The secret to get people through the failure gap.
On today's episode Russell talks about disagreeing with a designer on what a customer needs from Clickfunnels and how they were basically saying the complete opposite of each other. Here are some of the interesting things you'll hear in the this episode:
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What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson, welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast.
Alright everybody, welcome to Marketing Secrets. I’m here today in the Clickfunnels kitchen, the first time I’ve ever filmed in here. I’m excited. You guys want to see a quick view of what the kitchen looks like? Oh, there’s Dave. We’ve got a whole bunch of cool stuff. We actually built this kitchen because for a lot of the products we work with, for some reason we always need kitchen scenes, so we always rented different kitchens. And then we’re like, if we build a kitchen make sure we have a good scene so we can actually film stuff. So we do, but since we’ve had it we’ve never used it for filming.
For today, I want to share with you guys something kind of interesting. And I want to make sure when I say this that it doesn’t come off bad. Because it has a good purpose, but it’s important for you guys to understand. Some of the background behind this, to set it up so it all makes sense to you guys. We had a designer that worked for us for a while to come on and help with user interface, UIUX, those type of things in Clickfunnels, a really smart guy. What he liked to do is call and interview customers.
At first I was really excited. So he’d go and call 40 or 50 customers and interview them, finding out what they want, what they didn’t want. All those kind of things, which I thought was cool. We’ve never done that before. Some of you guys might have actually talked to him, which is cool. Based on that he was trying to build UI and structure based on customer’s feedback.
A couple of things I found with it. One is it was kind of almost a frustration, because I came to him saying, “This is what I want to have done.” And he treated me kind of like if I was a customer, “Hey, cool. These are good ideas.” I’m like, “No, you need to do this because I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. I’m not a survey.” We always kind of went back and forth and in his mind it’s like, we need to find out what the customers want, which I agree with. But also this comes back to Henry Ford’s quote about if I were to ask my customers what they wanted; they would have said they wanted a faster horse. You have to also understand that customers don’t always know the vision where we’re going. That’s why we’re creating stuff, we’re visionaries. We know where we’re trying to go.
So it’s kind of interesting, so he no longer works with the company, still an awesome guy, but that was kind of this frustration I had. I remember for a long time we’ve wanted to update our on-boarding in Clickfunnels, and we wanted to do a whole bunch of cool things we haven’t been able to do. This week is actually fun for me because we’re focusing on that.
Another side story, I was listening to Growth Hacker TV, there was an interview with a guy who bought the Warrior Forum. He also owned Freelancer.com and a bunch of other companies. He was talking about how they grew to a billion dollar evaluation. And one interesting thing he said is that they buy these companies and then they look at the traffic coming through and spend a lot of time optimizing the processes inside the processes to make more money from all the traffic coming, which is kind of the phase we’re in right now.
We have anywhere from 800 – 1000 new people a day that sign up for Clickfunnels, just organically. They’re coming from who knows where. And thank you for coming, I don’t even know where you came from but I’m grateful to have you here. And they’re coming in and we lose a bunch of them the first month, there’s a big drop off. After that it stays really steady, but there’s a big drop immediately. So we’re trying to figure out that process. How do we capture people and keep them in?
There’s a lot of cool stuff we’ve done that decreased our churn rate, which is the number metric we look at. It increased our retention. But right now we’re in a big overhaul, how do we simplify the sign up process? How do we make everything easier? It’s fun, you guys will see some new stuff coming to Clickfunnels here in the next 60 days. A lot of new stuff will be coming live, which just simplifies the process and makes Clickfunnels easier to use. So we’re excited for that.
But I was listening to this guy, and he talked about that’s what he was doing. They just worked on the optimization of the sign up flow and that’s how the companies blew up. They didn’t really focus on the traffic and these other things. And we’re always focused on the traffic. But it’s like, how do we make sure the funnel’s right so we’re not losing people out of the holes in the bucket?
So with that said, there’s a bunch of on-boarding stuff that I wanted to do and I know Todd wanted to do, so we kept trying to get this guy to do that. We want prize, we want to do free t-shirts, we want badges, we want to gamify the process. And he kept coming back saying, “How does gamifying the process help the people get the end result? We need to get people to the end result and this is just keeping people busy in the middle.” And it’s funny, Todd mentioned that this morning to me and I Voxed him back, there’s this quote from Dan Kennedy that I heard back in the day that actually ties this in, but I couldn’t remember exactly what it was. So I ended the Vox and said, “I’m going to go find the quote and come back to you.”
So I ended up finding the quote and I posted it there in Voxer and the quote said, “You’ve got to confuse activity with accomplishment.” Now I’m going to be careful when I say this because some of you guys are going to look at that and it might be frustrating or confusing or whatever. So I posted that and in the thing it said, Dan Kennedy, “You have to get your customers to confuse activity with achievement.” So Todd read that first before my Vox, and he thought I was saying, “Oh the designer was right. That’s just going to get people confused. Focusing on activity as opposed to achievement.” But if you listen to my Voxer, it was actually the exact opposite.
So what’s kind of funny, me and this UI designer both said the identical thing but for the exact opposite side of the argument. He was saying you don’t want to give people activities that keep them from the achievement. And I was saying, you want to give them activities so that they feel achievement, so someday they get to achievement. You want to confuse activity with achievement. Does that make sense?
So Kennedy said that, basically, as a retention strategy. People come in and are going to leave. He said, no you need to give them things to do, so they have activity that’s happening. Because the activity is what keeps them engaged. If we look at our Clickfunnels stats right now and numbers and things like that, the interesting parts are people that stick are people that have a custom domain, they log in at least 2 ½ times per week. There’s all these stats. People that stick are people that are going in and doing stuff consistently. So we know that’s the metric. People logging in and using it are the key. So how do get them to log in and use it?
Well just telling them to build a funnel, you’re going to have achievement, you’re going to achieve a funnel. People will try for a little bit and then they’re going to leave because they didn’t achieve anything. Because the goal is this huge thing. The goal is you’ve got to eat the whole entire cow. That’s the goal. If you’re giving your customer the goal to eat the cow, the problem is they’re going to come in and if they don’t eat the cow really quick, they’re going to leave.
So what you have to do is confuse achievement with activity. Give them activities to do that make them feel like they’re achieving something along the way. So they come in and you set the table, you give them their appetizers, they eat that and they achieve something. For us we’re gamifying the process. You come in, watch the video, build your hero funnel, we send you a t-shirt. So you had activity, so you felt you achievement, even though you didn’t achieve the thing you want yet. You felt achievement, which then drives you forward to do the next thing and the next thing, and the next thing.
All of us want our customers to have the achievement at the end, the problem is that they sign up and then there’s the achievement, there’s this huge gap in the middle that they’re going to fall into, disappear and die. So because of that we have to confuse activity with achievement, because that activity will make them feel micro-achievement which will get them to the big achievement at the end. That’s the goal, that’s the message for you guys.
As you’re creating your training programs, software, ideas, products, services, whatever it is you’re creating and doing, I want you thinking about that. You have to go and create activities that get people to feel small wins, small achievements so that it will drive them through this chasm, this gap, to get to the big goal, the big achievement that you want them to have. If you don’t have those, if you’re not confusing activity with achievement initially, they’re never going to get to the achievement.
So that’s kind of the message for today. I thought it was kind of interesting. I thought it was funny that we both we had the same argument for why we wanted to do this on-boarding process. But he was saying it was a negative thing, but I was saying it was a positive thing. I think it’s very positive, and I think we all can and should be visiting it. So I hope that helps you guys, and with that said, have an amazing day. Go back through your programs, products, services, member’s area and figure out how you can weave those things in, because as you give people little wins along the way, it will give them the momentum they need to get the big wins. That’s all I got for you guys today. Thanks so much for everything, see you guys soon. Bye.