know why they even care but for my dream client, for the person that I really want into my company, it attracts the right person, someone who already has a business.
A split testing book attracts the right person. Look back over the last year. What did we do? I didn't work harder this January and last January. In fact, I worked a lot less this January yet we made over a million dollars this January as opposed to $300,000 last. What was the big difference?
Again, it was first off, really identifying and spending time figuring out who is my dream customer, what do they look like, what do they want, what are their desires. Then after I knew who that person was, I didn't mean just know them, “Oh, I want males from 13 to 26,” that wasn't how I knew them.
It was I got to know them at a personal level. Who are they? What do they really want? Then after I knew that and I had a really good understanding of who my dream clients were, then we came back and figured out what's the bait we can create that's going to attract that person.
For us, Dot Com Secrets Labs was the bait that attracted the right person. People always say, “Have you made much money on that, Russell?” I'm like, “Yeah, we have. We've made a lot of money.”
I look at our coaching program. Before DCS Labs, it was very small, almost nonexistent. After we launched it, we've added over 100, probably 130, 140 people at our Ignite level, which is $10,000, and I think we're at 36 people now in our $25,000, and we have two people in our $100,000 program.
It's attracted millions of dollars in revenue, but more so, it attracted the right people, people I love working with, people that I give my coaching clients access to Voxer with me, and we Vox back and forth throughout the day. There are people that are just doing things that are so cool. It's so fun to hear what they're doing. It's made my happiness level different.
I've been able to work with clients I love, and because of that, we've made more money, and they've made more money. I just look at for you guys, if one thing that you can think about, I mentioned this on another podcast but it's not thought about or talked about enough but it's really spending that time to figure out who your dream client is, and creating bait that's going to attract them.
One of my students has a webinar right now. He's been doing really well with it but he's attracting business opportunity people. He's like, “Do I need to change the whole thing?” I'm like, “No, you just got to change how you pitch the front. Change the bait on the front that will attract a different person.”
The product will still help either person but if you change the bait, you change the messaging on the front, you'll get different people in. That's just something to think about. All you guys out there marketing and selling things, you're trying to make things better and easier, and I can't tell you enough that the biggest change for me in our company over the last year has been that.
I hope that helps a little bit. I'm here to get my haircut now. I'm ready to rock and roll. My big three takeaways I think from today, number one is you need to learn more by watching the process. Again, when you guys buy my book, watch the process and see what I'm doing, not just what I'm saying. Follow the process.
Number two is funnel hacking. First off, everyone needs to start saying funnel hacking. In fact, if you guys are going to Traffic Conversion Summit, we're giving away t-shirts that say #funnelhacker on the front, and the back has a big Click Funnels logo and says, “Powered by Click Funnels.” It's super cool, all grungy looking and awesome.
We're trying to get everyone to become a funnel hacker. Funnel hacking is cool. Become a funnel hacker. Go watch the webinar if you missed it. Come to the live event when we do announce it here in the next couple of weeks, and become a funnel hacker.
Then what was the last thing? The last thing was spend more time identifying your dream client and building bait that gets them. I hope that helps you guys. I'm ready to rock and roll, go get my haircut, and then tomorrow, making some videos for some new bait to get some new people in, and it's going to be fun.
I appreciate you guys listening in. We will talk to you guys all again very, very soon.
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.
How one good presentation can transform your business overnight.
On this episode Russell talks about speaking at a Mike Filsaime event and selling 36% of the room and how he did it.
Here are some cool things you’ll hear in today’s episode:
So listen below to hear how Russell was able to do so many sells at Mike Filsaime’s event.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone. This is Russell. I want to welcome you to Marketing in Your Car. Hey guys and gals. So this episode is kind of weird because I think it is the first Marketing in Your Car I have actually done when I am not in my car. Maybe there are one or two others, but that is what is happening today. I am at the office, and just want to share something cool with you guys because I think it would.
I had a chance this last week to watch one of my friends. He posted on Facebook. He is a big believer in bound marketing. I agree with him for the most part. He is trying to get clients and make arguments, but he is talking trash about conversion and sales and persuasion and all these things.
It makes me laugh because that is where his background came from, and that’s what he learned. That is what has worked for him in the past. He is talking trash about that so he can sell his inbound marketing thing. I read it, and I just kept going back and forth. Do I agree with him? Do I not? Which parts do I agree? It was interesting because there are parts that I definitely agreed with him on. I do believe that it is the future. I believe in ad networks versus they don’t squeeze pages and sales letters and things like that.
There’s that side of it, but the other side of it, which I think he is sort sighted on, he is trying to throw the baby out with the bath water, so to speak. His persuasion says it is important to understand, and if you understand those, then it just works. This weekend I had a really cool experience. I got asked to speak at Marketing Genesis, traffic genesis event. I went and spoke there.
There were about 120-130 people in the room when I started speaking. I created a presentation. I don’t know how many of you guys have gone through my perfect webinar presentation, but I have this script that I have built over 10 years, and it has taken the best I have learned from all of my coaches that have taught me how to speak well. I have learned from Ar and Moore and Jason and Dave Vanhoose, Perry Beltcher, and so many people. More than I could go through right now. People have helped me tweak my presentation and tweak it and tweak it and tweak it. I am to the point now, I call it the perfect webinar because it just works.
Anyway, I got asked to speak there and so I spent a day and a half or so just working on the presentation getting it perfect. I just, I literally just followed my script to a tee. I didn’t deviate from it at all. I just used the script. I opened my hand out. It goes through all the different pieces, and that is all I did. I went and gave the presentation, and it was really cool. After I pitched I ended up closing 36% of the room, which is the highest that I have ever done. Probably one of the highest that I have ever seen.
I was just reading my skype right now and Mike said, “Hey, wanted to webinar for your offer. One of the best offers I have ever seen. Maybe the best. It was kind of cool. Just really exciting. I closed 36% of the room at a $1,000 price point. What is interesting is what has happened since then. This is the power of a good offer. If you get a good offer and a pitch that converts, all the inbound marketing stuff is good, but man it will turn your outbound marketing on fire.
I did that presentation. Did my whole pitch, my close, everything. Made a whole ton of money. From there, almost instantly I had four or five people come up and beg me to do that webinar to their list. Mike and Andy asked me. Right now, people are lining up to do that webinar to that list because they saw it converted, saw it was going to make them a ton of money, saw that it was awesome. That is the power of having a good converting offer. People will line up to sell it for you.
I think it was Gary Halbert said, I can’t remember. A couple different quotes. One of them said something about, “Just one sales letter will make all your problems go away. One good sales letter.” I think it’s true. Literally there have been two or three times in my business career where because of stupid choices on my side, we have almost gone bankrupt or things have almost happened. Every single time it is one good pitch, one good offer that totally saves and changes everything.
While I agree with the whole inbound concept, I think that is where we all need to be going. After you use outbound concepts to get somebody in your funnel, that’s where the persuasion and the sales skills and all the things we have been talking and teaching and doing for the last 10 years. They still work. They work better than ever. You just have to learn how to do it.
We don’t have the slide yet, but in the next month or so I will probably put it live. If you go to perfectwebinar.com, I am going to have a DVD there that goes to my perfect webinar script. I will do free plus shipping. I recommend getting it because that thing works.
I just followed my own template, filled in all the blanks. Did the presentation and boom it works. I hope that helps you guys. I appreciate you all for listening. This is episode 99. The next one coming out is 100, and we will have a new theme song. I appreciate you guys, and we will talk to you soon.
A few quick things you can do to give yourself the edge.
On this episode Russell talks about how he uses supplements to get a slight edge and how he does the same thing in business.
Here are a couple of interesting things to listen for in this episode:
So listen below to hear how supplements give Russell a slight edge.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone. This is Russell Brunson, and welcome to a very cold and rainy Marketing in Your Car. Hey everyone. We are almost on episode 100, which is exciting. At 100 I am changing the theme song. I promise. I honestly can’t believe I have listened to 100, that theme song over 100 times. We have new things coming out. Also, I wanted to see how long all my podcasts have been. So I took them all, and I am getting someone to transcribe them all so I can put them on the blog, and all that fun stuff. I am posting it out there. I had my brother rip all the audios.
We put them into one long thing. That’s not counting the music. Just the actual talking parts. It ended up being seven or eight hours long. Maybe it was even longer. It was crazy. I was like, “Man. That is a short key to my office. Can you imagine for a lot of you how much time you spend each day in the car?” It is insane. So, anywho I wanted to talk about something I think is funny.
As lot of you guys know I eat really clean and healthy. I also am a big fan of supplements, and every morning I have a supplement regime that takes me almost an hour to do. Some people think that is crazy. Why would I spend an hour doing it? I have my kits there. Aden helps me. He helps me juice, and also helps me pick out all my pills. We take whatever out of each bottle, and I have this huge stack of stuff, and I take all those.
I take a bunch of powders and mixes. I look forward to it every morning. It is my favorite part. Usually when I am doing it, I am super tired. I take all the stuff and in about 15 minutes or so, I just feel like a million dollars. It is really awesome. Last night I took a picture of my supplements to post on Facebook. I thought it would be fun to get people’s responses. Man, it cracks me up. People’s feedback. Some people, and it’s funny because the people who are the least healthy are always the ones who are trying to explain to me how it’s going to kill my liver all these types of things. It makes me smile because I think about all the stuff I am taking compared to one big mac at Mcdonalds.
It makes me laugh. Also, the super healthy people who have their thing that they follow and they believe, and they stick with that, and they won’t. They said, “All you need is this. All you need is whatever.” They have their thing. Then there’s a couple guys who I know who are always trying to push the edge on things to get themselves the slight edges. All of them posted pictures of their supplements. Some of them have twice what I had on mine, which was fun as well.
I just thought it was funny. I started thinking about that. In all aspects of life. Again, obviously I am a big believer in supplements, but during Halloween, not Halloween, we went down to this Halloween celebration to my brother in law, sister in law’s house. They saw me taking all these things. It was interesting, my sister in law, she said something that I thought was kind of cool. She said, “Wow. You always look for little things to give you the edge.” I thought about it, and that is what supplementation is.
I am trying to figure out what little tweaks, what little hacks, what little things are there that I can take that are going to give me nutrients that I am not able to get out of my food, that are going to give me things that will help me open up my mind, or increase my energy in a natural way that’s not tied to caffeine or tied to these horrible things. All these little incremental things that I am adding into my supplementation have been amazing. That is the first part, and then I started thinking about also from a learning stand point. For me, I am always trying to get the edge. That is why I read so much. That is why I study so much. That is why I am always listening to trainings and audios. I want to get those tiny things.
Each little supplement I can learn and put it in my brain can give me an edge and help me increase my business and help me make more money and help me to serve more people. For me, just like supplements, I am always looking for those little things. I think about the people that almost had the same response with the supplements. I look at their life, and I think they’re response of information would be very similar.
Those who fight to have enough and they don’t need to do learn more, who would mock my library. Then we have those who already have, who do, you know a lot, but they don’t want to learn anymore, and those who are trying to seek knowledge in all aspects of life, and try to search out the best things. For me, I like the idea of always searching out the best things. Trying to find those little edges you can take that are natural. From a learning standpoint and a nutritional standpoint, to help you get to where you want to get, faster.
How to find coaches to get your unbalanced life back into balance.
On this episode Russell talks about having a life that is like an unbalanced wheel and he is working on straightening it out.
Here are some interesting things you will hear in today’s episode:
So listen below to find out what Russell is doing to straighten out his wheel.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone. This is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you to a brand new, exciting, awesome episode of Marketing in Your Car. Alright everyone. It has been a little while since I have done a podcast. Had kind of a crazy last month or so. Has it been a month? Probably not. It has been quite awhile. Since last we spoke we launched click funnels. It is going great. People are loving it. We are changing the whole industry, and it’s awesome. Loving that. I want to do something different because today I woke up, and I am in an awesome mood.
It is funny because there is a bunch of stuff that I could and should be upset about or frustrated or whatever, but I am in an awesome mood today. There are a lot of reasons for that. For one, I am just grateful for my family. I am grateful for click funnels. I am grateful for my partners, just everything that is happening. It is just awesome, like nothing could pop my bubble right now, which is really cool.
The other thing I want to mention, and I think it’s important, is I want to ask you guys, I want you guys to look at your life. There are different areas. Remember at a Tony Robbins event he had us do this in a circle. Each section’s circle was a pie, each part was part of your life, your personal life, your financial, your spiritual, your physical and all those kinds of things. He had us draw from 1-10 where we felt we were at. If you were close to the center of the circle, the further out you went, the better it was.
You drew these lines across each of the sections of the pie, and afterwards you looked at it, and it was this lopsided wheel. Everyone has one or two aspects of their life they are crushing it in. The other four or five they are really struggling it. It was interesting. He said, “Look at this as the wheel. How can you drive on this? Parts of it are super close. The edges are super close to the center. Part of it is like a real circle.”
I think that is what my life has been like. I have been having great success in a lot of areas, and having a lot of fun and things, but other parts of my life are really struggling like my physical part. I wasn’t sleeping. I wasn’t eating right. I was doing a whole bunch of stuff to try to get the launch out. Things became lop-sided. I did a podcast a while ago about the unbalanced life, which I still think is important, but I started thinking recently about that.
I have certain aspects of my life, half I am crushing in and half I am struggling in. I started looking at what are the traits in things that are happening in the areas that I am really successful. I have coaches and a team around me helping me in those aspects in my life. Those other ones, I am just going at it on my own and hoping for the best.
Recently, a little while ago I hired this guy. I am not sure if I told you guys or not. I don’t know if I told you or not, but I went and got my blood tested in the middle of our product launch thing. My hormones were out of whack from lack of sleep, lack of, I definitely went unbalanced for a while. My hormones suffered because I gained a bunch of weight. It was hard to sleep.
I had low energy. All of these things came from that. I went to a nutritional doctor, and he told me what I needed to do, and I didn’t agree with it and it scared me. I didn’t want to do. I looked out there, and I looked at my personal world, and try to find somebody who is really good at fixing the issues that I was having. I found this dude.
His name is Caleb Jennings. You can search for him. He is awesome. He is really expensive, $600 for a coaching call. I did my first coaching call with him, and he recommended a bunch of dietary things and a bunch of supplementation things and other things. What I am eating now is so weird from what I have ever eaten in my whole life. We just got started. “There’s two way to do this. The fast way and the slow way.” I said I wanted the fast way.
He said the fast way is really expensive. I said I didn’t care. I want to get where I want to be as quick as I can. Here is all the supplements that you should be taking. I spent $2,000 in supplements. I did that, changed my diet. I have been on it for 10 days now. I can’t tell you. I feel better now than I felt my entire life. It is truly amazing. I feel like I am glowing. I feel so awesome.
The point of this podcast because now I am at the office is, start looking at the areas of your life that are unbalanced and things you are not happy with instead of trying to trailblaze on your own like we always try to do. Go find a coach for that area of your life. There are coaches out there coaching people on anything. If you are struggling spiritually or financially or health wise, go find the person who is doing exactly what you want to be doing, and figure out how much it is going to cost and pay him.
It will get you where you want to be so much faster. I was listening to Tony Robbins this weekend, and that is one thing he said as well. If you want to be successful, you can’t find a good strategy. You have to find the best strategy. Find the best strategy. Find the person that you like the most and model them. Model them to a tee. If you do that, that is where you are going to be successful.
That is what I am doing now. I am finding the areas of my life that are lop-sided, that I am not quite happy with. I am finding coaches and get there quick. The last 10 days, we had a family trip this weekend, and I was driving, and typically when I am driving I am snacking on food and trying to stay awake.
Kids are going crazy and it is stressful. This time I didn’t eat any snacks. I was just driving there. I had so much energy. I was so much more fun. I was goofing off. It was night and day. My wife was like, “what is wrong with you? You are so happy right now.”
I said I don’t know. From the changes in my diet and supplementation, I feel like a million bucks. I am going to find some coaches for the other areas of my life I am struggling with, and I will be firing those as well. Do the same. Appreciate you guys. Thanks for listening. Have an awesome day, and I will talk to you all soon.
A cool new way that we are rolling out our new software to the world.
On this episode Russell talks about the Clickfunnels product launch and how it’s different than other product launches.
Here are the coolest reasons to listen to this episode:
So listen below to hear the plan of the Clickfunnels product launch.
---Transcript---
Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you to a very special launch-day “Marketing in Your Car.”
Hey, everyone. It’s been a little while since I talked to you guys, probably because we have been killing ourselves getting Click Funnels launched out. I’m driving home at about four in the morning, and I’m driving back a few hours later. I’m usually a little bit too tired to talk [laughs], but the good news is that today’s the day. We’re going to go live, and it’s exciting, and it’s scary. It’s so many things, but above all I’m excited to share this tool, this gift, whatever you want to call it, with the world, and so we have spent insane amounts of time, effort, money, energy [laughs] to bring this to everyone, and today, we have the fruition of that, which is exciting.
What I want to talk about today, just while I’m thinking about it, every one of us, depending on if you’ve got a business already, and you’re rolling out new ideas, new projects, new things, or those who are just getting started, there comes a time when you have to launch, and a lot of times, you probably think that all of us who are doing launches, that we’ve got everything, all of our ducks in a row, and it’s always perfect, and it’s sunshine and roses, but the reality is, it is crazy every single time. We’re juggling a million different things, trying to get everything done, but it’s fun to see it all come together. Now one thing that we learned from doing this or any launch is that first when you start a project, you get all of these things you want to do and then as you get closer and closer to the deadline, you’ve got to start chopping things and pulling things off, and it gets smaller and smaller until you get to where you’ve got something that you can actually do and put out there in the world, and even right now, it’s kind of fun with this launch. We kept on changing it and figuring out what we had to have to go live, and we picked a date, and we’ve stuck to it, and now it’s go time.
One thing that’s interesting that we’re doing on this launch – I think we’re going to start a trend – maybe. I’m not sure, but we’re doing a reverse launch, so most people do product launches where they show you training video number one, then video number two, then video number three, and then video number four they sell you, and they open the cart and you can go in and you can sign up. This one is going to be backwards.
What we’re doing is inside Click Funnels, we’ve got basically five or six different funnel types. Today we’re going to launch, and we’re going to launch one funnel type, which is our opt-in funnels, which that, by itself, makes us a better alternative than any of our competitors, so it does it better, easier, just right out of the gate. That’s the first thing we’re launching today, and that will give us a chance where the promotional video’s all about that feature and about thing, and we’re talking about that one little thing, and then two days later, we’re going to unlock the next feature, which is our automated webinar funnels and our webinar funnels, and so that will come out. Then, “Boom,” we’ll launch a new sales video with that. We’ll have training that goes with everything and we’ll indoctrinate and get people using that, and then three days later, we open our sales funnels, and after they open it, we’ll go in there and help people get those integrated and get their shopping carts in there, et cetera, et cetera, and then after that we have launch funnels and the membership sites, but we’re doing an internal rolling launch where we’re rolling out new features every three or four days, for a couple of reasons. One is that it gives our affiliates a reason to promote every two or three days, which is very good for sales. That’s the first thing.
The second thing is it gives us a chance on the support side to make sure we’ve mastered one funnel type, and make sure that it’s perfect and that we have templates and Q&As and all of those types of things. Just to make sure we’ve got that one funnel perfect. And then on the third is that it gives the customers the ability to really get in there and immerse and learn one thing at a time, and so anyway, we’re excited. That’s the strategy, and it’s never been done before, so it will be fun to see what happens on a reverse launch, and see if it blows up in our faces, or if it does awesomely, but either way we’re excited, and just really excited to share Click Funnels with the world.
It’s funny. Somebody posted on Facebook the other day about how they thought Click Funnels was the biggest marketing innovation since e-mail auto-responders, which I personally do believe, but I remember that I posted in there – and I thought about it a little bit before I posted, and I posted, and I said, “Look, guys, even if we never sold a single copy, this tool will make me and make my company millions of dollars. I’m just so grateful to be the one that has the chance to share it with you guys,” and that’s really how I feel, and so today, if you’re listening to this podcast, go get your Click Funnels account. Again, we’re giving away free trials, and I promise you guys you’re going to love it. It’s going to change your business. It’s changed mine already, and will continue to do so for the rest of my life.
I’m at the office now. I’m going to go in. I’m going to push the last few buttons and give everybody everything live, and in a few hours it’ll be show time. I appreciate you guys listening in, and we’ll talk to you soon.
The secrets of temporarily unbalancing your life to achieve your dreams…
On today’s episode Russell talks about why his life is unbalanced because he isn’t getting any sleep and why right now, that is okay.
Here are some things you’ll hear in this episode:
So listen below to find out why it’s okay for Russell to live an unbalanced life sometimes.
---Transcript---
Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you to a special late night “Marketing in Your Car.” Actually it should be called, “Marketing in Your Ferrari”, because right now, late at night, I’m driving to the office in the Ferrari.
Hey, everyone. I want to welcome you to this webinar. This is not a webinar. This is a podcast. You can tell my brain’s a little bit fried right now. Over the last week or so, we’ve had Todd and Dylan and Chris and the entire Click Funnels crew flew in to Boise so we could focus on getting Click Funnels live and launched, and it’s been super fun. We’re halfway through the week, and we’ve got the other half coming up, and so I’m going in for another late-night session so that we can keep cranking this thing out so we can have it ready for you guys all to experience here soon, and I’m really excited. We’ve got some amazing changes. If any of you guys have used Click Funnels yet, you’re going to be blown away by the new editor and the new UI that we’re rolling it out on Thursday, and so we’re trying to hit a hard deadline and get it all done by Thursday, which will be pretty cool. So that’s why we’re all killing ourselves right now.
I was thinking about some stuff recently. In my life, I’ve been trying to do so many things. I’ve been trying to get this new company launched while keeping our old company growing, while being a dad with my kids now in football, and my daughter in soccer, and then trying to be a good husband, and trying to do all of my church responsibilities. There’re so many things that are happening right now, and I’ve been trying to live a balanced life and because of that, I basically had to cut out sleep almost completely from my schedule, which has caught up with me. It’s been hurting, so I’ve been trying to get some more sleep, and so I’m trying to figure out, what do you do? They always talk about living a balanced life, and how do you do that as an entrepreneur, especially when you’re trying to launch a new company, and trying to provide value to the world. How do you do it?
I was thinking about a couple of things, and funny enough, by both of them coming from Mark Cuban, who, if you guys don’t know who Mark Cuban is, you’re probably living under a rock right now, but one thing he said that was really interesting, and I’m going to slaughter the quote, but he said something along the lines of – something about sleeping at night, like, “While my competitors sleep, and I’m staying up at night getting ready to kick his butt,” or something like that, and so that’s been our mantra, because we’ve been going through this. We’ve got a couple of big competitors, some of them with VC money and everything that we’re competing against. We’re the ones busting our butts at night while they’re sleeping soundly in their beds, and they’re not going to know what came and hit them, so that’s exciting.
The other Mark Cuban thing was I was listening to, watching “Shark Tank”. This was a couple of months ago, but I remember this one scene, and it kept replaying through my head this weekend as I was trying to figure out how to become more balanced. He was talking about how, as an entrepreneur, when you’re first getting started out, you can’t lead a balanced life. He was talking about how things have to fall to the wayside, because there’s so much effort and momentum that has to go into launching this thing. He was like, “Entrepreneurs do not get the privilege,” or whatever you want to call it, “the luxury of having a balanced life when they’re getting started.” Someday, obviously, the goal of being an entrepreneur is to shift that, right? So all of this effort, you kind of frontloaded turns into this company that pays for itself, pays for you and your family so that you can go and live those things you want.
It got me thinking about that. It’s not good to always live your life unbalanced, but there are times when I think you have to, to be able to push forward and to succeed. I look at when I was wrestling in high school and college. My life was very unbalanced towards that, but that’s what I had to do to be able to succeed. You’ve got to sacrifice other things to be able to do that.
I look at the two years I spend on a mission for my church, and when I was doing that, life was very unbalanced. I was giving up everything else to be able to focus on that aspect and to be able to serve the world in that way, and so while I think that the goal is to get to a balanced life, I think in order to get the momentum you need to succeed at almost anything, that initial inertia comes from being not in balance, and so you have to kind of pick and choose.
Tonight, my wife and I sat down, and we started talking about what aspects I need to cut during this process to be able to function, so there’s going to be some things in my life that I love that I’m going to have to cut out just so that I don’t die [laughs] from lack of sleep and lack of everything, right? So one of the things I’m going to cut out is going to be weight-training. It’s going to be this and that, and like, “What are the pieces I’m going to pull out so that I can focus on the good stuff which is obviously launching this company and having success with it and all of those types of things.
Anyway, kind of fun – that’s what’s going down. I’m at the office now. Late night, I’m driving the Ferrari. Things are good. Time to get this Click Funnels launched so it can change the world, both your guys’ and mine. I’m excited, and I will talk to you guys soon.
Lessons that I learned from my Greco coach, and how they 10x’d my results.
On this episode Russell talks about his wrestling career and some of the things he learned when he started practicing for the Olympics with a new coach.
Here are some of the things you will hear in today’s episode:
So listen below to hear what Russell’s Olympic Wrestling Coach taught him.
---Transcript---
Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you to a very late night “Marketing in Your Car.”
Hey, everyone. It is eleven o’clock at night. I just got done with a two-hour wrestling match, and it was awesome. One of my buddies who’s been my jiu jitsu coach for the last few years or so – I wanted start to do some hard wrestling, and he was trying to learn some wrestling, so we’ve been going a few nights a week at night and beating the trash out of each other. We just got done with that, and I had so much fun. It was awesome. Despite the fact that I’m old and I’m out of shape, I could still do all right in wrestling, which makes me happy.
I’ve got a little drive home right now, and I want to talk about some stuff. I have no idea if this is going to relate to you or your business at all, but I think it’s really interesting, and I think that there are things that you can grasp from it, whether it be in your business or in your personal life. I’m going to be honest. I don’t know how these directly relate to you specifically, but it’s a principle that I learned in a really interesting way, and I’m going to share that with you, and hopefully you’ll get some value out of it. I think that if you think about it, and try to figure out how to apply it to your circumstances, you’ll find value, but it’s not going to be surface-level. It’s not going to be like, “Oh, yeah. This is how this works,” and so if you listen to this podcast, and you don’t get it [laughs], listen to it again, and then just think about it, and think about a couple of different aspects of your life. Think about your personal life, your business, your relationships, because I think that this is applicable on a lot of different levels besides the one I’m going to share with you right now. There’s my preview for this podcast.
The backstory is – a lot of you guys know my wrestling background. I wrestled in high school. I was a state champ. I had a chance to go the High School National Tournament, and I took second there. I became an All-American, lost in the High School National finals by two points. It was a really close match, but it was amazing. Out of all of the things in my life that I identify myself as, I still to this day, if you were to ask me, “Who are you, Russell?” I still consider myself a wrestler.
That was, more than business, more than anything else, that was the thing that defined me and made me who I am. I just love wrestling, and so I got done with high school, I got a scholarship offers at a couple of places. I wrestled a year at BYU, and then they cut the wrestling program, so I transferred up to Boise State. I wrestled my last four years there, and I just had a great experience. I can’t tell you how many happy moments and the stuff that came from that, but again, the defining thing in my life is definitely that.
I’m sure that all of you guys have in your life something that – I look at my life before wrestling, and I’d come home from school and I’d watch cartoons [laughs] until dinner, and then I’d eat dinner, then I’d go to bed. It was the first thing I had where I had a dream, and I had a goal, and I put everything – my blood, sweat, and tears into it and chased that dream and achieved some big goals, and also didn’t achieve some goals, and I learned how to win, and I learned how to lose. It was just – to this day, the greatest thing I’ve ever had a chance to experience – that was my wrestling.
Then when I got done with college, I took a couple of years off, and ate a lot of food. My wife got pregnant with twins, and I gained a lot of weight because of this whole thing, and fast forward about four or five years later, I just really missed wrestling. My business was cranking. We were making money, and I did a podcast about this earlier, so I’m not going to tell the whole story again, but I decided I wanted to train for the Olympics. We built an Olympic training center out here in Boise. I hired an Olympic Greco coach, moved him out here. We moved out six or seven guys who were training for the Olympics, and I hired them. They worked for me, and then we were wrestling every day. It was a really cool experience.
But the story I want to tell you guys today is we brought this coaches in to Ivan Ivanoff, and to this day, one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met. I don’t think I’ve ever even told him this before, but one of the people I look up to more than almost anyone else in the world, and just an amazing human and an amazing person. I remember we brought him in as this coach, and he had actually come from Bulgaria with basically nothing – showed up here in America. He moved out to Utah. He got this job coaching this little kids’ club. My little brother’s in that club, and in two years, he took my brother, and this group of kids who didn’t know Greco at all, and within a year and a half to two years, my brother took second place in the country in Utah and the state took first in the country in Greco.
He has this amazing ability to put his hands on somebody, and have them transformed. As soon as he did that with these high school kids, then the Olympic team brought him up, and he started coaching the Olympic Greco team, and raised up some of the most amazing athletes really, really quickly and just awesome, so when I wanted to start wrestling again, I was going to have someone, I wanted Ivan, and I’d never had a chance to personally work with him, but I saw what he did with my brother. I saw what he did with these other people, and so I wanted him there. I was lucky enough and blessed to have him agree, and he moved to Boise and he started coaching us.
It was interesting because I remember the first probably four or five months, we were practicing, and I was really frustrated about how he ran practices. I was almost confused, and I was thinking, “What is this guy doing? Does he not know how wrestling practices run?” Literally, what we would do is every Sunday we’d come in, and in wrestling you’ve got an offensive guy and a defensive guy, right? So I’m practicing moves on him, so I’ll have a guy stand there, and I’ll practice shooting on him, and I’ll practice taking him down. I’ll practice different moves. The defensive guy plays like a dummy, and he’ll let you take him down. That’s how you drill, right? You practice that way, and then you go and you wrestle matches where everyone’s going live, so you have this dummy’s day where your defensive person is like a dummy just standing there and going through the moves, and then you have full-speed wrestling where the guy’s going a hundred percent.
Ivan, literally, probably about the first four or five months, all he would do with us is he would drill the defensive guy on how to be a good partner, and like I said, I was getting so frustrated, like, “Ivan, you need to be teaching us stuff. I need to be learning some new take-downs. You need to be drilling us,” but he would focus on the defensive guy and getting the defensive guy to be a better partner, and teaching him to react the right way as a defensive partner needs to do.
Literally, every single day, we’d come to practice and we would drill defensively how to be good defenders during practice, how to be a good dummy man. I was so frustrated, and I remember one day he told me, “Russell, right now when our guys are coming in here, they’re drilling against people who don’t know how to be dummies, so that’s not going to help them in competition. In competition, if you’re not practicing against somebody who is a good partner, who is giving you the right looks and the feel and the pressure and things like that, if you’re not practicing perfectly in your practices, when you get in competition, you’re not going to be at that level,” and so he spent those three or four or five months getting us to be good defensive wrestlers, to be good dummies, and then as soon as he did that, and as soon as he got to the point where he said, “Yes, now you guys are good defensively. Now you’re good practice partners. Now we can focus on the offense,” and then he started focusing on the offense, and I saw the brilliance in what he did.
Literally because everyone on our team became great at being the dummy, and at giving the right looks and the right pressure when someone was drilling on you, when he started introducing new moves, we were able to pick them up, and not only pick them up faster, but our technique was perfect because the partners we were drilling against were defending them perfectly, and they were giving the right pressure and doing the right things, and so you could literally just start seeing the huge improvements in yourself. I look and a month and a half, two months later, that team that we had built up went to the U.S. tournament, and we were this unnamed team. I can’t remember – I’m pretty sure we won first place at that tournament, if not it was just because we didn’t have as many guys as the other teams, but just we did awesome. We had three or four guys in the finals, and it was really fascinating to watch that.
I’d forgotten that lesson, until a little while ago when I was wrestling with Jason, my jiu jitsu coach, and I told him that. I said, “What was interesting when we first brought Ivan in, the first three or four months, he didn’t focus on techniques for offensive techniques. He focused on drilling the defense man and making him become the perfect partner, so that when we did introduce techniques, we got those techniques perfectly, as opposed to picking them up in an un-perfect environment.
I told Jason that, and Jason got really excited. He went back to his club, and he started focusing on the guys he was training, not so much on offensive, because he said, “Offensively these guys come to practice and the defensive guys are just lying there. They’re doing to moves perfectly, and then they go to tournaments, and they go to matches, and they go to fights, and they’re losing because when they go against somebody who’s good, the pressure and the things that are happening defensively at practice are not at the same level as what’s happening in the tournaments. So he went back and he started focusing on that part of it with his guys, and he started seeing these huge leaps and bounds.
I think that a lot of times in all aspects of our life, we do what I thought we should do, and what I came in and wanted to coach my team, right? It was, “Let’s focus on offensive, offensive, offensive,” and that’s not always the right way to start something. Building the foundation and understanding that part of it, which may seem like you’re taking a step back. It might seem like you’re going slower at first, but it builds a solid structure and builds a platform where now you can offensively grow ten, twenty, thirty times faster.
Again, I’m not sure how this relates back to your life – if it’s in your relationships, if it’s in your businesses, if it’s in some other area – your finances, your religion – whatever it is, but I want you to think about that. What part of your life – it could be your nutrition. It could be your whatever, like what is the equivalent of what I talked about? What can you step back and focus on that builds out a better foundation so that when you are trying to make those offensive moves, you can grow and see ten, twenty, thirty times results from the exact same amount of effort?
Just kind of a thought. The guy got really excited about it, and I’ve been trying to figure out different ways to implement it back in to my life now, and I wanted to share it with you guys and let you guys stew on it. Again, if you don’t get it yet, that’s fine. It’s not something that’s right in front of your face. It’s something you’ve got to think about, and figure out how to relate it to yourselves.
I’m here now. I’m at my home. I’m going to go shower, and I’m going to take a nice, long nap, or I’ll just go to bed, and I’ll see you guys maybe tomorrow. I’m excited. Click Funnels relaunch is about to happen, and I’ve got Dylan and Todd in town. They just got here tonight, and I’m super fired up. We’ve got a new editor. It’s an exciting time, so maybe I’ll share some of our pre-launch strategies with you guys tomorrow on a podcast, because I think you’ll enjoy it. We’re doing some cool stuff and building a lot of buzz, and I’m excited for it.
With that said, you guys, I appreciate you all for listening, and I will talk to you soon.
How I can make as much front end revenue giving my product away for free, as I can selling it for full price.
On today’s episode Russell talks about something so easy that everyone should be doing it, but nobody is.
Here are some cool things you will hear in this episode:
So listen below to find out how Russell was able to transform the way he does business.
---Transcript---
Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you to another “Marketing in Your Car.”
Hey, everyone. It’s been a little while since I’ve done one of these. I’ve been super busy, and was actually out until about three o’clock last night recording the coolest promo video ever. I’m excited to launch it. It’s a blend between the FourHourBody.com, if you watch Tim Ferriss’ promo video there – it’s a blend between that and “Prison Break” [laughs], and I think it’s going to be pretty cool. It took us six hours to film, literally, twelve seconds of footage, so we’ll see how it all turns out. In my head it’s amazing, so I’m hoping that it actually turns out that way. That’s pretty exciting.
What I want to talk to you guys about right now is something that I think is literally changing my business right now, and it’s so simple and so easy that everybody should be doing it – and I don’t see anybody doing it yet. Actually, one other dude, I do. One dude was smart enough to see what I did and copy me.
So this is the concept. Let’s say you wanted to sell a $47 product. You’ve got your $47 product, and you’ve got your up sells, and you’ve got your down sells. That’s just trying to sell. For a typical $47 product, you’ve got to write a really good VSL. It’s a lot of work to sell that, right? So you take that into consideration, and there’s your $47 product.
Or you create a free shipping product, and then afterwards you have the same up sell and the same down sell you do on the $47 one, but it’s free plus shipping. I want you to go head-to-head with those. I’m curious. If you send a thousand people to both of those, and on your free plus shipping offer, your copy’s not amazing, but it’s a good offer, so people want it. How many people would you think want both of them? I was thinking we’d be conservative. From $47 down to free, let’s say we get three times as many, so let’s say at $47, I get ten customers. At free, I get thirty customers.
Now I want to ask you – do you guys agree that that’s pretty realistic? If I had almost the identical product, if it was just as good of a product, with one I’d get three times as many customers by not charging them and by giving it away for free? They just cover five or six bucks for shipping and handling? I’d say that three times is pretty conservative. Let’s say three times four – this argument of what I’m trying to sell you guys on right now, okay? [laughs] So there’s that.
Now this is a little secret that we figured out about seven or eight months ago that is literally transforming all three of our core companies. On the page that we’re taking the product, we have the order form, and they put in their credit card information, and then right before they click “Submit”, there’s a little tiny block that has two sentences. The sentences just say, “Yes, I want this,” and “Hey, do you want me to throw in this extra thing that does this that’s really cool. It’s an extra $47. This is a one-time offer, and not available anywhere else.” It’s literally probably thirty or forty words. I’ll have to find out how many exactly, but that’s about it, and then we sell this $47 product. That’s called a bump, that’s like an order form bump.
Now, right now, we’re averaging almost forty percent, so I think it’s thirty-eight percent is what we’re averaging – people who buy our free plus shipping offers, who click on that little button. So let’s say we broke it down, and we only got 33.3 percent to do it. So now I want to come back. We’ve got two offers. The $47 product that we’re selling along with our up sells, and then we’ve got our free plus shipping product, but on the order form, we’ve got this little bump that says “Hey, only $47”, and right now, we’re getting a third of the people to take that. What just happened?
What just happened is, we get the exact same amount of front-end revenue. Ten customers at $47 or thirty customers at zero plus shipping and handling with a $47 bump, if one-third of those people are taking that bump, which they are in all three of our tests right now. Do you guys see what I’m saying? I can get three times as many customers and make the exact same amount of front-end cash before people see up sells by doing the free plus shipping on page order form bump as I can for a $47 straight sale, and the $47 straight sale – I’ve got to sell the crap out of it, whereas with the free plus shipping, I’ve just got to tell them that there’s a cool thing for free. They pay for shipping, and on the order form I need two sentences to sell them on my core $47 product.
It’s interesting. We were doing some consulting stuff, and these guys had a sales page, and then their up sell was their membership site. It was a $1 trial, and they’re getting fifteen to eighteen percent of the people to take that trial. They had some really good copy – a long form video and everything to sell people on that $1 trial. I said, “If you just got rid of that whole video, added that offer to your order page, and write two sentences, they said the lowest we’ve gotten is twenty-eight percent conversion. The highest is over fifty. They’re averaging fifty – pretty close. I think it’s thirty-eight percent or so, are taking that offer. It changes the dynamics of everything.
So I want you to think about that. It might be kind of hard to envision from me explaining it, so listen to this two or three times, and kind of map it out, but the concept is amazing. When we launched Click Funnels, we gave away a free trial, and then we had a $47 bump on the order form. That was the lowest one, I think. We had eighteen percent of the people take that. From the eighteen percent, it made something like $60,000 in sales from giving away free accounts. So pretty sexy, pretty exciting and definitely something you guys should look at and figure out how to try to implement in your business.
I’m at the office now. I have a fun day planned out, so I will talk to you guys all again later.
A cool strategy to redistribute your work day into other areas of your life.
On today’s episode Russell talks about receiving advice from his life coach about shaving a couple hours off his work schedule each day.
Here are some fun things you will hear in this episode:
So listen below to hear Russell’s plan of getting the same amount of work done in less hours.
---Transcript---
Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you to “Marketing in Your Car.”
Hey everyone. It’s another early morning day for me today. I had my accountability call with me coach, Carl, today, which was kind of exciting. I learned some cool stuff. I’m heading in to the gym, and I wanted to jump on and do a quick podcast because I thought what I learned today was pretty profound. I hope it will help a lot of you guys, too.
All of us, as entrepreneurs, have this horrible, horrible problem of working too much. I’m not sure if you guys are the same way, but I’m guessing you probably are [laughs], and it’s interesting. Carl – one of the reasons why I wanted him to be my accountability coach is he used to work the 9-to-5, five days a week, like all of us, and then he started cutting out Fridays, and then he started cutting out every other week and literally, right now he works Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, every other week, so he works eight days a month right now. He’s making more money than he ever was working the whole time, right? Today his big challenge to me was, “Hey, Russell, you need to start shifting your work habits and what you’re doing.” It was interesting.
He said that, “Do you think that if God took the day, and instead of making it twenty-four hours, he made it thirty hours, would you get more stuff done?” I was like, “Probably not. Maybe a little bit, but not a ton more.” He said, “Okay, well what if we went the other direction. Instead of having twenty-four hours in a day, he cut it down to twenty hours a day? Do you think you would get less stuff done?” and I was like, “No, I think we’d still be able to get everything done in the same amount of hours. We’d be able to jam it in. A lot of times, when you have less time, you get more stuff done.”
He was like, “Well what if we did that to your work day? Right now, what time do you usually leave the office?” I said, “Oh, about six.” He said, “Let’s shave it off so that every day, you start leaving the office at four? Do you think that you could do that?” I’m like, “I guess I could.” He said, “What do you do from four to six, anyway?” I’m like, “I don’t know – just stuff?” He said, “I bet if you cut those things out, all of the stuff you could get done prior to four. At four o’clock, you have to turn your computer off, and you had to leave the office.” We went through the whole process, and he committed me to doing that, which is kind of fun, so I’m excited to start trying that out today.
The next thing was he was like, “What about Fridays, man? What do you do on Fridays?” I was explaining. I explained what I do, and he said, “Friday’s kind of dead day, then, right?” I’m like, “Well I get stuff done, but, yeah, it’s not as productive usually,” and he’s like, “What if you just jammed all of your Friday stuff in to Friday morning, and then every Friday at noon you left and took that last half of the day off? What do you think would happen?” I said, “Probably not a lot. I don’t think I’d lose out on too much stuff.” So he kind of committed me to that. So I am shaving two hours a day off of my work day, and then I’m going to shave half a day off of my Fridays, and just see what happens, and my guess is that the world’s not going to come to an end. I’m excited to find out [laughs].
I want you guys to think about that as well for your life. All of us don’t have enough time – enough time for your family, enough time for your church, enough time for all of the different pieces you’re having, but we spend so much time at the office working. So I’m going to try to shave off those two hours and put it into use in other things in my life that are out of balance and see what happens. I’m guessing, I’m not sure yet, but I’m guessing that everything else will just fall in to the right spots. So I’m going to try it. I want to encourage you guys to try it as well.
I remember one time I was listening to this old cassette course I bought from Jay Conrad Levinson, Jay Abraham, Chet Holmes – I can’t remember who all. It was called “Guerilla versus Gorilla”, and it was awesome. One of the concepts I learned in there, Jay Conrad Levinson was saying that people have habits – a lot of us will kick our business and work eighty hours a week, and we’re going to work so that eventually we can launch whatever, and then we can cut down to twenty hours a week. He said that what he’s found is that whatever your habits are when you start will be your habits forever. If you want to live a lifestyle where you work twenty hours a week, you have to start working twenty hours a week from day one, otherwise you’ll just never get there. It will become a habit. I thought that was interesting as well.
Anywho, that is my game plan to start shaving off some time and redistribute that in other parts of my life that are a little out of balance right now and see what it’s going to do overall. I’m fired up. I’m excited. I recommend you guys test out the same thing. Right now I’m at the gym. I’m going to go get tough, and it’ll be fun [laughs]. I appreciate you guys, and I’ll talk to you soon.
One little secret I learned from the Clickfunnels launch.
On this episode Russell talks about the secret of the pre-indoctrination video and why it is so cool.
Here are some interesting to listen for in this episode:
So listen below to hear why pre-indoctrination videos will help tell your audience what to think, and therefore what to buy.
---Transcript---
Good morning, everyone. This is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you to “Marketing in Your Car.”
Hey, guys and gals, and everyone who’s listening. I hope you’ve had an awesome day so far today. If you’re in the car right now, then you’re just like me, and you’re getting excited and pumped up for the day – trying to get in the state, right?
I just want to talk about what my mind’s been on all weekend, because it’s been kind of exciting. For the last however many years – seven or eight years, I’ve been watching everyone do their big product launches. They do the multi-video sequences and all of those kinds of things. I’ve done a lot of product launches in my day, but I never really did the whole multi-video thing. For whatever reason, I just never did it.
The first time I’ve really done it was with the Click Funnels launch to our own internal list, where basically – and partly it was because we had these really cool product launch funnels that I wanted to test out, where it lets you do four videos and all kinds of stuff, and so I got really excited to try it out. So we made these four videos and they were fun and they were entertaining and we got to use some good content. It was just kind of cool.
The coolest thing about it was that people loved the videos. Even those that didn’t buy it, they watched the videos. They loved them. They build a good relationship, and it was cool. I keep thinking more and more about that. I remember I was at a Mastermind meeting, and Frank Kern was there and he was talking what he calls “indoctrination pieces”. He says that before he sells anything, he sends out three or four e-mails of these different indoctrination pieces to pre-dispose people to actually buying. He was showing videos he’s send out. He was showing pdfs. He was showing all of this stuff to go out there and give cool stuff out before you ask for a sale.
The other day on Facebook, I was watching a copywriter [laughs]. He’s one of my friends. He was bragging about two or three letters he wrote for Frank Kern, and how awesome they were, and how they did, [imitates] “a million dollars in like twenty minutes,” and all of this garbage. I was like, “Yeah, but in twenty minutes, there’s no way everyone read the sales letter. They just bought because they wanted to buy.” It’s kind of like he had this feeling.
Frank came in and he was like, “Hey, so-and-so’s sales letters are awesome, but you have to understand that the sales letter’s just one piece of the sequence to this. The sequence is what sells people. It’s all of these indoctrination pieces. It’s all of these things that are happening ahead of time that pre-frame them and get them prepared and get them warmed up to actually buy, where at the last minute, a lot of people never even read the sales letter. They’re just going to buy it because they’re going to buy.
That was kind of a big “aha”, a big epiphany for me. Having the perfect, scripted sales pitch is awesome, and especially for cold trafficking. If they don’t know you, and you’re driving them in from Facebook or somewhere where you’ve got to click and you’ve got to convert them really, really quick. A good old-fashioned video sales letter or an actual sales letter is definitely the way you’ve got to go to convert them, but after they’re on your list, or you’ve got partners promoting it and things like that, I think the best way to do it is to take them through a gauntlet of pre-indoctrination videos and audios and cool things, just to build up that relationship, and do that first.
I got excited. I’m going to go back through all of them. We’re in this process now of re-launching our affiliate program and re-rolling out each of our products and a bunch of other cool things. We’re going to be doing that for each one. I’m excited.
For example, this week we’re rolling out a new project called “List Hacker”, and I’m really excited for it. With that, we basically used four different videos. The first video is this one that I recorded about a year ago with a guy named Jonathan [inaudible 2:25:14]. He came out and it was a video that I recorded at my old duplex, which is where I actually started my business. I told my list-building story, and how I’d gotten shut down for spamming, and all of these things I’d tried to do. I told that story, and it was fun.
So that’s video number one in the sequence, and then number two is me sitting in my office with a whole bunch of junk mail, and I’m talking about junk mail and why it’s important. I tell that whole story, which is again, not really a sales piece. It’s just kind of getting people excited, and it’s something cool that they can watch and get away from their day. The third one is where I do a little more teaching and training how to map out what a list hacking funnel looks like, and in the fourth one I actually show us doing a trip to Kenya, because a percentage of all the money I make goes back to the kids in Kenya. Then from there, “Boom,” then we push the actual sell – push people to the actual sales video which then slam dunks and closes them.
It’s kind of fun. I look at all of my projects. What kind of cool videos can I do to illustrate the concept and get people excited and provide some value before I ever ask for the sale? That’s what we’re going to go back and do with all of our stuff. Just for you guys to think about that, even if it’s not awesome sales pieces, just think of three or four cool content videos around that you for each of my products, just to get my warm list internally to get excited and build a little hype, a little excitement, give some value away, and like Frank Kerns, some pre-indoctrination pieces. Get them re-indoctrinated to what you need them to think to be able to purchase your product or service.
That’s it for today. I’m going to go in today and bust out some pre-indoctrination videos. We should be rolling out the first video, “List Hacking” today, which I’m excited for, and then we’ll go from there. All right, everyone, have a great day.
The easy way to get to the top.
---Transcript---
Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you to “Marketing in Your Car.”
Hey everyone. I’m heading back from the gym right now, and I just had a quick thought. Because the drive from my gym to my house is even less than from the office, this one won’t probably be that long.
Last night, I had a really cool experience. I had a chance to talk to Dave Asprey from Bullet-Proof Executive. First off, it was really, really cool. I’ve been trying to do the Bulletproof Diet. I thought I was doing it well, but I’ve been gaining weight and gaining body fat. I was like [laughs], “I don’t think this Bulletproof thing is really working. I think there’re some issues here, and so two months ago, I was on his site, and he had a link. It was like, “Hey, five hundred bucks for a one-on-one consultation.” I was like, “All right. Sweet. I can do that,” and so I paid him five hundred bucks. Last night was my one-on-one consultation with him, and it was pretty cool, because literally, I sat down with him on Skype chat, and within about thirty seconds, he told me everything I was doing wrong, why I was screwing it up. I always thought I was doing it intelligently, and I was doing it totally backwards. We completely rebuilt the whole thing, and it was awesome. I gained more from that hour than I could have gotten in five years reading every one of his blog posts, listening to all of his podcasts, and going through all of that kind of stuff.
It made me start thinking about how when I first got started in this business, I met this guy. I can’t remember his name, but it was at one of Armand Morin’s events, and I may have even done a podcast about this before, because I think it’s a cool concept, but I started thinking about it again last night. It was a young kid, and he was at this event, and he had joined Armand’s Platinum Group, and I was talking to him, and he was in ten different Platinum groups, and all of these different Masterminds. I was like, “Dude, how in the world can you afford all of that? That stuff’s expensive.” He said, “Russell, I learned something early in my life. There’re two ways to get to the top. Number one, you can work your way in. Number two, you can buy your way in. I choose the second. I could spend three years trying to get to know Armand and become friends with him and do a deal with him and learn from him, and all kinds of stuff, or I can just pay him some money, and “Boom,” buy my way in. I buy into everyone’s programs,” and he just works. –“There’re two ways. You either work your way in or buy your way in. It’s faster to buy your way in.”
I was thinking about how with Dave Asprey, I paid him five hundred bucks. Not a lot of money, but I had a chance to spend an hour with him on Skype. We got to know each other. At the end of it, we talked about his book he’s launching. I talked to him about how to promote it, and “Boom.” We feel like we had a connection, and now moving forward, I feel like he will be a friend – someone who I’ll be able to help in the future. He’ll help me, and that kind of thing, whereas if it was someone who I had just contacted him normally, I probably could have gotten through to him. I probably could have met him, but not at the same level as when I was just able to come and just pay and get in that way.
It’s interesting. I’m looking at the people who are in my Inner Circle, people who are in my Knight program and in our coaching programs, and its fun, because literally, I have Voxer on my phone, and all of the people in my Inner Circle have Voxer with me. I know their businesses. They ask me questions all of the time. I know their ins and outs. I know their ups and their downs. They get so much more access to me, and I feel like they’re my friends now. Again, I never would have met these people if they’d had to work their way in, but they bought their way in, and now “Boom,” I’m here. I’m on their team. I’m helping them out in their businesses, and it’s a ton of fun.
There was a guy the other day who – now, I charge a lot more for an hour-long consult than Dave does, but he bought an hour-long consult with me. It was really cool. I went through the consult, and I gave him my all in an hour. We built out an entirely new business model for him online, mapped out the whole thing for him, and it turned out pretty awesome. At the end of it, he was like, “Hey, Russell, by the way, I’ve got this new thing,” that he was doing, and he explained it to me, and it was awesome, and now I am giving him money back in exchange for his thing. But he bought his way in, and that conversation probably never would have happened. It cost him money, but again, in return, I ended up investing in something he had, and he made his money back immediately. It was pretty cool.
That’s my thought for today. There’re two ways to get in, again, you guys. You can work your way in, or you can buy your way in, but it’s always better and faster to buy your way in. That’s my thoughts. If you don’t have the money, then go fricking earn it. Go get a job. Go rake some leaves.
I literally, when I bought my first thing, I had to go rake leaves. I bought a $12 rake and a tarp at Home Depot, and I raked leaves for four or five weekends in a row to be able to invest in Mark Joyner’s “Farewell Package”. That’s what you’ve got to do sometimes – buy your way in.
That’s my message for today. I hope that helps some of you guys. Check out Dave Asprey’s stuff. Super cool guy. I’m excited for his book to come out. We’ll talk to you guys all again really, really soon. Thanks.
The secret of being present all the time.
---Transcript---
Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson, and I’m here in the car today with Dallin, who is my little entrepreneur, and we’re here for another exciting episode of “Marketing in Your Car”.
So today, its summertime still, and Dallin wanted to come to work with me today. He’s got his little packet of stuff to work on his projects. It’s going to be exciting. What are you planning on doing today?
Dallin: Find out how to build a robot.
Russell: He’s going to find out how to build a robot, which is a very important task. Do you think we’re going to sell that if we figure it out?
Dallin: Maybe.
Russell: Maybe. That’s a good idea. So that’s his plan today [laughs].
I wanted to tell you guys about a thought I had over the last week. It’s been a while since I’ve done a “Marketing in Your Car”, and one of the main reasons was I in Maui with my beautiful wife. She had a birthday, and I surprised her, and had her family come and watch the kids while we were gone, and took her to Maui.
We had a lot of fun, but one of the things I learned on this trip – I re-realized, and I wanted to give it to you. I want to share with you guys. One of the last nights we were there, we went to this luau. Everything out there – you know how tourist traps are – they’re super expensive, right? I think it was a hundred and fifty bucks a person, so it cost us three hundred bucks to go there and have this luau, and we were sitting there and we ate dinner, and we enjoyed the conversation with some people we met, and it was really fun. Then they do an actual luau dance, with the hula dances and all of this stuff. It was really neat. We were watching it, and right in front of us to the right, there was this lady who got out her video camera. She opened it up, and she clicked “Record”, and she was looking through this little tiny screen at the hula dance, which, it’s nighttime. Her little hand-held $200 camera from K-Mart barely picked up any light. You could barely see anything, right? [laughs] She sat there for the entire ninety minutes or so recording it, looking through this little tiny screen, barely seeing it, so she could record it so she would watch it again later, I guess?
I remember I was sitting there with my wife, and we were watching and enjoying this thing, and seeing some amazing things – people doing some cool choreographic things. I don’t know – I love watching them perform, just doing their talents, and I looked over at this lady. She was looking through the screen, and she’s missing the entire thing so that she can record it, so that she can watch it later.
I thought it was ironic. How many times in life we’re missing the most important stuff that’s happening around us, because we’re looking at our computer screen or we’re looking at our phone, or we’re recording something and missing the entire thing. I was reading somewhere on Facebook the other day. I don’t even know whose concert it was. It was some concert. I think it was Jack White or something. I have no idea who that is, but I remember I was thinking Jack Black and he was a white guy, and his last name was White, so I think it was Jack White. Some of you guys probably know who he is. I think it was him. He was doing a concert. I think he was on some TV show – Jay Leno or, I guess Jay Leno’s not on anymore [laughs]. That shows you how up I am with my pop culture, right? But anyway, he was on this show, and he was talking about how they don’t let cell phones into their concert. He said, “We don’t want people watching it, experiencing it through this tiny little screen. We want them actually experiencing it. That’s why we do live concerts. They can go and watch the YouTube clips if they want to watch YouTube clips, but if they want to actually experience it, they have to be there and be present and experience it.”
That’s my big take-away, was that most of us aren’t present enough. I know I’m guilty of this in a lot of things – in my kids’ lives, sometimes, huh, Dallin?
Dallin: Yes.
Russell: [laughs] That’s not a good thing to admit to. No, but even one day in Muai, we were sitting there, and my wife and I were in bed and we were texting on the phone, on Facebook, and stuff like that, and I texted her in the middle, and I said, “Hey, how are you doing?” It was just kind of funny.
We need to be more present in where we’re at, and we need to put away our phones. When you’re at something amazing, don’t worry about capturing it on video so you can watch it later. Watch it right now, and enjoy it, and be there for the moment, otherwise you’re going to miss it. It happens way too often. The more connected we become, the more its happening. It’s happening to everyone, around the world.
So I just want to encourage you guys. Don’t be the person who’s at the luau watching this amazing thing and trying to capture it on video so that you can watch it later. Be present, enjoy it now, and don’t miss the moment, because they go way too fast.
So that’s about it, you guys. We are almost to the office. Dallin and I will have a fun-filled day. We’re going to be launching a new project called “List Hacking” this week, which I’m super excited about. We’ve got a video guy coming over to film us and to film some stuff. We’re going to roll it out, and what’s exciting is we haven’t started building it yet. We’re going to build the entire membership site, sales process, everything inside of Click Funnels, and I will be able to get done in a day or so what used to take me two weeks, and so anyway, just kind of fun. We’ve finished the beta for Click Funnels, now we’re going to just be rolling out a bunch of projects just to prove how awesome it is. People can see the power of Click Funnels. It should be exciting.
We’re at the office, you guys. Have an awesome day, and we will talk to you soon.
Lessons in success from my 8 year old son.
---Transcript---
Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you to a late night “Marketing in Your Car.”
I’m actually headed back home. Todd is in town. We launched Click Funnels last week. It’s been a smashing success, and now we’re doing the other side of the software business, which is keeping up with customer support [laughs], and features, and bugs, and all of that fun kind of stuff. It’s been a lot of fun. He flew in today, and we’re going to be hanging out this week, cleaning it up, and making it perfect so that we can do our big, big launch here. Hopefully within the next twenty or thirty days or so – we’ll plan that out tomorrow, but I’m super excited for that.
I wanted to do a podcast today, because I wanted to share a story that happened this afternoon with my son, Dallin. Dallin is the little entrepreneur in our family, for sure, and he’s always trying to figure out how to make more money. He’s doing yard sales and lemonade stands and all sorts of stuff.
Yesterday, he told my wife, Collette, that he wanted to open up a bank account. He has a couple of dollars, and she’s like, “Well you have to have more money to open a bank account.” So he’s like, “Well I need to make more money so I can open a bank account,” so that’s his mindset. We were driving home from church today, and he had this idea. He said, “Hey, mom and dad, if I lose a tooth today, then the tooth fairy can give me some money, and I can use that money to open a bank account.” I said, “Yeah, but how are you going to lose a tooth?” He said, “What I’m going to do is I’m going to get a string, and I’m going to tie it around my tooth, and I’ll tie it to a door handle, and I’ll slam the door, and my tooth will get pulled out.”
We kind of laughed and giggled, and that’s where I thought it was going to end. Fast forward thirty minutes later, we’re in the house, and my wife and I are making lunch for the kids and getting everything ready for that, and I keep hearing the door slam upstairs. I totally forgot about what’s happening, and so I’m yelling upstairs, “Quit slamming the door,” and then Bowen yells down, “It’s Ellie slamming it. She’s trying to pull out Dallin’s tooth.” [laughs] I was like, “Oh man, hold on,” and so like any good dad would do, I went and grabbed my phone, because I wanted to get this on tape [laughs], so I grabbed my phone, and I ran upstairs. He’d gotten the ribbon from wrapping paper on a Christmas box, and he’d tied a little knot around his tooth, and then he’d tied it to the door. All of the kids were up there trying to figure out how to make Dallin some money, and Dallin was literally trying to pull his tooth out so he could make money so that he could open up a savings account.
What was so funny was he was standing on the wrong side of the door, so when he would slam it, the string would actually get shorter instead of pulling it, and two of the times they were doing it, they were perplexed. They were like, “Why is this not working? Why is it not working?” Then they were both like, “Dallin, you’ve got to be on this side of the door.” I’m filming this whole thing on my phone, so Dallin goes on the inside, and they start slamming the door from the inside trying to pull his tooth out [laughs]. They would slam it, and sometimes the ribbon on his tooth would pop off, and other times it would start sliding through his teeth and not pull all of the way out. Anyway, I got, probably five or six times, them slamming the door and trying to lose his tooth. I thought it was really funny. Then I had them stop so that we could come down and have lunch.
I started thinking about it. I started thinking about this little kid, right? My little Dallin – he’s eight years old, and he’s got in his mind, he needs money.—““I need to figure out how to make some money.” There’re a lot of things he can do. He can do chores. He knows he can make some money doing that, but thought, “A quick way I can make money is to rip one of my teeth out.” Instead of thinking about it and how it’s going to hurt and all of these things, he just went and did it – just got out there and tied a string to his tooth, tied it to a doorknob, and started slamming the door trying to rip his tooth out.
I was proud of him, not because I thought it was the smartest idea to do, but I just look at how many entrepreneurs I have a chance to work with and how many people I work with. Most of them want something, and they want money. They want whatever, but then when you lay out, “Here’s the steps you need to do to accomplish that goal and get that thing you want,” they don’t do it. They’ll buy course after course after course, and they’ll learn, and they’ll hear, and they’ll have ideas and all of these things in their head, but they’re not willing to step up and fricking tie a string to their tooth and slam the door.
I think that that’s one of the biggest problems with people today. I’m so proud of Dallin for doing that – for getting off his butt, tying a string to his tooth, and slamming the door trying to make some money. I think that for any of you guys that are listening to this who are on that fence right now, and you’ve been in this learning cycle, and you’re learning, and you’re learning, and you’re enjoying this learning cycle, it’s time to get off your butt, tie a string to your tooth, and slam the door. I really think that mindset, that attitude, that thing that Dallin has, whatever that is, and I’m proud of him as my son for doing that, but it’s what all of us need.
I look at the things in my life that have been successful, and a lot of it is because of that – because I’ve just gone out there and tried to do that thing. If you’re struggling, this is your call to action. This is your time to get off your butt, tie a string to your tooth, and slam the door, and go out there and find these things. Just do it. Do what it takes to make money. It’s going to be painful. It might cost you some money. You have to get out of your comfort zone. You’re going to have to stretch probably further than you’ve ever stretched before in your life. You’re going to have to have some sleepless nights. You’re going to have to risk some of your own hard-earned money, and you’re going to have to be able to do a lot of work to reach your dream and to have what you want, but it’s worth it, I promise you guys. It is so worth it.
Anyway, that’s my message for you guys today. I thought it was kind of a fun story. If my eight-year-old son, to earn fifty cents or a dollar, whatever the tooth fairy would bring him [laughs], he would have done it, is willing to tie a string on his tooth – on a tooth that’s not even loose [laughs], and try to rip it out to make a buck, what are you willing to do? What are you willing to do to change your life? If you’re not willing to do something, then you’re probably going to keep being it at the spot you’re at right now, so figure out what you’re willing to do, get off of your butt, and go do it. That’s my message for tonight.
Thanks, you guys. I’m sure you’re going to be hearing more from me this week. I’m back from vacation now, and we’re having some fun rolling out the new company. I’m excited to be sharing all of the little behind-the-scenes things that are happening with you guys. Thanks, again, and I’ll talk to you soon.
How to trick your mind to get crap done.
---Transcript---
Good morning, everyone. This is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you to “Marketing in Your Car”.
Hi, everyone. Today is an exciting day. It’s a Monday, and we are about to launch Click Funnels. This week is our execution week, which is kind of fun. Now, luckily for me, my wife and kids went out of town this week. They’ve gone camping for the next three days, which basically means I get to pull all-nighters for three nights in a row, launch this thing, and then pass out for two weeks straight, unless there’re issues. Then it means I’ve got to not pass out for a week straight [laughs], but I’m fired up and excited.
I wanted this podcast just to talk about the process of actually getting a project or a product, whatever you want to call it, out of the door. I know that it’s something that all of us go through, and it’s funny. Todd and I were talking about this as we’ve been getting all of this stuff done. It’s kind of like, I think it’s Pareto’s Law, where no matter how much time you have left before the launch date, things will always fill up all of the available time to get things done. That’s what I’m feeling like right now. Literally, the launch date was two months ago, and then one month ago, and then this week, it’s happening, win, lose, or draw, and we still have so much stuff that’s got to be done [laughs], but it’s at the point now where we’re going to make it happen, and we’re put it out there. We’ll do whatever it takes and kill ourselves and get it done, and then we’ll back fill it, and fix any issues we see along the way.
I think one of the things that keeps most people from ever getting their projects out there, and I’m guessing most of you have got at least one, if not ten or twenty projects [laughs] that are mostly done, but they’re not finished yet. They’re not pushed out the door. People, a lot of times, ask me, “Russell, how do you get so much stuff done. How do you get so many things out the door?” I think part of it is because of the philosophy we started using five or six – I don’t know, maybe longer – seven or eight years ago.
It started when I heard a tape that was called “The Scuttlebutt Tape” from Gary Halbert and – it wasn’t John Carlton – Gary Halbert and Michael Fortin were talking about copywriting stuff, and one of the things that Halbert talked about was this concept called “Lead or Gold”. It was interesting to me because he talked about, and again, I don’t know if the story’s true or not, but the illustration of what he shared was powerful for me. He said that down in Mexico that when the mafia warlords wanted to change laws, they would go to the government and say, “Hey, you need to change this law.” The government would be like, “No. We’re not going to do that for you. That’s crazy.” [laughs] So what they would do then is the mafia would go and break in to people’s houses late at night – the government officials. They would wake them up out of their sleep, and they would come up to them, and they would have a gun and a bag of gold, and they would say, “We need you to change this law tonight, and you’ve got two options – lead or gold. Which one do you want? Do you want a bullet to the head, or would you like some cash?” Very quickly, somehow, laws were able to be changed. When the options are lead or gold, it’s pretty easy to get things done [laughs].
I started thinking of that in my business. How many times do we have projects where we’re like, “Oh, we’re going to launch this week. Oh, okay, next week,” and six years later, nothing’s ever happened. We started setting these deadlines, and we called them “lead or gold deadlines”, where it’s like, “We’re launching Tuesday at noon. Win, lose, or draw, it’s happening, and we’ve got two options – either lead or gold, and we’ve got to make this happen.”
When you give yourself those two options, and those two options only, it’s amazing what kind of stuff you can get done. It’s amazing how you can get people to stay late, and you can stay late, and you can work harder, and you can do whatever it takes. You’ll get that project done. So for us and all of our coaching groups who have been here for the last five or six years, I always talk about this, and I say, “Look, when you guys get home from this event, or home from whatever it is that you’ve learned about something, you have to go and set lead or gold deadlines for each step of the process.” You say, “Look, for me, first I’ve got to get the sales stuff done, okay? So my deadline is next Tuesday at three – lead or gold. There’s nothing that can move that date. I will die if it doesn’t happen,” and you just make sure it happens.
Then the next one – “We’re going to have this part done by this day, and you set that lead or gold deadline, and then you hit it, and you keep doing those things. For most of you guys who aren’t getting the things done that you want, it’s because you’re too soft on yourselves. You let yourselves off the hook, like, “Oh well, we ran out of time. We’ll do it tomorrow,” and when you do that, it keeps getting pushed forever, because of Pareto’s law where as much time as you give it, things will always fill up the expanse of that time, no matter what it is, and so I promise you guys, if you want your project tomorrow or a month from now, either way, you’re going to be up until three or four or five o’clock in the morning the night before cramming to get it done, and so why not pick the date that’s earliest and get you more money?
That’s what we’re doing. I’m going in to the office now. We’ve got two and a half days away from launch time, and we picked our deadline, and we are going to hit it, and no matter what happens, we will make it work, and I’m excited. I’m fired up. It’s going to be an awesome day today. I hope you guys have a good day as well. Set some lead or gold deadlines, and we will see you guys again on the next episode. Thanks, everyone.
What really happened over the last three days…
---Transcript---
Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you once again to “Marketing in Your Car”.
So first off, I want to say that I think it’s about time we get a new theme song. What do you guys think? [laughs] The 1980s initial version is about ready to be retired, I think, so that’s going to be first on my list for this week.
Anywho, it’s been a little while since I’ve done a podcast. The reason why is that I’ve been neck deep in getting ready to launch Click Funnels, and I’m guessing from the outside, everything seems so calm and simple and easy for what we’re doing. We launched the first pre-launch video yesterday, but there’s always a story behind the story, and so I thought I would just share that to you guys while I’m heading in to the office, because I think it’s always fun.
First off, Click Funnels has been a big project [laughs]. We’ve been going crazy trying to get all of the templates done, working and testing them on every browser, and on and on and on, and it’s been a ton of work on that side, but it’s turning out amazingly. For the last three or four nights in a row, I’ve been pulling sixteen hour days. I work eight hours, go home and play with the kids, and then go back another eight hours, and then come home and sleep for a few hours, and then go back again. It’s been a lot of work on that side.
The last week we started planning out the pre-launch. What should we do? How should we do it? My team member, John Parkes, and I sat down and we brainstormed out an idea that it would be fun to have Chris, our number one designer, go head to head with somebody who’d never used Click Funnels before, and see who could build a website the fastest. We started brainstorming these ideas, and it went from this really simple idea to us renting out an octagon and having these two fight it out in the octagon. We got really excited. This was Thursday.
I had this guy who wanted to do the video, so I called him up and said, “Hey, do you have some time next week to do videos?” He said, “No, I’m flying into Tokyo on Monday.” I was like, “On Monday? Crap. I need these before Monday.” He’s like, “I have tomorrow, Friday, if you want to do it then.” I’m like, “All right, man. Let’s do it,” and so Thursday night, I’m scrambling to try to write scripts for this four video launch sequence. Typically I think, most people spend a couple of weeks writing out scripts to launch a brand-new company [laughs], but literally, I had to do it in about an hour.
Then I had to find an octagon, so I’m calling around, and luckily, some of my buddies own an MMA gym and we were able to rent an octagon. We got the camera person in. I needed to find somebody to be the other person competing against Chris. One of my friends is an author in town. She’s written a book, and she’s been super successful. She’s a life coach, and she also certifies life coaches, so I called her and begged her, and she dropped everything, moved all of her appointments around so she could show up and be the other person, and on and on and on.
That day, I get a call from the Ferrari place, because my Ferrari, which is a whole other story for another podcast, has been in the shop for six weeks. They’re like, “The Ferrari’s done,” and I’m like, “Oh, sweet. We can have the Ferrari in the video.” So I raced down to go grab the Ferrari, and on my way back, trying to get home, it died about thirteen times [laughs], so it still doesn’t actually work, but at least it moves forward long enough so you can catch a glimpse of us driving it on the video [laughs].
So we put the whole thing together, and then the video guy is scrambling because he’s flying to Tokyo Monday morning at 6 a.m., so he’s scrambling to edit the videos and put it all together and get all of his stuff done. Then he texts me Sunday night at about five in the morning and says, “Hey, I got it pretty much done. I left the hard drive out in front of my house, and you can go grab it, and hopefully the files will all work for you.” [laughs]
So I go and grab the thing, and it looked good, but there were some tweaks I needed, and my brother, who’s my main video guy, was heading out of town Monday morning, so I called him and tell him and his wife they can’t leave yet, and so he goes down on his computer and he’s editing the videos and tweaking some stuff to get it just perfect [laughs]. I swear, his wife is probably cursing me out, because they were leaving on this big family vacation. We get that back, and then at the same time, we’re in the process of moving our e-mail auto-responders again, for about the third time this year, to this company called MaroPost, and we’re having issues there. We can’t get the list imported [laughs], and then their scrubbing process, which should take an hour, took about three days.
Then we started building out the launch funnel inside Click Funnels, and honestly, the only funnel I’d never tested yet was the launch funnels, so we started testing them. The first time around, there’re always issues that come with any funnel. Then we’re rebuilding our entire launch funnel sequences and Click Funnels and we’re adding features, and it’s like this storm of things, literally, for the last four or five days. I don’t even know.
Finally, yesterday, I was in the office, and I hadn’t slept in about three days in a row. I literally am living off of our supplement that we’re launching in the MMA market, called “MMA Ignite”. I take a shot of that, every few hours to wake me back up, but the effects of it had stopped working yesterday. I think my body was just done. I was just dragging, putting all of the pieces together, and then finally we got the launch page up. We got the video live. MaroPost uploaded. I sent the e-mail out to the list, and I sat down, and I was just like [sighs], “We did it.” I was so excited.
I went home, played with the kids for a bunch of time, and then checked my phone, and a whole bunch of people were texting, “Man, that video is awesome. It’s the best video you’ve ever done.” You know, all of the things people message me on Facebook and stuff about how impressed they were with it all, and how good the scripts were and everything. It just made me smile, knowing that we pulled the whole thing off, literally, in about a day, if even that. I think it turned out pretty good, so behind the exterior, there’s always crazy stuff happening inside.
Oh, and not only that, we’ve got our support team, right? We ramped up because we were getting ready for Click Funnels, but then, low and behold, Neuracel just went crazy, and so we’ve got three full-time support people who’re doing Neuracel, and we have no one to support Click Funnels, so we’ve been scrambling and trying to hire people in Boise. We haven’t found anyone good.
Luckily, thankfully, and hopefully some of you guys listening have probably got some great friends who’ve volunteered who are good at something, like Garrett Pierson. He’s the owner of a whole bunch of sites, Trust Guard, Shopper Approved, Kart Rocket. He just dedicated his time. He’s coming up for a week to work for free just to help us during the launch week [laughs]. We’ve got a couple of other people that are I met on Facebook that are friends that are going to come in and work for a couple of weeks. People are literally flying here just to help out with the launch, just to help us so that it will go off opefullyHwithout a hitch while we’re finding a more long-term support team.
So anyway, it’s just kind of crazy. I’m grateful for everyone on my team that’s made this happen. I’m grateful for everybody outside of it, people like Garrett and others, who don’t have any vested interest, but just care about me and about us enough to come and throw in a helping hand. Some really cool things are happening, but I just wanted to share that, because I’m sure a lot of you guys, in your business, you see you’re doing stuff, and you feel like nothing’s working, and you’re going crazy, and you’re freaking out. Even though it may look like on the outside that we have it all together all of the time, we’re just like everybody else. It’s a lot of work and a lot of juggling, and when it all comes together in the end, it feels really, really good.
I’m excited. Launch Week is in less than a week – Launch Day. We’re just going to launch to our internal list first and we’re going to test that out and make sure we can handle the support, and then we’ll open it up to affiliates after that. It’s pretty exciting.
After I got home last night, after the kids went down, I had a chance to finally watch “24”, which was awesome, because it’s was Wednesday night, so I’ve had two or three nights in a row of wishing I could watch it, but I’ve been too busy working. I got to watch it last night. It was exciting, and I wish that show would never end. For those guys who are watching it right now, they only have twelve episodes a season, and they just finished up with number ten, so there’s only two more to go. We should have a 24-Dot Com Secrets “Marketing in Your Car” party for everyone. That would be fun.
Anyway, I’m in the office. I’ve got a lot of work to do. I’ve got to go clean up a couple more messes and stuff for video number two, but I’m excited for it all. I appreciate you guys listening. I hope you got something out of this one, and I’ll talk to you guys all again soon.
How to stop focusing on the good things, so you can grow the great things.
---Transcript---
Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you to “Marketing in Your Car”.
All right, guys and gals, I’m actually driving right now in a brand new Lexus. Not because I bought a new Lexus, but because I took mine in for an oil change, and it turns out something was jacking it, and so they wouldn’t give me a loaner car. Then Brent that works with me told them, “You know Russell’s in the market for a new car. You might as well give him something nice. He may come and buy from you guys,” and so they gave me a brand new Lexus. I’m driving a pretty sweet car right now.
Today, it’s about seven in the morning. I’ve been awake for three hours so far. I got up early this morning for my accountability call, which again, I’ve mentioned this to you guys multiple times, and I encourage you to do this if you haven’t done this yet – find an accountability partner. The way we do ours is I write him a check, he writes me a check, and every two weeks we meet together. We have some goals and if we don’t keep one of our goals – if he doesn’t keep his goal, then I cash his check, and vice versa.
Right now I’m doing that with him, and I’m doing it with someone else in a spiritual standpoint. I have some spiritual goals, and I have a buddy who does, too. We did the same thing. We wrote each other checks, and if one of us screws up, we cash the other person’s check. It’s amazing what happens when you do this. I’m going to write a book about it someday, because I’m making huge strides in my business, and in my personal life, so I’m going to try to find another couple of accountability partners. Maybe I’ll do a weight loss one as well, and a couple of other things.
Today I want to talk about the entrepreneurial – I don’t even know what the right word is – ADD, right? Something we all get. We get into these shiny object syndromes, and the guy I had my meeting with, my accountability partner, today we were talking about stuff and I was showing him our businesses and how we were doing. I showed him our supplement business, which is blowing up and growing faster than anything I’ve ever had, and faster than I probably want it to be [laughs]. It’s a business that scares me. There’s liability that makes me nervous. There’s inventory management. All of these things that I haven’t done in the past, I can learn, and we’re learning and we’re doing, but it’s not my core competency. We’re making good money on it.
He asked me an interesting question. He said, “If you were to get rid of that business, Russell, how much money do you think you would make focusing on your core passion, your core business?” which is our marketing and Click Funnels and some of the other stuff that’s coming out in the next couple of weeks. I sat back and I thought about it for a while. He said, “You know, Russell, you’re struggling right now because this business is netting you whatever each month, but what you don’t understand is that that business may be costing you even more in your focus. You look at retailers like Wal-Mart. They have all of this shelf space, right? They look at every single SKU on the shelf, and if something’s not performing or making enough, they get rid of it, right? Their shelf space – they’ve got to be very protective of it. Entrepreneurs like us, our shelf space is between our ears, in our mind, and we’ve got to be very, very aware of it, and be very careful. If something’s taking up a lot of shelf space, and if it’s not making as much money as it should, you’ve got to take it out, because it could be suffocating other parts of your business.”
I was thinking about that this morning. I was thinking about how, whichever part of the business I focus on starts growing, so when we focus on supplements, “Boom,” it starts growing and growing and growing, and then all of the sudden, everything else starts hurting. All of the sudden we’ll look and say, “Hey, the coaching business is hurting,” and I shift my focus over there, and “Boom.” It starts growing and growing and growing. Then I look back and the supplements are suffering, and everything else is suffering. Whatever we’re focusing on is growing. So, what’s the opportunity that you have and that I have that’s going to make us the most amount of money? Let’s focus a hundred percent of our time and effort there, and let it grow. Don’t let these other good things suffocate and kill the great things.
This is stuff, obviously, I know and I’ve heard before, but it was a good reminder for me this morning, and it made me start thinking about some of my side projects, and made me start thinking about what I can sell, what I can kill, what I can give to partners, what I can do and where I can do it to get to the point where I can focus on the great things, and so that’s my focus for today. I just got home from the gym, and I’m going to go see my kids and play with them for a little bit, and then I’ll be in the office to go try to accomplish that, so it should be fun.
I hope you guys have an awesome day. I hope you guys can do what I do and take some inventory of your mental shelf space, and make some good decisions so that you’re focusing on the great things and not the good things. Thanks guys, and I’ll talk to you soon.
Are you the type of person who finds problems or are you the type of person who finds answers? Find out who you are on today’s exciting episode!
---Transcript---
Hey, everyone. This is Russell, and I want to welcome you to a very late night “Marketing in Your Car”.
It is currently 1:14 in the morning, and it’s funny. I volunteered at our church to lock up the building this week, and I completely forgot [laughs]. I was about to go to bed, and all of the sudden it popped into my head, so I’m driving to the church to go lock up. I thought I would jump on the phone and leave you guys all a message.
Today was the first day back after being gone for two weeks, which is kind of stressful. I don’t know – our business runs well, but when you get back there’re all of these little fires that are on fire when you come back, and you’ve got to figure out how to put the fires out and what to do, and there’re so many questions. You have this stuff you want to get done. You want to move forward, but all of this reactive stuff keeps pulling you back and pulling you back. I’m sure you guys have felt that.
It’s funny, because I still remember when my wife and I were engaged. I was maybe twenty-one or twenty-two at the time, and I was starting this business. I thought I was so cool. I had my laptop, and I was selling stuff on eBay. I had a website, and I probably had two customers total, maybe [laughs]. I might not even have been that lucky, but I remember on our honeymoon, every day I’d have to turn on my laptop and check my e-mails and make sure customer support had been handled. I didn’t want my business to collapse, and it makes me laugh so hard now. I could have not e-mailed those two customers back for that whole week, and it probably would have been a smart idea.
But I digress, so I’ll come back to what I was talking about. I’m sure most of you guys who own your own business have that. You leave for a little bit, and you come back, and it’s just like you have to spend a day or two putting out all of these fires. Today for us, we specifically had a lot of stuff. I’m outside, and its 1:14 in the morning, so if I get mugged or something, we’re going to catch it live on the podcast [laughs], so all of you faithful marketers in your cars are going to be hanging out. Okay, the first door’s locked.
Anyway, so basically, I came back, and our supplement has been blowing up. I’ve talked about this during the podcasts. It’s literally just going crazy. We can’t even keep up with it. Literally, if we wouldn’t have run out of inventory a little while ago [laughs], we probably would have passed a million dollars in sales this month, which is crazy. It’s just growing and growing, and it’s like a wildfire. We can’t put it down. The immediate buyers, we had to cut them down to a fourth of what they were spending, and they’re still spending like crazy. We’re trying to order new supplements and import the ingredients from all over the country. The growing season’s over, and they don’t have enough in stock of the things we need. It’s just issue after issue after issue, and problem after problem [laughs].
We’re behind on support, and we’ve got two full-time support people and they’re still so far behind, we have to hire another two or three or four more on top of that. We’re putting out ads, and we’re trying to hire people. You have people that are applying for ads. We have an ad out there that’s pretty good, that gets them to want to. In theory, it gets them to. We make them jump through a bunch of hoops and do a bunch of stuff. They have to apply, and we have to get good people.
We ended up getting ten or fifteen good people that actually went through all of the hoops that we put out there and applied. We called them back, and out of everyone, only two people called us back. It’s just amazing how people, humans – disappoint me [laughs] over and over and over again. They just don’t do stuff. Its like, “If you need a job, then return the call, or...” I don’t know – just whatever.
So all of these kinds of things are happening, and then we’ve got our mini call center that we’ve set up, and they need more leads, and these other leads they don’t like. We need a new funnel. Our funnel has been stale because we’ve been driving so much traffic to it. It’s been seen by all of the audiences on Facebook. It’s been worn out. We need new leads for it. It’s just thing after thing.
Click Funnels is almost about to launch. We found out that there’s an error here, and we’ve got this thing here, and the day we were planning on launching, it turns out everyone on our team’s out of town. Literally, just all of these issues today – thing after thing, and by the end of the day, I have this little couch by my desk, and at the end of the day, I laid down on it, and I felt this overwhelming feeling. I was like, “Man, I’ve made more choices in the last eight hours than I typically make in a year,” and all of them are big choices.
I think it was Dan Kennedy who said that every six months or every forty-five days or something, that an entrepreneur’s going to make a decision that will make or break their business. I felt like today, I made enough decisions for our entire years’ worth of stuff [laughs]. I was lying on the couch, and I was overwhelmed. It was like, “Ugh, I’m so far behind.” I’m sure you guys have felt that, right? It made me think about – well not at first. At first I just felt overwhelmed. I had a sick feeling. My wife texted me and she said, “Are you coming home for dinner?” and I was like, “Yes, I need to get out of here. I need to just get away from it.” So I got away from it for a while. I ate some dinner. We may or may not have watched “The Bachelorette” tonight, which may or may not be my favorite show [laughs]. I kind of passed out during it a little bit, because I was pretty beat up and tired, and I fell asleep for a little bit.
Then I woke back up, and when I woke back up, I had some ideas. I contacted one guy, and I asked him questions. I got a whole bunch of ideas for the supplement, like how to fix that one. My buddy just gave me a bunch of some really good stuff from his experience. And then all of the sudden, I was just lying there, and this other idea just popped in to my head about how we could solve the application problem for our call center, and all of these things started coming, and I’m like, "Hey, Collette, I've got to go back to work. I’ve got to get all of this stuff implemented quickly, before everyone else wakes up in the morning,” and so I went back into the office until about 12:30, and I literally got most of the issues all lined out with all of the stuff I was stressing out about and all of the issues. My brain just needed a little reboot, and then I was ready to go back in and answer the rest of the questions and solve the problems, and now I feel like most of the problems are solved.
Now by tomorrow, I’ll go in, which tomorrow’s the fun day, because I’ve got lifting. I’m lifting weights in probably four hours from now, and I’ll have jiu jitsu practice tomorrow. It should be a lot of fun, but anyway tomorrow I’m going to go in and just do normal stuff, but it made me think tonight about something my dad told me, and I hope I don’t offend anyone with this. That’s not my intention. The sprinklers are on, so hopefully you guys can still hear me. So I don’t want to offend anybody, but my dad told me something when I was a kid, and my dad is an entrepreneur like me, and he had a bunch of his own little businesses and stuff that he did, and I don’t remember the situation when he told me, but I remember it had a big impact on me. He said, “Russell, there’re two kinds of people in this world. There're people who find problems, and there’re people who find the answers. You always want to be the latter.”
That had a big, profound impact on me, and I started thinking about that in all areas of my life, actually. I was thinking about wrestling. I was thinking about my family. I was thinking about business, thinking about our coaching programs, thinking about everything. There are two types of people. People who find the problems, and people who find the answers to the problems, and I was thinking about how, not all of them, but a lot of the employees on my team are people who find problems. They find a problem. If they have a problem, they come to you with it and say, “I found a problem. I found a problem,” and they just don’t find the answer.
There are a couple of guys on my team that are amazing people at finding answers. One of them who I’ll mention is this guy named John Parkes, on my team and one of the neatest people I’ve ever met in my life. I watched him today, because he gets the brunt of the problem people. They go to him first before they come to me. He has the major job of solving most of the problems. People come to him with all sorts of questions, and he finds them answers. He’s able to think about it, and find an answer. He’s a great person at finding answers.
It’s interesting. I’ve done this experiment over the years with people when they ask me questions, just to see. I think I heard Tony Robbins do it the first time. That’s probably where I got it from. People would ask him something. They would ask him a question, and he would say, “Well what do you think?” and they’d go, “Well, I don’t know the answer.” He’d say, “Well if you did know the answer, what do you think it would be?” The person would almost always give the correct answer afterwards, and so I’ve done that sometimes in the past. It’s interesting that most people can solve their own problems just by asking, “Well what do you think the answer would be if this was you?” and magically they can go, and they can answer these problems.
I think all of us have the ability to be the person that finds the answer, but for whatever reason, we’re nervous, or we like that crutch, or we have this thing where we always want to put it on somebody else. The person who’s willing to find the answers becomes the leader in every situation. In wrestling, I became a leader because people brought me problems and I found answers. In business, I’ve become a leader because of that as well. I look at our coaching program, and it’s interesting – a lot of the calls I do with our students – they come, and they’ve got an issue, and most of the time, they know the answer, and they just want me to tell them that they’re right. It’s just interesting how much people need that validation.
I think for you guys that are listening to this, think about yourself. Which kind of person are you right now? Are you the kind of person who finds the problem, or are you the kind of person who finds the answer? If you’re really the person that’s going to find the problem, I think the fastest way you can get a pay raise, or get more friends, or a bigger following, or whatever that thing is, is you’ve got to shift to the other kind of person, and I know that the answer’s there. When I hear some of our support people come and ask John questions, I know they know the answer, but they want the validation. They want him to answer it for them, because they don’t want to mess up. They don’t want to get in trouble, and they want somebody else to blame if something goes wrong, but if you’re willing to step into that role and be that person, and be the one who’s taking the brunt of the responsibility on your shoulders and if it’s wrong then you take it, you will go a lot further in this life.
That’s for sure, so that’s my message for tonight, and those of you who are entrepreneurs who have those days like I had today where it’s hard and you get beat down and you just want to lay down and cry for a while, just know that it’s okay. Lay down. Take a little nap. Watch The Bachelorette or whatever show it is that you need to, but then get back up and get back to work and solve your problems and make it happen. For all of you guys, focus on that. Focus on shifting from being someone who finds problems to somebody who finds the answers, and as soon as you do that, it will change everything around you.
That is it. I’m home. It’s 1:26 in the morning. I am up in four and a half hours to life weights. [laughs] I hope I don’t pass out. Hopefully something I said made a lot of sense. I’m pretty tired, so I’m not really sure, but I appreciate you guys listening in. I hope you enjoyed the podcast, and I will talk to you all again soon. Thanks, guys.
Russell’s test for increasing his energy and focus for this week.
---Transcript---
Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson. It’s been a long time, but I want to welcome you to another “Marketing in Your Car”.
Hey, guys and gals. I hope you guys are having an awesome time. I actually took almost two weeks off from everything, which sounds really nice, but it’s really painful for entrepreneurs like me who just want to go and create cool stuff, so I’m back in the heat of it, and I’m super excited for this week. I hope you are as well.
While I was in San Diego, some really cool stuff happened. I had a chance to hang out with Todd, who’s one of my partners. He’s the one who has coded all of the Click Funnels, and it’s always fun hanging out with him, just talking about everything from financial stuff to making money to health to weight loss. Always fun stuff, and he got me thinking about a lot of things.
I had a chance to hang out with a guy named Drew Canole. Some of you guys may know Drew. If not, check out FitLife.TV, I think. It may be FitLifeTV.com – one of those two, anyway. Drew is a juicing expert and a super-cool guy. I saw him online, and I was really impressed with him. It turned out that he was in San Diego, so I wanted to go meet him. I had a chance to go hang out with him.
This weekend, I decided that I was going to go, and I was going to try some experiments on myself from an eating standpoint. I’m really going to track it closely. It’s interesting. I’ve done diets and weight loss things for my whole life. All the time from when I was wrestling and I was losing twenty-five to thirty pounds a week, to when I was just out of shape and trying to figure out how to get back into it, but I’ve never been that good at tracking everything, especially from a food consumption standpoint.
What I did is I went out on Saturday, and I went to Whole Foods, because I wanted to do the whole organic, grass-fed everything. I spent a lot of money [laughs], because Whole Foods is not cheap. I bought tons of vegetables – everything I could find – all of the leafy greens and as many different varieties of vegetables as I could find, and I went and found the organic grass-fed meat, and found a bunch of stuff. I came home yesterday, and I took all of my vegetables and I broke them down into five different days, so I’m going to be juicing every day for the next five days. From Mercola.com, I bought his new juicer, which is different from the one I had before. The one I had before was the Jack LaLanne one, which spins and grinds. This one’s got more of an auger in it or something like that, where it squishes the juice out instead of cutting it, so it’s supposed to stay fresher longer. I don’t know [laughs]. I thought it looked cool on the video. I’m not going to lie [laughs].
So I’m doing the whole juice thing, and then I started making frittatas, which if you don’t know what a frittata is, it’s probably the best way to eat simply, so I probably spent an hour yesterday, on Sunday, making frittatas that will last me for at least a week, if not longer. Basically, it’s eggs and vegetables and a whole bunch of stuff like that all mixed. It’s like an omelet/quiche thing, but we call them frittatas. I made some huge ones, and what was awesome, because I went and put in tons of spinach and kale and broccoli and okra and all of these really cool vegetables in my frittatas. I’m just veg-ing it up like crazy. So this is my experiment, guys. I’m calling it my hippie paleo juicing week-long thing [laughs]. I don’t know what I’m going to call it – something like that.
It’s funny. We’ve been teasing about how we were in San Diego, and the area we were in had all of these hippie-type people there. Everyone’s got dreadlocks, and they’re surfing all day long. We were joking about how when I was younger, we used to always make fun of the hippie culture and stuff like that – eating green, where now it’s the cool thing to do, so this is my hippie juicing paleo, because the frittatas are pure paleo the way we build them. It’s going to be fun, so I’m excited.
I’m excited to see how much energy I get from the whole process this week. It should be really, really cool, because I’ve got a lot of stuff happening this week, so I need the energy. I need the excitement. I need the newness of it all, so I’m excited. I’ll let you guys know throughout the week how it goes.
For you guys, I would say, “This week, figure out something different. Figure out a pattern interrupt. Figure out something that you’ve been doing. If it’s diet, or if it’s health, or if it’s how you wake up in the morning, or if it’s how you work, or whatever, figure out something, and just do a big interrupt like I’m doing right now – just a big pattern interrupt. Do something that’s just going to totally shock your system, and see what happens. For all I know, this could be the worst thing in the world, but I’m still excited for it. I think it’s going to be awesome.
I’m at the office, you guys. I am going to go and get some stuff done today. I hope you guys enjoy your Monday, and we will talk to you all again soon.
Why you should never ask somebody for free advice.
---Transcript---
Hey everybody. This is Russell Brunson, and I have a very special “Marketing in Your Car” for you for today.
Hey, everyone. I just got my hair cut, and I’m driving back home. I actually wanted to do a special podcast. I don’t normally log into Facebook very much because it stresses me out. Typically I’m getting a lot of people who are asking me for my help for free. It’s just hard, because I want to, and I wish I could give them all the attention. The problem is, with everything I’m doing right now in my own company, in my own business, and in my own coaching clients, it’s hard to find time to even sleep at night. There’s so much stuff always happening, and so I don’t typically log in that often, but the last week, I did for a couple of reasons. I just checked again when I was walking out of getting my hair cut. I saw a message, and it just made me think, so I want to tell you about two different people that approached me on Facebook. I won’t use their real names, but I want to share their approaches with you, because they were both very different.
The first guy that contacted me basically said, “Hey Russell, I’ve been watching you for a bunch of years. I love your stuff. I think you’re awesome. How much would it cost to buy an hour of your time?” I said, “Right now, I sell an hour for twenty-five hundred bucks,” and he wrote back and said, “Oh, that’s kind of steep, but hey, man, I love your stuff, and I think you can help me, so where do I send the money?” So I told him. He sent the money. Two days later, we were on the phone. We spent an hour on the phone with him looking at his funnel, building it out, tweaking it, giving him all the advice that he needed, and after he was done, he was like, “Man, that was awesome. I feel like I’ve shifted my focus. I know exactly where I’m going now, I’m going to go ahead and implement it. Hey, do you mind if I shoot some questions now and then as I’m building this thing out, to help me create it?” and I’m like, “Yeah, no worries.” So he went out, and he’s been building, and he shot me a couple of questions. I gave him some feedback, and I haven’t minded because he understood the value of my time, and what it takes for me to spend some time. I don’t mind helping him now, because he valued my time up front, and he was willing to invest, and now he’s trying to implement what I showed him, and so of course I’m going to help steer him in the right direction and have success. It’s been awesome.
Then I have this other guy. Again, a really nice guy, and my heart strings go out to him and to other people that I’ve gotten this message from. Literally, I think, five or six people this week sent me similar messages about, “Hey Russell, I love your stuff. I don’t have any money, but I want to work with you. I’d love it if you could get on the phone with me and coach me through this. I’ll give you half of my profits, and I’ll do all of this kind of stuff.” That’s their mentality, and it’s tough, because honestly, for me as a person, I can’t even tell you how much I want to, but it’s hard. Most of those I don’t respond back to, because it’s just so hard for me to tell them “No”, but it’s like, “You have to understand, that when I was getting started, I never would have gone to somebody who is as busy or had as much success, and just ask them for their time. I always would have gone and figured out how I could provide value to them, whether it’s money or whatever, because their time is valuable.”
I look at my schedule. For example, this week, I was at the office twice until 3 a.m. in the morning this week trying to get some projects done. I literally had, I think, seven or eight one-hour phone call consultations with people. Every single one of those people, outside of the first guy I told you about – he paid $2,500 – everybody else paid $25,000 for those, and it was hard for me to fit those $25,000 one-hour calls into my schedule, because it’s so busy with everything. I obviously made the time, because they made the investment.
Plus I’ve got the Reactive Coaching for our $25,000 students, and then on top of that, I’ve got my own projects and my own businesses, and in our supplement company, we’re in the process of trying to hire three or four more people. It has by far eclipsed our internet marketing business [laughs] to this point, which is exciting. We’re about to launch Click Funnels, which is a brand new company. We’re in the process of trying to find new office space and probably hiring a staff of, who knows – ten to twelve people to help with that.
I literally don’t have time to sleep right now. I go home. I spend time in the morning with my family and kids and at night with my family and kids. As soon as they all pass out, I’m back to work trying to move things forward, and it’s hard when I get an e-mail saying, “I just need an hour of your time. Remember what it was like when you were just beginning and you had no ability? If you had just gotten some guru to help you...,” and how it would help them, and again, my heart strings go out to them, but I don’t think people really understand the reality of it.
For me to carve out another hour of my time, I would have to put one of my projects on hold, and you look at opportunity cost. The one lesson I learned from my college education is opportunity cost. With opportunity cost, if you remember the concept, you’ve got two options. The opportunity cost is what you lost by not taking the other option, so for example, if I was to jump on the phone with this guy for an hour, the opportunity cost is that I’ve either got to give up an hour of time with my family, which is not something I’m willing to do at all, or I’ve got to carve out an hour of time from all of my other projects.
An hour of focused time working towards Click Funnels or an hour towards something else, will make me a lot of money. It’s hard, because what he is asking for and what people like that are asking for – they don’t understand what they’re asking for. They’re asking for an hour of your time. An hour of your time, literally, on the low end, is $2,500. I was trying to be nice to this guy, but because he was willing to respect the value of my time, I was willing to do it for $2,500, but the reality is an hour of time that’s focused on your own business is worth so much more than that.
I just wanted to share. It’s been on my mind. I may send him this podcast, and I hope it doesn’t hurt his feelings. That’s not my intention, but more so just to help him understand the value of other people’s time, and if you want to get someone’s attention, you’ve got to look at things differently.
When I first got into this business, I remember I went to this event, and there was this guy that was at the event. He was in this Mastermind group, and he was in four or five others, and I was like, “How in the world did you get in all of these groups?” and he said, “I learned something early on in life, Russell. I learned I can either work my way in, or I can buy my way in. It’s way easier just to buy your way in.” He had spent tons of money in to getting in to these different clubs.
I said, “How in the world do you afford that?” I think he had spent almost a hundred grand in these Masterminds. He said, “Well, I couldn’t afford it, so instead of complaining about the fact that I didn’t have the resources to afford it, I tried to get resourceful. I went out to a bunch of Internet marketing forums, and I found a bunch of people who were in similar situations like me. They couldn’t afford it, but they wanted the information, and so I said, “Look. This is the deal. I’m going to invest in these five Mastermind groups, and my total cost is going to be X amount of dollars. I can’t afford it right now, but if you will pay X amount of dollars into it, I will go to these events, and I will learn. I will do everything, and when I come back from these events, I will bring back and break down everything I learned, all the notes, give you everything, and you’ll get a chance, at a fraction of the cost, to go to all of these events with me, basically, to get all of the information I extract from these.” This guy literally got ten people to give him $10,000. He had $100,000 in cash to go out and join the best Masterminds in the world. I was just like, “Wow.” – resourcefulness, right? He didn’t have the resources, but he figured out a way to make it happen.
I always think about one of my favorite people I ever met in my entire life, and this is in the business, or out of the business, but it’s a guy named Stu McLaren. Before I even met Stu, I was putting on this workshop called “Affiliate Boot Camp”, and Stu paid $1,000 to be part of this boot camp. He’s one of the smartest people I have ever met. It was a life-training series that I did, and I’d do a teleseminar. Every teleseminar, I’d open it up for questions at the end, and the first person to pop on was Stu, saying, “Hey, Russell, that was amazing. I’m Stu McLaren. That session you gave was amazing. It just totally built me up,” and he talked about why it was so great. He’d ask me some questions, and then he’d thank me, and, “Boom.” Literally, for ten sessions in a row, Stu was the first one asking questions, the first one thanking me, all of that kind of stuff, and it was awesome. Then at the end of the event, he called me up one day, and he was like, “Hey, man, I’ve got an idea. We should work on this project together.” I knew who Stu was, and I knew he’d given me so much value from that side. Me, as an educator and a teacher – to have somebody invest in my business and thank me and all of these things along the way, it changes it. Where now, just like the dude who paid the twenty-five hundred bucks, I have a vested interest in him. I want him to be successful. I want him to take the advice. Yeah, I’m going to pick up the phone, and I’m going to return the call.
The other interesting thing is, in my Mastermind group, in our inner circle, we have a couple of different levels – anywhere from $8,000 up to $25,000 in our coaching program, and inside the programs, all of our members are able to ask me questions each week. They can submit video clips and write questions to me, and we can chat back and forth. It’s a cool process. What’s interesting is that the majority of people who ask me questions will jump on and ask me a question, and that’s it. We move on. Sometimes, they’ll say, “Hey, thanks,” but that’s it. There’re not many people that say, “Thanks,” and I’m fine with that.
I’m not looking for thanks, but there’s one guy whose name is Simon Cryer, and Simon signs up for the coaching program, goes in there, studies a bunch of stuff, and then he jumps into this thing where he can message me, and makes me this video, and all the video said was, “You know, Russell, thank you. This was one of the most amazing things in the world. It was awesome. It was...,” and all of this stuff. I watched the video, and then I was waiting for him to ask me a favor, a question, or whatever, and he never did. He just thanked me, and I was like, “Dude, that guy’s awesome.” Simon’s name, I remembered.
A couple of weeks later, he e-mailed me a question, and because I knew Simon’s name, and because he’d given me value, I literally sat up that night while my wife was angry at me, because she wanted me to go to bed [laughs]. I spent almost an hour on the computer making videos for him, mapping out the whole game process, showed him what he was doing right, showed him what he was doing wrong, sent him all of my files. I literally gave him a years’ worth of my research. I gave it all to him, one hundred percent, and I just said, “Hey, here you go, Simon.” He told me when he got that that he started crying, because he couldn’t believe that I would give him that. I told him afterwards, “You know what, Simon? You’re the first person that ever thanked me.”
It was interesting how that works, and so the reason for this, you guys, is I would just say – I don’t know what I’m trying to say, to be honest, but when you want things in life, there’s the right way and the wrong way to do it. The right way is to figure out how you can provide as much value as possible to other people, and if you do that, it’s amazing what they’ll do back in return for you.
Sometimes that is paying people, right? I pay coaches all of the time. I wrote Ryan Deiss and Perry Belcher a check for $25,000 in January, because I wanted some of their help. I’m friends with them. I could text them. I could call them, but I wanted to show them that I have respect for them and what they do, so I wrote them a check. I asked them one or two little questions here and there, and those things have transformed my business.
I look at Bill Glaser. I was in his Mastermind group for six years. I spoke on his stage tons of times, and one day I had a question. Instead of calling him and saying, “Hey, Bill, I have a question for you,” I called his assistant, and I sent him, I think, fifteen hundred bucks for an hour of his time. We got on the phone, and we talked through it. It’s just you understanding that people are busy, and yes, they may have time, and they’re there for their buddies or whatever, but if you’re going to pick their brains or you’re going to do whatever, understand that that’s not a small thing.
I have people all the time that are like, “Hey, man, let me take you to lunch and pick your brain.” In my life, I have not had the luxury of having lunch for months. I don’t have time for lunch. I eat while I’m working, because I don’t have time to break away and go to lunch. I have too many projects and too many things that are happening. If I were to go to lunch, I would miss time with my family, so I don’t eat lunch. So for them to say, “Hey, Russell, I want to take you to lunch and pick your brain,” it seems like in their mind, they’re thinking it’s such a small thing –“Hey, I’m going to buy you lunch,” but for me to pull away and go to lunch, it’s like, “You don’t understand the opportunity cost of that. That will cost me on the lowest end, $2,500, and on the high end, I’m losing $10,000 to $15,000 or more by letting you take me to lunch to pick my brain.”
I think that it’s important to understand that, especially with people you’re trying to get to, trying to get access to and need information from. Figure out ways that you can provide value first. Coming to someone and saying, “Hey, I’ll give you half of my business,” or, “Hey, if you do this, I could make a lot of money, and I’ll give you part of it back,” that’s the same pitch everyone is giving them.
It’s funny. I had a guy – this is another one. I get these all of the time, so I apologize for the rant here, but I had a guy the other day who came up to me and said, “Hey, Russell, this is the deal. I pitch you. You’re the one I want to work with on this project. This project’s awesome. What I want you to do is I want you to work with me to set the entire thing up. We’ll do this, this, and this. Help me launch and help me do everything and from that I’ll give you a percentage of the profits.” I wrote him back, and I was like, “Dude, for the effort that it would take for me to go and do what you just asked me to do, <em> </em>I could do the exact same thing on my own project and keep all of the money. I don’t think you understand that. You’re not providing me value by giving me half of your company and letting me do all of the work. There’s no value for me in that, all right?”
And so it’s just an understanding of you looking at the people that you want information from and figuring out, “How can I serve them first?” Stu McLaren was smart. He did not come to me, day one, and say, “Russell, I need this. I need this. I need this.” He said, “How can I serve Russell first? I’m going to join his coaching program and ask him questions. I’m going to edify him, and I’m going to do all of this stuff, and I’m going to build a relationship,” and now, when Stu calls, I will drop anything. When Stu says, “Russell, I need this,” I will. To this day, if Stu was to call me at three in the morning and tell me that he needs an accountant, I’d be there. That’s how much rapport he’s built with me.
I look at somebody like Simon. After that whole thing happened, I happened to be in Dallas one day, and I think Simon’s from Dallas. We e-mailed, and an hour later, we’re hanging out. We spent the whole day together, and I consider him a close friend. He came out to Boise. We went to the fights together. All of this stuff came from him saying, “Thanks,” from him figuring out what I needed in my life to help me. Because of that now, I have this reciprocity, where I want to make sure he’s successful, and he’s going to be successful, because he played his cards right.
This guy that came to me first and said, “Hey, I’m going to pay you twenty-five hundred bucks for an hour of your time because that’s what it’s worth to you right now,” I’ve probably answered fifteen questions for him since then, because he respected my time. It helped me to feel that value first, and so, yes, I want to help him back out in the other direction.
Anyway, I hope this doesn’t fall on deaf ears. In all aspects of your life, whether it’s relationships, whether it’s business or whatever it is, this advice is important. It’s key, and you need to understand it.
I don’t want to admit this, but one of my favorite shows on TV is “The Bachelor” or “The Bachelorette”. I watch this show, and I cringe every single time, because these guys get two minutes with the bachelor or the bachelorette to get to know them, and the ones that always blow it are the ones that get on there and go, “Okay, so my name is Joe, and this is what I do, and this is what I love,” and they just start talking about themselves, and just dump all of this garbage on the person that they’re on this date with. The girl gets done and walks away, and they’re like, “Wow. I know everything about that guy, but he didn’t ask me a single question about myself.” The guys who are successful are the ones who sit down and ask the girl questions. –“Tell me about you. Tell me about this.” Those are the ones that succeed. The ones that fall in love are the ones who are not talking about themselves and telling them why they’re great. It’s the ones who go on the dates and ask questions to the other person.
When I was in college, I had a roommate. He was one of the most fascinating people ever, and I say that because I always thought that. I remember always thinking that this guy – John Merritt was his name. I thought, “This guy’s just fascinating.” He was one of the coolest people. I just thought he was awesome.
One day, I came home from something, and I sat down, and I was talking to him, and he literally asked me questions directly for probably an hour straight – just question after question. Everything he had to say, he seemed more fascinated by what I said, and I was like, “Man,” and all of the sudden, in the middle of this I remember pausing and thinking, “Oh, wow. I think he’s so fascinating, but I’ve never asked him a single question. I’m like that guy – I’m the bad date, but he’s the most amazing person in the world.” He just kept asking me question after question after question. Everything I said, he seemed fascinated by, and that’s what he gave me. That’s why I always wanted to be around John. Everyone wanted to be around John. He was one of the neatest people ever.
So anyway, there’s some stuff for all of you guys to think about. I have no idea if this went the right direction or not, but I hope that you guys got some value out of it.
I am at the bank grabbing some money, so I’m going to jump off for now, and I appreciate you guys, and I will talk to you all soon.