Final Clickfunnels webinar?
On this extra long episode Russell talks about doing a webinar for Clickfunnels today, and why it’s the last time. He talks about where he was a year ago, and how things have changed for Clickfunnels in that year.
Here are some interesting things you will hear in today’s episode:
So listen below to hear what kind of changes are coming for Clickfunnels in 2017 and why.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson I want to welcome you guys back to Marketing In Your Car. Now, it’s funny I get people all the time that ask me what microphone I use due to its amazing audio quality, and it’s just my phone. I don’t do microphones, I just hold it and talk into it. I figured if I had to get a microphone set up I never would have done it. I just want to be able to do these whenever I want to. Whenever I want, so I need at least the most simple, easy setup possible and that’s how we did this, which is really cool.
I actually just got a brand new iPhone, so this is my first time recording on this new iPhone, which I’m kind of excited about. With that said, it snowed last night, if you follow me on Snapchat….I may be killing Snapchat, I haven’t decided yet, but it’s kind of frustrating but it’s also kind of fun. I may be moving it over to Instagram Stories or something, I don’t know.
But we went, half my kids are out in the snow playing in it. Norah and me were in the hot tub, it was really fun. Then the kids want the fireplace on, so I ran in my bare feet in the snow to turn the fireplace, it was some good times, but I survived it and lived to tell the story.
Today is exciting day because today is webinar day. We’re doing a webinar, I was doing the stats, 4500 people registered. What? Which is going to be exciting. It’s funny, we’re getting towards the end of the year now and I want to share a message that’ll loop back to the beginning of this year. For those of you who have been listening to the Marketing In Your Car podcast, if you haven’t been, go and binge listen to all of them and catch up because there are some important things you’re missing. Just kidding, kind of.
There was a podcast I did, I think in January. I was driving home and it was snowy as well. I think it was called the business model for the next twelve months. So if you go to marketinginyourcar.com and search on the page for business model, or twelve months, it should pull up and you listen to it. But I walk through a challenge I give to everyone, that basically do a live webinar every single week for the next twelve months and transform your life and business and it’ll be amazing.
What’s interesting is that, as I’ve been saying that over and over and over again, very few people have. Surprise, surprise. But the people that have are doing some amazing things. Some are speaking at Funnel Hacking Live, some are doing different things. One of them, I’m going to brag, I hope they don’t mind. I’m sure that they’re probably listening to this, but Brandon and Kaelin Poulin are examples of people who just, every time I’m like, “Hey you should do this.” Just do it and it’s amazing. And last month, and they’re in the weight loss space, they sell $147 product and you might think, well how much can someone make doing a webinar a week every single week for a year? And I tell you it compounds. It’s a compounding interest game.
I remember some famous guy said something about compounding interest, which was cool, but I don’t remember the quote or the actual concept behind compounding interest. I only know how to sell stuff. But it’s the same thing I think. It compounds. Just to put into perspective, when I met them at Funnel Hacking Live, they were doing about $100,000 a month that was in March or April, whenever Funnel Hacking Live was. Then they joined Inner Circle and kept doing it, and kept compounding and compounding.
November, I actually sent an email out the other day, I was like they did almost half a million dollars in November. And Brandon messaged me back, “What? We passed 600 grand in November.” So I want to put it in perspective for you. $600,000 selling a $147 information product in the weight loss industry. That’s the power of what we’re talking about, this compounding interest, this compounding effect of consistently doing the same thing over and over and over and over again. And I’ve shared it with some of my friends, people who are successful, I had one friend I won’t mention his name. A great marketer and super cool guy, and his company has been stuck at about $3 million dollars a year for a couple of years.
Which is funny, for some reason, I was stuck at 3 million a year for a long time, that was my sticking point. There’s different sticking points, for me to break a million dollars was really hard, took me four or five years in a row, I was trying to break a million dollars from January 1st to December 31st, and I missed it multiple years in a row by a couple tens of thousands of dollars, like 20 or 30 thousand dollars. There’s some mental block, and after I broke that I shot to 3 million and stuck there for a long time. Could never really break through that, in fact, I broke through it one time, when we built a big company up and had a huge staff, but our profits were horrible, then we shut that down and I was stuck at 3 million again for 3 or 4 years consistently, could not break that mental barrier.
What changed it for me was that transition to selling a lot of different product, because that’s the mindset of marketers, I gotta create the next big thing, to make more money to how do I make something consistent that I just keep pushing people through. For me it was the webinar. We did the webinar and I committed to our team, because everyone….it’s funny, when we launched Clickfunnels, a lot of my friends, and I saw it in forums, in Facebook groups, people were like, “Clickfunnels looks cool, but it’s Russell’s flavor of the week. I don’t want to move my whole platform and then next week he’s on to a new thing.”
I was like, “Crap, I have to show people that I’m serious about this. This is the future, this is my focus.” So a lot of my friends actually, didn’t sign up for a year and half to two years because of that. They were afraid I was going to move on, because that was my pattern. That’s all of our patterns. We do something initially to build a big audience of people. Then the way we start making money is create new things to sell to them. And that’s part of the strategy, there’s value in that, but what’s more valuable is creating a front end offer that’s evergreen, consistent, that you’re always driving people into. There’s a consistent message, consistent onboard, everyone comes through the same channel, buying the same thing, understanding the same concepts, then as you’re building your culture and all these other things, come off of that.
So I started doing these one things consistently, that was kind of my promise to Dylan and Todd initially, “This is going to be my focus, don’t worry guys. I’m not chasing the next shiny object. We’re going to focus on this.” It took me three months before we figured out how to sell it right. We had multiple failed product launches initially. Then we figured out the webinar was how we were going to sell it, and it worked.
We did the webinar over and over. And I did the webinar every week for almost a year, probably more than that. Some days I would do two to three webinars in a day, which is a lot. I don’t know if I could handle that nowadays. When we first got started, that’s what I was doing. I’d do a webinar and get off, then do another one and get off. If you do it, those of you who have done a webinar, a two hour webinar, it drains you. All your energy is going into it, and to do two or a couple times three in a day, it was tough. But I was learning my message, finding my voice, understanding where people were getting stuck, perfecting it and going over and over.
And the nice thing about doing it live is it gets everyone on your staff and team focused on this thing. This last year, we had so much success and the webinars were kind of shifted over to automated webinar, and that’s been running for most of this year, so I haven’t been doing them live that much this year. But I paid my dues, so it’s okay for me. For you guys, you gotta pay your dues first then you can. After you’ve done it 50 or 60 times live, you’re allowed to automate it.
So we automated it a lot this year, it’s been good, a consistent stream of money, but it hasn’t been this big focal point. So we wanted to do one big last hurrah, which is happening today in a couple of hours, to do the funnel hacks webinars. So we did a big push and got 4500 people on it. 4500 people means we’ll get a thousand on the webinar. We consistently close 20 percent, that means 200, so we’re looking at probably 150-200 thousand dollars live on the webinar. And then from replays we should double that. Gets us to 3 or 4, but then we’ll also have a big urgency and scarcity scare since this is the last time we’ll be doing this webinar, in fact we’re doubling the price of this offer and changing the webinar as a whole coming into the new year.
So there’s a lot of built in urgency and scarcity. So my guess, we’ll probably end up with 5 or 6 hundred thousand from this in immediate sales, but the lift from that is huge as well, because even people that don’t buy, now they are indoctrinated into our process. They sign up for Clickfunnels, they start buying the books, all the other pieces start happening and there’s so many big benefits that come from the consistency of the webinar.
So I just wanted to kind of circle back to when we talked about, almost a year ago, and get back to that. Like I said, my friend who’s stuck at $3 million I told him, “This is the model. You gotta do a webinar every single week.” He was like, “I can’t write a new webinar every single week.” I was like, “No, you do the same webinar every single week.” He was like, “I can’t do the same webinar every week, my audience will get tired of it.” I was like, “Exactly, that means you gotta bring in a new audience.” And he was like, “No, that won’t work. We make our money by creating new things, and it takes me a couple of months to create a new thing.” And I was like, “That’s why you’re stuck at 3 million dollars, because you can’t.” It’s a hard, hard road to grow past that until you find……
I know that, from a decade, ten years of me trying that and launching and re-launching. No, focus on creating a front end, it becomes so amazing, good, and powerful that you can consistently bring new blood in that brings new blood in.
The second half is that you’ll find these businesses that are stuck at 2 or 3 million dollars a year. Usually after a year or two of that they start getting atrophy and it starts shrinking and there’s usually a couple of reasons. One is the entrepreneur is burned out of creating new offers. Number two the audience starts shrinking. I don’t know what it is, we all get good at bringing in an audience initially, and then we have it and we stop focusing on that. We’ve gotta be focusing consistently on new leads coming in. It’s a life blood of your business, even if you don’t want to grow, just want to maintain, it’s essential to have.
It’s interesting, I have been listening to an old course, an old Kennedy, actually Bill Glazer course, it’s called Think and Grow Rich for Renegade Entrepreneurs, or something like that. I found it somewhere. So I’ve been listening to that and the firs thing he talked about is renegade entrepreneurs thinking to grow rich is that they all have a focus on consistent new lead generation. No matter how good their business is doing, they are always focusing on consistent new leads coming in.
As I move into this new year, we are changing the webinar offer. We’re changing the pricing. We’re doing a lot of cool things inside of Clickfunnels and how we sell it, but I’m not going to be doing this webinar anymore. So for me it’s like, what’s the new horizon? What are we shifting to?
I still recommend for 99.9% of all business, the focal point should be a front end webinar. In fact, we will still have webinars that are selling on the front end. But for me, I think I’ve talked about this with you guys before, my whole goal now, we just passed, it’s crazy. This week we passed 25 thousand active customers inside of Clickfunnels. That’s not people who signed up and left, that’s people who are actively being billed, happily. It’s…..we never thought we would get to that. We talked about that, “Oh yeah, when we have 100,000 customers…” but we never thought that was a real thing. But a little over two years in we’re at 25 thousand active customers, which is crazy.
So for us, it’s like how do we expand that market? How do we get it bigger? We can keep doing it through webinars, and we will, but I think for me and my business, and again, I’m not saying this for all businesses, because I do not think this is across the board, but for Clickfunnels to grow….we’ll continue to grow in the channels we are, people that have existing businesses that need a funnel, but the big opportunity for me and our team is, and it’s funny because a year and a half ago when I started down this project, for new customer acquisition, how do we keep the fuel in the pump? It was funny, we were looking at, trying to figure out, what’s the offer I create so that all small businesses will start using Clickfunnels?
I was stuck for 3 or 4 four months, trying to think through that, trying to figure things out. And it’s funny, I may have told this story before, if not it’s worth telling again. So you guys may hear it twice. A year and a half ago I had joined Joe Polish’s 25k group and the night before the first meeting, I got invited by some cool people to come to this little dinner party. It had about ten people in it, so I come to this dinner party and Dave Woodward came with me to the trip, but he wasn’t able to come to the dinner. And prior to that Dave and I were talking about it, “How do I create, a book I need to write, or is it a webinar? What do we need to do to penetrate and get all of small businesses to start using Clickfunnels? And we’re thinking through it and thinking through it. And it’s funny how when your brain is on something how things just open up.
So I’m at this dinner and sitting across the table from me is Dean Graziosi and Dean is someone I’ve always looked up to and he’s been on TV for 15 years selling his books. I think he’s probably sold more books through direct response marketing than any other human on earth. The person who might be closest is Kevin Trudeau but he’s in jail right now so I’m not going to work with him. But Dean’s the best, and he does things in a really clean way that aren’t cheesy, that aren’t like the dirty stuff.
And I’m sitting across, looking at Dean and we’re talking about, I don’t even know, something unrelated, and as we’re talking I had this epiphany, I don’t know, I look at it probably more like a revelation from Heaven, but who knows, whatever it is. That thing that is like, “Russell, you are going to be writing a book, you’re not going to be targeting small business owners, that’ll take care of itself. You have to expand the market and the book you’re going to write is going to be called Expert Secrets.” I own that domain, but that was never in my vision to write a book called that. “The book’s going to be called Expert Secrets and somehow Dean’s going to write an infomercial for you.” I’m sitting there listening to Dean talk about his kids or whatever, and I was like, “What? Did I just hear that right, because I don’t know if that makes any logical sense whatsoever. Then my brain comes back and its like, it doesn’t need to. I was like, alright cool.
All I had was this little glimpse, “Okay, you are writing a book called Expert Secret, it’s going to help you expand the market and Dean’s going to write an infomercial.” I’m like, okay do I tell Dean that he’s writing an infomercial for me? No, don’t tell him, he’ll think you’re weird. It’s like on a first date, I think this is my wife, should I tell her? No, don’t tell her on the first date, hold that in. That’s how I kind of felt. So that was kind of the beginning of it.
So I went back that night to the hotel room and I saw Dave and I was like, “Dave, I’m writing a book, it’s called Expert Secrets and the whole goal is to expand the market.” And he’s like “I got chills. Yes, we need to do that.” I’m like, “Alright.” So Julie, who is my writer, helps me with my writing projects, I voxed her that night. “Okay Julie, I’m writing another book.” She’s like, “You said you were never writing a book ever again.” I was like, “I know, we’re doing it anyway. I’m wiring you some money, give me the info again.” That night. I wire her and then I start writing this book and we start going down this process and I have no idea how all these pieces are going to take place, I just know that it’s supposed to. So I’m going to start running that direction.
So we start running. Some of you might already know I wrote the whole book and then this summer I was editing it and trying to get it ready for the publisher and I realized that I hated the book. So on Snapchat I highlighted all 250 pages of it and deleted it. Messaged Julie and said, “We’re writing a new book.” And she’s like, “What? We just wrote a book.” And I’m like, “Yeah, we’re writing the same book again, but this one is going to be way better.” And started over, I’d been working on that project, in fact, today I finished Secret number 7, which is chapter number 7. For some reason I have to name everything secrets, I don’t know what’s wrong with me, I just like secrets better than chapters, so whatever.
And the book is legitimately, I’m so proud of it. I can’t even….so proud of it, so excited to share it with everybody. It’s gonna change a lot of lives. Change how people look and view how we sell and how we influence and how we can affect people’s lives. So it’s gonna be awesome.
And then I’m in Genius Network, I go to that….Excuse me, now I’m going to rewind back. This is the next morning after hanging out with Dean, I’m in the genius network and I love Joe and Genius Network…..Just the way that…..I’m not a super huge fan of some of the way that…….I’ll leave it there.
I’m out in the hallway talking to Jason Fladlien. Jason’s a big mentor of mine and I’v e learned some things about belief that….I was telling him the last time we were hanging out, “Do you realize those things you told me about belief have changed my whole life.” He was like, “ I don’t remember talking to you about that.” I was like, “Really? It was a really big deal to me.” He’s like, “I don’t remember that.” It was funny.
I was talking to Jason and I told him we had launched a certification program, I was like, “We’re shutting it down.” He was like, “Why would you shut it down.” I was like, “It’s not working.” And we tried to talk through it and we were going to shut it down, and he was like, “Why don’t you find some rock star to run it for you?” and then I was thinking, if I can find the right person, then yes I would do it. But I don’t see that vision.
Then a couple of days later, we’re sitting in a room talking about shutting down the certification program and all the sudden, I can’t remember who it was, but someone mentioned Norah and all of us in the room got chills, it was like, yes, she is the right person. She will take this to the next level. Norah is that person. We called her up, begged her and she came in and built the certification program. And what’s interesting, the certification program, we’re certifying all these amazing people now who were building funnels…
I just pulled up and Steven is looking through the office window in a Santa hat, waving at me going crazy and saying Webinar Day.
Anyway, this certification program is certifying all these amazing people who are now going and penetrating getting funnels into local businesses, which is cool because I was trying to figure out how to get that, how to go that direction and it didn’t make any sense. Now I know that those markets will be filled through the certification program, which is so cool to now see the vision later.
So we’re working on the book, go to the next Genius Network, and I went to the last one and I was like I was not planning on re-upping, so I was like, it’s been good and I like it but it wasn’t what I needed right now in my business. The night before the last meeting, Dean’s like, “Hey come to my office.” So I swing over to his office and we talk for a bit. He shows me his infomercial studio, I’m sitting in this thing and I’m like, this is where he’s going to be filming an infomercial for me, but he doesn’t know that yet, how do I not awkwardly bring it up? “Hey man, just so you know you’re building an infomercial in this studio.” It was pretty cool.
And then, I was talking about how cool it’d be to have him do an infomercial. I just dropped it as if it just came in my head, not that I’d been plotting it for a year and knew it was going to happen someday in the future. I was like, “Man, that’d be so cool to have you do an infomercial. What does it look like?” an d he’s like, “I don’t do infomercials for people, but I might be willing to do one for you.” I was like, “Really.” And he’s like, “Yeah.” And he gave me some cool compliments and I was like that’s cool.
And then he kind of mentions in bypass, Joe Polish and I are thinking of doing a 100k group, would you be interested? And I said, “If you help me do an infomercial I’d definitely be interested.” And he was like, “Alright, I think we can make that happen.” And we kind of left it at that. I was like, oh my gosh. That night I was all giddy, this may actually happen. There’s now a path that this could actually, that this might possibly happen.
So the next morning at the 25k meeting, the first thing Joe and Dean do is they launch, “Hey we’re launching a 100k program.” Dean’s like, “Brunson’s thinks he’s in.” and I was like, “I’m in.” and they handed me an order form, I filled it out and joined the 100k program. I’m like, I don’t know the answer but I know that this is the path. Somehow Dean’s making the infomercial and I just need to be closer to him.
So that was kind of it, and now the 100k program, we had our first meeting a couple of weeks ago, I think I talked to you guys about that. And what’s cool, is at the meeting he asked me if I would train for a little bit. I was like, “What do you want me to train?” and he asked what I thought would be best for this audience. And I said, “I know what would be best.” So I shared some stuff in expert secrets book, it’s almost like a test to see how this audience would respond to it, and they went nuts. Insane. I was like, yes the message is right. The book is right.
And I told Dean, my book’s about this concept. And Dean’s like, “I want to help you with the infomercial.” And I was like, “I want you to help me with the infomercial.” And he text the other day, “I think I have the perfect host for your show.” I’m freaking out that all this stuff is happening. For me the market expansion is the book, Expert Secret and using it through an infomercial. I mean we’ll be doing a normal book launch and pushing through channels that we’re good at. But I see a very clear vision of how we can use Expert Secrets to create the market to get people to……
Because the hard thing with a small business owner, let’s say it’s a chiropractor. If I go and I’m like, “I want to show you this thing called Clickfunnels.” And he’s like, “Alright.” And I show it to him, “Look you can drag and drop and move things on the page.” And he’s like, “Isn’t that how all website builders work?” because he doesn’t build his website. It’s the consultant that they hired or the webmaster that does that. To them it’s not a big deal, so the only way to get to them is to become a consultant, which is why the consultant program is working so well.
I’m like, if we want to expand, we have to create people who are going to be using Clickfunnels. How do I create somebody? I show them the value they have within themselves. I show them that they’ve got talents and hobbies and skills and the thing that they goof off on the weekends because they love it, could actually become a career for them, if they learn how to structure it right. As soon as I can convince them of that, which is the goal of the book, then they need Clickfunnels the tool to be able to actually implement it. And that’s the magic.
So that’s how we are going to be expanding our market. That’s going to become our new front end. Don’t forget, unless you’re worried I’m shutting down webinars, after they go through the book the next funnel is the webinar. The message will be a little bit different. In fact…..it’s already been 21 minutes. I’m sorry. I’ve been sitting in the parking lot freezing because I’m so excited to hang out with you guys. So I’ll just tell you some more.
So what’s going to happen is they’re going to get the book, through radio, infomercials and online, all these different channels are gonna be pushing it. After they get the book, then there’ll be a survey they take. The survey will identify what type of business they are and then there’s a different webinar based on each of those types. And that’s the future, where we’re going. At least I think so. It could definitely change in the next few months. But that’s where we’re going. And Dean may decide next week that he hates me and not do an infomercial and I’d be totally cool with that.
But so far I said, that’s the direction I’m going. But for most of you guys, the book is a much harder direction, longer and I think that for every one of you guys, if you join the inner circle, 99% of you guys, I’d say, you need a webinar and you need to do it every single week. And you’d say, “I want to automate it.” And I’d say, “Go back to this podcast episode.” And I’d make them go back and listen to it and say, “After you have perfected your message then you have my permission to automate it, but not before.” And that’s kind of the same thing I wanted to mention today.
It’s been a year now. And those that heard that message a year ago, if you’ve been listening, you could be in the spot where Brandon and Kaelin are, where you did 600 thousand in sales on a webinar in November. Or maybe you haven’t done the webinar yet, and it could be both ways.
There’s a kid, I’m learning his story, 4 or 5 people keep telling me, I haven’t met him yet. In the Clickfunnels group, he’s an 18 year old kid who was a pizza boy a little while ago and he learned the perfect webinar and he did like, I don’t know, 3 or 4 hundred grand selling something through a webinar. And he’s a young kid, first time he’s ever done it. But he did it and he’s doing it consistently and that’s what you guys gotta do. So I’m asking you right now to recommit. Because I don’t want to have this conversation next year with you.
The conversation I want to have next year with you is, “Russell, I made so much money this last year. What should I do?” I’m going to say, “Come to Kenya with us and let’s build some schools together. But first we gotta get you to a spot where you can.” And the way we get you there is by having a consistent funnel. You’re bringing leads in every single day, new blood into your business every single day.
And it’s happening through a front end webinar. And that’s the model. So go back, marketinginyourcar.com search for the next twelve months, or business model for the next twelve months, something like that. And listen to that, and follow that like it’s the gospel truth, because it is.
There’s times for all these other funnels and all these cool things we’re doing, after you’ve acquired the customer. What’s cool is that you can focus on doing the live webinar once a week and the rest of the time you can focus on cool new products and services you can create for the existing audience, but all of your ad money, your time, your effort, your focus, should be on getting new people in through one consistent message. After you have that, then you can go back and create new things for those people. But that should be your focus.
There you go. This may be the longest marketing in your car in the history of all time. We’re at 24 minutes and 15 seconds. I’m going to bounce. I got some work to do. We’ve got a webinar today. I have no idea what the numbers will be, but I’m excited to do it. And then retiring this message, which is kind of sad. Not completely retiring, I’m just definitely changing it for the new funnels to be very specific.
The one…… for people wondering why, this webinar I talk about supplement funnels, which has been a double edged sword. It’s got a lot of people excited about supplements, but people who don’t have a supplement, there’s always just gap after bridges. So the new version webinars, webinars-plural, we identify who they are, and if they’re a retail store, we have a webinar showing them retail funnels. If they are an expert, we’ll show them expert funnels. There an ecommerce person will show them ecommerce funnels. We’ll be very specific to funnels we show in the webinar to the type of person who’s listening. So that is what we’re doing.
Because the first two years of this has been brute force. We try to get everyone with the best message we can create. The second ten years will be more like a sniper war where we craft the message perfectly for each audience. It will hopefully increase conversions, stick rate, decrease churn, and build the culture even better. Thanks everyone for listening. Appreciate you all, have an amazing day and I will talk to you all again soon. Bye everybody.