Jeremy Miner’s Secret to Selling Without Chasing or Convincing | #Sales - Ep. 50
7 Jul 2025 · 40 min
In this episode of The Russell Brunson Show, host Russell Brunson interviews top‑sales trainer Jeremy Miner. Miner shares his academic background in neuropsychology and New Testament studies, explaining how the concept of seven levels of heaven inspired the name of his company, Seventh Level. He introduces his proprietary sales framework, NEPQ (Neuro‑Emotional Persuasion Questions), detailing how it blends neuroscience, emotional connection, and persuasive framing to move prospects from resistance to agreement. Miner recounts his rise to a world‑top‑ranked salesperson, the transition from one‑to‑one door‑to‑door sales to high‑ticket webinars, and the early financial losses that taught him to refine his funnel, traffic sources, and product stack. He describes the structure of his business: self‑liquidating offers (SLOs), the Black Book question libraries for various industries, tiered training programs (Fundamentals, $4k, $10k, Inner Circle Mastery), and the role of community platforms and recurring challenges in customer activation. Throughout, Miner emphasizes the importance of identity framing, tone, physiology, and continuous learning, warning that sales mastery is a lifelong pursuit. The conversation also weaves in historical anecdotes about propaganda, the power of language, and the ethical responsibility of influence.
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This is the Russell Brunson Show. What's up everybody? It's Russell. Welcome back to my show. Uh, and I'm here today where we're not in Phoenix. Where are we at?
We are in, uh, North Scottsdale. There's a difference between North Scottsdale and like Scottsdale. Yeah.
What's the difference? I don't even know.
Too much to explain.
Yes, man. It's funny. Cause like, um, 'Cause in my mind there's Arizona, and it's like, there's all these places, but I fly one place here, I never know which city I'm in, and it's all just similar.
I think there's like 5 or 6 million people, it's like scattered. There's not like huge skyscrapers, but it like takes hours to go anywhere.
To see everything?
It's all over the place.
Well, that's where we're at right now, and I'm here with Jeremy Minor, which I'm excited for. We just finished a podcast a few minutes ago, I was on his podcast, and now he's gonna be here on mine. And I'm excited because I probably have different questions for you than most people have. Obviously, we have a very similar religious background, but we look at things differently. You're very much like, and hopefully you'll tell us kind of your background, but like, you are hardcore into like the history of religions and things like that. I think that was part of your schooling. So I want, I'd love you to tell us some of the background on that, and then at the end of it, explain your company name, Seventh Level, 'cause I did not know that this was tied to anything until I heard you say something on a random podcast once, and it blew my mind.
Like, why is it a level?
And it's very fascinating, so.
Yeah, yeah. Okay, so I went to school. So I went to school for behavioral science, was going to become a psychologist, and my minor was in New Testament Christianity. So going to school at UVU, so study New Testament Christian, which was fascinating about— I was always fascinated about the mind and like, why do people do the things they do? Like, why do they have these beliefs, right? I'm always very, very— I always believe there's truth in everything, right? There's also some things that might not be true. There's some things that are true, and I don't think we all know until after this life, but that's just my opinion. Yeah. And so in pretty much every religion. So I'm talking about like ancient Christianity before like the rise of Roman Catholicism, like in the probably the 4th century. I'm talking about Islam the first few hundred years. I'm talking about Hinduism, Buddhism, like not present day but like ancient. I'm talking about even religions all the way back to, you know, the first recorded ones maybe in Mesopotamia, um, all had a few core beliefs that pretty much every religion believes in today. And I find that fascinating they've lasted like thousands of years. Now one of those beliefs was that there was different levels of the afterlife, or heaven, or whatever you want to call it. There wasn't just like two places, like a heaven or a hell, right? Like it's kind of taught today. But there's this belief, uh, really in every religion, that there were seven levels of heaven.
But every religion believes seven was the number?
This was like— you're talking about ancient Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism. You're talking about religions that I can't pronounce back in Mesopotamia. You're talking about Islam, like Ancient, like core, not like present day, because some of those have changed. There's just some that's simply in that. But there's 7 levels of the afterlife, okay? And in order for you to inherit where God— God dwelt at the, like, the 7th level. Now, 7, in typically in most, um, uh, most ancient civilizations, that number represents something that's divine. Does that make sense? So it represents perfection or divinity in ancient times. I'm not sure if it represents that now, it depends on who you, who you read. But so that is where God dwelled on this 7th level of heaven, and in order for you to obtain what he has, you had to become, you had to follow him, you had to be good, you had to believe in Christ, all these type of things. In other religions, you kind of like, I don't know how to describe it in a way, like perfection was at the 7th level. So I'm like, okay, what do I name, 'cause in my mind, sales training, it's not just, I don't do this to help people sell more, I do it to help people communicate better, if that makes sense, 'cause I believe that the world's, problems really all stem from a lack of communication. If you think about any war that's fought, why was it fought? Lack of communication. Right. So anything stems back to that. So in my mind, I'm like, communication has to be perfected. So that's where I came up with 7th Level. 7th Level is perfection in your communication skills. That's where I came up with that. Interesting. Yeah. And hardly anybody ever asked me that. A few people have asked me that. Not very many.
They just assume it's like, oh, it must be like the 7th level of the—
The levels of the tool or something. Yeah.
Yeah.
So fascinating.
So a competitor might come out with the 8th level. I don't know. We're the 8th level.
Jake, there is no 8th level.
Jake, there is no 8th level. There's only 7. What are you talking about?
Do you know when in history the faith started shifting away from levels into what most people believe nowadays?
It just depends. I mean, you probably know quite a bit about ancient Christianity. The, you know, the doctrine of the Trinity, where it stemmed from, and, uh, what ancient— what earliest Christians believe, like from let's say 33 AD to maybe 325 AD, kind of shifted, you know. Prayers for the dead, like just different things kind of shifted as, as people had just different beliefs and different agendas. Yeah, I mean, we could really go into like the writings of Plato inspired the Christian metaphysical Godhead, but you know, you guys would get bored.
Is this the Marketing and Sales Podcast?
I just geek out on this. So this is what I do in my spare time. I study like religions, and I studied World War II history. Just random. If you know me, I, I know everything about those topics pretty much. Yeah. If you ask me anything outside of that, I'm like, I know nothing. Yeah. I can't change the oil in my car.
So cool. Does your company know? Like, do most people inside your company— you guys talk about that as a thing, or is it more just like you create the company and that's kind of what it is?
Most of them know. Yeah, most of them know. I mean, our mission is to change the way sales is perceived in society. One salesperson, one person one company at a time. I believe everybody's in sales. It doesn't matter what you do, you're selling something. You're, you know, if you're a school teacher that, you know, trying to convince your kids to do their homework, you're trying to persuade, influence, you're trying to move them. If you're an attorney trying to convince a judge your client's innocent, you're trying to persuade, influence, convince. If you're a politician trying to get people to vote for you, trying to— everything is in sales. If you're a parent trying to get your kids to behave, go to bed at night, persuading, influencing, like everything is sales. And until we all start to understand that our communication skills can literally shape our destiny, it's hard to get where we want to go. It just is. If you were on a webinar and you didn't know 70%, 80% of what you know, where would your company be now? How many lives would you not have impacted? But it's because of your commitment to mastery, of learning those skills to help people that has helped you get to where you're at. And by doing that, it helps other people get where they want. Yeah.
Yeah.
So cool.
So in school you studied psychology.
Mm-hmm.
That we said psychology.
Mainly neuro, I specialized in neuropsychology, just like the study of how the brain works in conjunction with your nervous system. Oh, okay. Yeah, weird stuff.
How much of that then translates into what you're doing today teaching sales? Like, is it?
Well, it's everything. You've heard of like fight or flight mode. Mm-hmm. Well, fight or flight mode is a reaction by your nervous system, right? So I had to learn this the hard way. So when I got into sales, I was going into my senior year at UVU, And I get this job selling home security systems door-to-door because I got married and had my first daughter on the way. Cami is back there somewhere. Yes, long time ago. And I just viewed sales different. I viewed it differently because most— we get back in the van at night and most salespeople are like, oh, this neighborhood sucks. People are so mean. They're all broke. But I never viewed it that way. If somebody, like, in the first couple of months, I was trying to figure it out. If somebody slammed the door in my face, I'm like, oh, what did I say? Or what did I not ask that triggered that reaction in their nervous system? Like, this is weird stuff. I'm like, what did I do there that triggered them to react that way? Like, I triggered something in them. I triggered sales resistance. Instead of complaining, I'm like going through like, oh, I think, you know, because, you know, I'm talking too fast, I'm making them nervous, I need to slow down my tone. Oh, this person's a little bit older, I need to soften my tone, you know. So like gradually I took what I was learning in school, which doesn't really— it's not like they're direct correlation, direct. They're not like, hey, you know, when you say this in this tone, but I studied patterns, right? Principles and patterns. And I took those patterns from like Sigmund Freud. People do who they believe they are. I'm like, okay, people do they believe they are. So these people believe they're this. How do I change their identity into this? And so that's where NAPQ was developed. It took a while, you know, and it's still being developed. Yeah, that's the fascinating thing.
Do you study, um, so I love Freud, but I studied Bernays very heavily, who was Freud's nephew, who kind of started, you know, propaganda, PR, everything. Do you study—
I, I haven't Freud a lot, but we studied a lot of Milton Erickson because I was going to be a child psychologist. So you're talking about Milton Erickson, Milton Erickson patterns and principles and different things. Yeah.
You, um, I was just Bernays because he's—
he—
because he took Freud— he was Freud's nephew who took all of Freud's information.
Yeah.
And then used it to like move masses to get people to change their beliefs on the war and to buy cigarettes and all sorts of stuff. And so, that's the lens I look at.
Oh, that was World War I, right? World War I where he got started after World War I because all men smoked but no women smoked. So, they started the commercials where women that are independent and women that work smoke.
It became a torch of freedom and all these—
Yeah. He started to shift the identity of, oh, if I'm a woman, you thought I'm a stay-at-home mom, I'm only— I cannot smoke. I'm not like these guys. To like, I'm independent now, I need to show them I'm boss, I need to smoke. So he's shifting identities. Yeah.
If you follow— if you guys haven't read the book Propaganda, it's amazing. But he goes through all these different businesses, like, like breakfast, for example. Like, breakfast is not a thing that people ever had back then. And then, um, they— people, you know, saw what he did with cigarettes and they hired him to like, okay, we need people eating breakfast. And so he's like, well, how do I do this? So the first thing is like, if I just tell them to eat breakfast, no one's going to believe me. So he's like, he went and found all these doctors and scientists to say like, oh, you need to have breakfast. Breakfast is the most important meal. They took that, built a propaganda campaign, blew it up, and now we eat breakfast. And it was all because of this one dude who was nephew of Freud.
Yeah.
Um, and it was fascinating is the book Propaganda, it got a bad— it's like people like the word propaganda. So then he changed the phrasings, like propaganda and PR. Yeah, it's like the neutral language.
The coolest story, it's like the, you know, the, uh, the IRS used to not be called the IRS, you know, it used to be called the Internal Tax service. But that sounds kind of bad, so— but revenue sounds better. Revenue service. Like, see the neutral languaging? It's the identities. So it's fascinating because, you know, identity framing that we, that we talk about, like, it can be used for good or evil. Like, you talk about, you know, World War II, like the Nazis, how Goebbels used it to like literally change the identity of a nation to hate certain people, where before it was maybe a little bit of the population, but How do they get, you know, because how do they get 50-plus percent to change their identity into that? So when you learn this type of stuff, you really have to take great care of it because you can use it.
With great power comes great responsibility.
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All right, I want to transition back to you. So I didn't know this when we first met. Um, I obviously saw you initially online, saw your funnels, like, because that's what I go, this funnel sucks, this guy needs it.
He's like the analyzer of funnels, you know.
I don't want to show Russell the funnel, like, he's gonna make fun of it, he's gonna say, you But prior to that, you told me later, I didn't realize this, but a lot of people get in the sales business because they think there's good money in it. You were actually one of the best salespeople ever.
Do you want to brag about yourself for a few minutes? This is what your grandpa told me. Yeah.
But legitimately, you showed me some of the stats and the numbers. I want to make sure my people understand that you weren't just some guy—
I was ranked, yeah. —wanted to teach selling. Yeah, like, Direct Selling Association ranks salespeople. You have to prove it. So it's— I always say, like, Everybody's numbers typically go down if the IRS knows. It's interesting, you know, compared to the IRS doesn't know. But you have to prove it. You have to send in, like, if you're a W-2 salesperson or a 1099, you have to send in statements to show you. And they actually call and confirm with the company that you work for. So I was ranked number 40, I think 45 in the world. It's a long time ago. 45 in the world from like 2010 to 2018 based on what I was making per year. As a salesperson. This is out of like 180-some million salespeople in any industry selling anything. So, but I was always like, okay, these 44 people above me, I'm still— there's still stuff I have to learn. That's what always drove me, you know? And some of it is your industry you're in. Like, there was like the industries I— and like eventually, like, I capped out everything. And that's why I would leave, because I'm like, like, even if I sell 3 times more, I can't, I can't make more. Like, I'm capped. There's nothing I can do. Yeah. So yeah, it was, it was a, it was a fun run, but it taught me a lot. Like, I've sold in 4 different industries: 2 business-to-consumer, 2 B2B. And so even after, like, I had an 18-year sales career before I retired, even when I retired and then like a year later, I'm like, okay, I'm going to start the sales training company. I still was like, I don't know if I can do this. Like, I don't like, you know, I was at the top of my game for all these other industries, but like this, because I didn't even label it an EPQ then. I was just like, had all these different types of questions that I had. And it was like, you know, I didn't really label it. I knew what it was, but I'm like, how do I duplicate this in every industry? So there's always that question when you do something. There's always that little doubt. And I think that is good to have a little bit of a doubt, because I think doubt, in my mind, always drives change. Because I'm always like, I'm looking for the person behind me, like over the shoulder. I really love Tom Brady's story. Have you watched his documentary? No. It'll change your life. But he always talks about, he was always looking for the next guy up. He was like, I might have a bad practice, or a bad week, or a bad game. I'm looking at the guy behind me that's about to take my job. And that drove him, like literally drove him to keep learning more than everybody else. And that's why he stayed at the top. And a lot of people get complacent. And you see that in business too. You see a lot of business owners that get complacent eventually, and then eventually they get left behind. But it's the ones that are always like, have that little doubt, that little seed, like, you know, like somebody's coming for me. So I've always got to keep getting better. I think that's the key. I think it's good to have that.
So when you did, you did transition to the sales training coaching, you started doing everything that I think one of the really smart things you did. And I talk about these people all the time. It's like you're teaching a thing, you don't want to look like everything else. And again, I don't know the story behind this, but you definitely created something. You created a framework, you named it, it became yours. It was like, you know, this thing that was different.
So like in my feed, I follow all the people, right? New model of selling.
Yeah, it pops out. And I was like, what is NEPQ?
I'm like, what is it? Like, what is it?
Like it was a unique framework with a different name and everything. And I love like How did you develop that? Why did you develop it?
Like, what was the— I did— why I sit down, I was like, okay, I have to have like a, a framework or methodology, you know? And this was— I think this is even before— this is like 2018. I, I don't even know when, when we— dude, the first year and a half was like a blur. Like, we made some money and we spent more money. Like, it's just like, what happened? You know, it took us like a year and a half to figure it out. But setting down, I'm like, okay, what I'm going to name this? Okay, so went to school for neuropsychology, going to become a psychologist. So neuro. That's where neuro comes from. Neuro stands for brain, how it works in conjunction with the nervous system. So there's the N. E, emotional. So like I always say, and, and I love Tony, and I, I love to just go to the events because like I'm all geeking out. I'm like, everybody's like crying, laughing, and jumping. I'm like, man, that was a really good D-frame there. You see how he lowered his tone there? Like, like, did you see like the, the audience just change? And then that song came on, just everybody cried. Like Brilliant. Like, that's how I'm going. Like, I'm looking— I'm like, I'm seeing the frames and the body language and stuff. You and I geek out. Yeah, but so fun. Um, so anyway, so the E stands for emotion. So I always say, like, in order to master influence at the highest level, you have to master how to emotionally connect with that other human being or audience, whoever it is, where they feel that you're going there first. They feel like you understand them, their needs, their desires, their fears, their wants. Without buying into their story. Now, there's a key line here, because you can understand somebody and judge them. But if you judge somebody and they feel that, it's unlikely they'll buy. Most people, if they feel like you're judging them. So you have to feel like, they have to feel like you understand them and you're concerned about the consequences if they don't change. Not, oh, you don't have the money, oh, I'm so sorry. Like, that doesn't help them. That would be me buying into their story. I have to get them to feel that I'm concerned if this stays the same for them, the consequences. And a lot of that has to do with your physiology, your tonality shifting. That's why Tony doesn't talk in one monotone the entire time, because nobody would know who Tony was if he talked like that. And so that's where the E stands for, emotional. It's that emotional connection. The P stands for persuasion, and I like to say self-persuasion. So how do I frame the offer? Because I was talking to— I don't know if you saw me. I was with, uh, Dan Henry at your event. This is like, yeah, you, you've— have you had Dan on your show? Yeah, I love Dan. He's like one of my favorite dudes. I didn't really know him. Like, dude, we're like, we're like brothers, man. Like, this is just fun. We're like geeking out on deframing, just like, who are these weirdos? But we're talking about like, you know, everybody's solution looks the same. It's like everybody, like, everybody thinks like, oh well, if I just sell this, like, oh, that's good. We have this big Facebook group called Sales Revolution. There's probably 180,000 salespeople in there. Every day, there's new testimonials, boom, boom, boom, boom. The first question they ask, if they're not a client, it's like, oh, what industry are you in? Because they'll be like, my sales have tripled, or I used to make this and now I make this, or whatever it is if they're a salesperson. The first question must be, oh, what industry are you in? Now, why are they asking that? Because their belief system is, it must be the industry, it's not me. If I go to that industry, maybe it'll be different. Then they go to that industry and they they're like, oh shit, there's other problems here. This market's saturated too. Oh my gosh. Like, you know, the amount of times I've heard salespeople say, you don't understand, our market's saturated. I'm like, what? How many industries do you feel probably say that? Insurance saturated, cars, solar, everything saturated. Like funnels saturated, everybody's, everything's, chairs saturated. So, you know, so like, anyway, so going back here, so the P, it's how you frame the offer. Okay, so, you know, Dan and I were— Dan, we're talking about like, imagine two family picture frames. So imagine your family picture frame, you got your kids there, your parents or whatever, it's on the— it's on the mantle. Okay, same exact picture, but now you have to go buy two frames. The first frame you buy is like immaculate. It's like, you know, you got it from like trump.com, you know, it's like all gold. You know, if you've ever been to like Trump Towers, everything's like gold. The chocolate bars are gold. You know, you're like, this guy likes gold. And so like, they just go like the best picture frame in the world, and another frame you go to the flea market and it's like got cobwebs in it, it's broken, it just, it looks cheap, it looks horrible. Same family picture. Which one are you getting? The one that's framed better. So your offer's somewhat important, but the main thing that will separate you from everybody else is how you frame the offer. That's it. And when you start to realize that how you frame what you're selling, and that's going to determine if they buy from you or not. Like, everything will change because you'll start focusing less on the product and you'll start focusing on the results of why they're even buying something like that. And I think most salespeople just— they don't understand that. I think they're starting to get there.
Yeah, it's good. I think most of those people, they follow script, you know. I think about that with— you talk about getting back in the car, the sales guys, they're like, oh, it's not working, neighbors are working. No one's thinking like the deeper strategies, like principles behind it. It's just like, oh, it didn't work for this thing. It's like, yeah, but Like, why?
Well, yeah, because like, look, in every sales organization, how does some— how do salespeople selling the same thing to the same prospects, same price points, using the same script, how do they get completely different results? It's because of— it's not necessarily the, the, the words, but it's how they say the words. It's how they ask the questions. It's their physiology. That's a big part of it. Now, the words do matter. You know, every book talks, you know, 93% is your nonverbal 7% is your words. That's kind of a failed study. That's an old study. It's actually a little bit more. About 30% is your words you use and the things you ask. 67% of it is just how you ask the questions, the tone, right? And your body language and the cadence, how you pace out the question compared to asking it too fast. You know, there's so many nuances there.
So cool. All right, I want to geek out on the marketing side of this. So you Create an NPQ, you're going out there spending the first year and a half spending more money than you're making. Yeah. What was the transition as far as like, this is the offer, this is the funnel, this is the thing we created, this is the business model. Like, what is— what was the winning business model for you after you tried a bunch of things? So you're like, okay, we got it, now we can start growing.
Yeah, I think the first year was like 2019. I did 3 webinars. It was me and my assistant. That was it. So she was my assistant at my old job before I retired. I was like, hey Beth, I'm starting this thing. Do you want to come be my assistant? She's like, I'm in. So it's me and Beth. And so like, I think that's when we signed up for ClickFunnels. I think she did that. Yeah, she's also been ClickFunnels. Still remember 297, like, what's ClickFunnels? And then, uh, we, we hired this, we hired this marketing agency, you know, to run our traffic. And I didn't know anything about traffic, you know, or how that worked, how to write ad copy or anything. And they just started advertising, and I, you know, I had a little bit of— I'm like, okay, I'm gonna throw some money into this, you know. And I think we did 3 webinars I don't remember how many people we got on there, but those days are behind me. But that first year, I think we did about $1.3 million in sales, just 3 webinars, because I was still kind of like retired. And I think we spent $1.9 million. So, you know, we just lost $600,000.
That was just coming off because you didn't have a following at the point, right? There was just buying ads, man. People show up, you sell them something, they're gone after that.
Nothing. No, no, that's still pretty amazing though. Yeah, I mean, and I didn't know, like, you know, how to how to go from selling one-to-one or like one to 5 or 10 in a boardroom to then like, how do I sell on a webinar where people— I'm not even in front of them. It was awkward for me, right? I had sold on the phone and I was sold in the boardroom in front of people. But going to like, now I've got, you know, 5,000 people on a webinar, I'm like mumbling, bumbling. I was probably one of those people like, oh God, that guy, he told the story too long, horrible. But after the first couple times, you know, I learned quickly. I'm like, okay, that didn't work. I'm like analyzing it. I'm like, okay, that sounded like crap.
I'm curious, I tell people all the time, like there's a difference between one-to-one selling, one-to-many. You've done both. And what, what, what were the tweaks? Like what were the changes you had to make to transition from, from one to the other?
Well, the biggest, the biggest thing is it's very easy to, like, if I'm on a Zoom call or a phone call or in person with a person, how to basically, like, instead of, I mean, there's so many different things, but instead of like a lot of people are like, oh, you gotta mirror the prospect. Well, I'm like, well, I, I'm gonna teach you how to get them to mirror you. That's pretty easy when you sell one-to-one, or maybe there's 4 people in a room. When there's 3,000, a little bit different.
Whom I'm hearing?
That's a little bit of a tweak there. Uh, you know, I can tell if I'm selling one-to-one usually within the first, like, couple of things that they say, like how they feel loved, like, or what fears they have. Like, this, this guy has a fear of significance, that he's not significant, because in the first 30 seconds he said he went to Harvard and he got his degree in this, and I didn't even ask him. So what's his fear? That he's gonna be viewed as not significant or dumb, right? So I can see that the patterns and the principles pretty quickly and adjust very quickly. But when, you know, you've got 15,000 people in a webinar, how do you do that? You know they're in there, but how do you do that? So I had to start learning. It's just the principles, it's the patterns. And eventually, you know, I started on patterns, and then I go hire people that we have sold on stage before because I want to learn from them. And then I'll take what I know and with psychology and be like, oh, you know, the way they asked that question, that's a really good question, but they ask it way too fast. If they just slowed down and they went from like really playful tone there and then like lowered it into I'm concerned for you, that would have landed better, you know. So I just— these little shifts like that. But I, I'm, I'm a huge believer in like just hiring people that already know how to do what you, you want to do and learn from them. And you just— it— the trick is you got to find the right people to do that. Because in the very beginning, that first year or two, I was just throwing money. I was just like, oh, you do ads? Uh, 100 grand, here. Oh, you, uh, do a website? How much is it? 40 grand? Okay, here. Like, just like throwing money. And that's, you know, that's why I spent— I lost like $600 grand. Yeah. Then I'm like, okay, marketing agencies, maybe they don't work. Maybe we have to figure this out, you know. And then I think the next year, maybe we did a couple million more. We were like actually profitable.
And at that point, were you pulling more people internally, or you just find different agencies? Yeah.
And then, then like after the After 2 years, I'm like, okay, like, I don't know how to really run this type of business. Because at a high level, I've been a vice president of sales for a really big company in my corporate career, and I was a chief sales officer for a really large company. But that's completely different than like, you own the business and you have to hire the people and everything. It's like a startup. It's like you're talking about 90-day difference. I was the chief sales officer of a company who was already doing $400 million a year. Just different, you know? And so I just, I had to like I had to figure out, like, okay, I am— my strengths are here, my weaknesses are here. I'm not very good at this, I don't like this, so I need to find somebody that's really strong in this area. And that's when I started just finding people that were— would do that. I'm like, it's going to be way less expensive for me just to hire them and pay them to get the result that I want than me trying to figure out how to write ad copy. Yeah, just things like that. Yeah, yeah. And then started— things started to shift, you know, uh, 2020 we started getting on the map, you know, we might have did maybe $4 or $5 million. You know, which is not a ton. I look at it now, I'm like, oh geez, you know, 2021 we doubled that, you know, we won the big $10 million award or whatever, you know. And then, uh, my first reel was January 2022. I didn't even have an Instagram account before January 2022. I think one of my girls told me like, you need to do these reels or something. I don't even— camera— yeah, you need to do these reels. I'm like, what's the reel, you know, on IG? So started doing reels in January 2022, and then that's That's when we started like, you know, getting out there because then we started retargeting the reels and like our ad spends went way down. And I'm like, wow, this is really awesome, you know? Yeah. And so we just, you know, we're always trying to improve in that game, you know? Yeah. Build up the organic. That's cool. With ads. Kayak gets my flight, hotel, and rental car right so I can tune out travel advice that's just plain wrong. Bro, Skycoin, way better than points. During a Scorpio full moon.
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Um, for my funnel nerds, I wanna walk through the process. Right now you're doing organic, paid.
What's, what's the, what's the breakdown in where the traffic's coming from for your business right now? Uh, that would be a great question for our marketing people, but We, we have, uh, Curtis doesn't like this term, it's called, you know, SLOs, because he's like, ah, that one is close to being SL, but it's really liquidated. 100%. We can't call it SLO, almost self-liquidating, almost self-liquidating offer. Yeah, we're gonna rename it. So we have several of those. We have the NVQ Black Book questions, we have the insurance Black Book questions. That's our biggest industry we train. So it's any type of insurance. Life insurance is our biggest, final expense, commercial, property casualty, just a bunch of different homeowners. Um, and then we have a new one called NEPQ Black Book of cold prospecting, like cold calling, right? So more for our B2B audience. And, uh, we generate— I don't know, I don't know how many buyer leads. I know the Black Book, the generic Black Book, does like, I think, 10,000+ buyer leads a month just, just from that. That's not any affiliates, that's just us, cold traffic. And then we have an outbound team. Um, we also have— I think we have the things called the funnels, you know. I just don't look at them. I see some ads, I'm like, man, we've been running that ad 3 years. It still works. It still works. There's like a gazillion comments on there. I'm like, does anybody buy from that ad? Is anybody auditing that? But, um, you can tell I don't know all this.
This is the world I live in. I'm like, you don't know any of this information? This is the most important part.
This is, this is all the marketing people on our team. But we have some really good people that, that do that. Blake is our guy that does all of our media buying. Blake White's a good, good guy if you, if you know him. Yeah. Yeah, it's, you know, I try to stay in my lane, man. Yeah, I just get on the— I get on the camera and say, say some stuff like, here's the script, read it out.
Yeah. So someone buys one of your SLOs at the beginning, what's the rest of the business on the backside look like?
Okay, let's say they buy the NPQ Black Book. Okay, so there's many different avenues. So let's say they buy NPQ Black Book, then we have the— we have an outbound team. So we have about 55, 60 salespeople. I could be off one or two, and probably at least half of those are on the outbound team. So they're calling all those Black Book buyers from any Black Book or And we have another book, uh, SLO called the Top 50 Objections Black Book or something. It's out there too. I don't know how much that generates. And so they call them. So might have a 10-15 minute conversation about, you know, what they're looking, you know, why they're looking to possibly learn how to sell more. Hey, crazy idea, we want to learn how to sell more. I don't know, crazy. And then they'll book them in with one of our, uh, senior specialists is what we call them. And they'll go over like different training options, you know, help build a gap, you know, from where they are to where they want to be. And Then they'll go into— if they're a consumer, not a company, they'll go into like one of our main core 3 offers. We have NEPQ Academy, what's called Fundamentals. That's like a $4,000 offer. That's like a 51-hour course of me, you know, all recordings of different subjects for sales. And then they have like one training call a week, which is a huge like group coaching call that I do. Okay, but you might have thousands of people on that one. That's a 4 grand offer. And then we have one that's a $10,000 offer where they get the portal, 51-hour course, and then they get more, uh, specialized training. So they might have another training call each week. I think in that, that program there's like 9 or 10 different training calls a week on different subjects— advanced tonality, objection prevention, deframing, identity framing.
You know, you teach those or you have trainers?
Yeah, trainers. I do one of those, that's it, in that program, that $10,000. But that's a huge group call. There might be 1,000, 2,000 people on there every week. And then we have trainers that do the other calls, okay? Those are group training. And then we have what's called any— or Inner Circle Mastery, okay? And that's where I'm more involved. That's industry-specific. So we have like— we pretty much train every industry at this point, all the subcategories. So let's say if you sold doors, right, home improvement, okay? We probably have hundreds of home improvement scripts from the different companies we train, different salespeople we train, because the first 3 years we were savages because I knew we were going to do this. And like, me and the trainers like wrote out all these scripts from every industry, and people didn't pay as much for them as they probably should. But now we have a bank of like thousands of industry-specific scripts. So when they come in there, they'll go copy and paste one of those from their industry, or one that's very similar. And then on those training calls, we teach them patterns and principles on how to tweak it for basically what they sell. And I do 2 of those training calls per week. And I do it because I, I really like doing it. And I— and, and for me, in my mind, like, if I'm not constantly training, I'm losing skills. Does— are you with me on that? Like, I can't just like, I'm not going to do any more training, I'm just done, I'm retired. Like, your brain's like, my— I don't, you know, my brain cells would— yeah, I have to keep learning. So we're always tweaking things, you know. We might have a client on there that sells, let's say, you know, I don't know, SaaS or something. They sell an AI device that helps doctors, you know, you know, automate their notes instantly rather than manually doing it, or whatever, you know. And we write this sales structure out for it, and they might have changed like what I call problem awareness question just a little bit of a different— and I'm like, oh, the way they change that, because I'm teaching principles and patterns. I'm like, that was really good. We could take that same change and we can do that in, in this industry, this industry. I'm always like creative. Like, any PQ is always ever developing, and that's what I believe you have to be, because like I believe when you commit to mastery, I believe you never master it in this life. Like, you're committed to mastering marketing. Would you say, like, I know there's nothing I can get better at? Like, you're always like, I study more. What am I learning? Yeah, the same way. I'm like searching for more, always learning. I'm like, how do I tweak? How do I make this better? And I, and I think you have to be like that. I, I unfortunately, I see a lot of our competitors that we've kind of blown by, they just, they didn't do that anymore. They just, it got stale. You know, and we're talking some companies that have been around since like the 1970s that were the big boys that were now have flown way past because they just got stale. And I'm never, I'm never gonna— I'm always looking over my shoulder, always scared they're coming back, you know. So I'm always like looking, you know. So I always gotta, always gotta stay in there, you know. My thing, people always ask me when I was in sales, like, how are you selling so much? I'm like, uh, I don't know, I'm just outlearning everybody else. There's no like secret sauce, like I just I just put in more time learning this stuff than everybody else. Like, when I'm driving down the road, when I was in sales, even now, I'm not— listen, I always make fun of Taylor Swift. I'm not listening to Taylor Swift. Like, how is this helping me sell more? Like, no offense, you know. Maybe you have a cheat day on Saturdays, your music day, you know, where you just listen to— you just jam out, you know. But like, in my mind, like, you know, Brian Tracy, first concept I ever learned in sales. University on Wheels. I went to the seminar, it's like 2001, in Salt Lake City, Utah. Like He's like, use your car as a university. I'm like, yes, literally turn off the radio. All I did was listen. It's like sales CDs all the time. And you do that, man, I'm telling you, you do that. Just even if you did that an hour a day, people like, oh, I don't have time. Well, what do you listen to when you drive to work? What do you listen to when you drive to the chiropractor? What do you listen to when you drive home? What do you listen to when you drop the kids off at soccer? What do you listen to when you go back? What do you listen to to iron your shirt? You have those earbud things. What do you listen to when you eat breakfast? I mean, you don't have to get up at 3 in the morning to do this. Like, you can listen to 5 minutes here, 10 minutes here, 8 minutes here. And every day, if you do that consistently, that's at least an hour of learning. And you do that 7 days a week, that's 7 hours a week, that's 28 hours a month, that's 350 or whatever hours a year. And you do that for 23, 24 years, it's kind of really hard to suck at anything. Yeah, because you just outlearn everybody. But you have to say You have to stay— you're committed to mastery, you know? And to me, I just, I just like it. Just, I don't know, I'm always like, especially selling from stage, because it wasn't something I was used to. So now I'm like, I'm just like, all— I'm just like mastering the deframing and the reframing. I'm like, okay, I gotta do this. Like, it just, to me, it's like exciting to learn this stuff, you know? I just love it.
So cool. And then in your business, you're also doing events and challenges, stuff like that. How does that fit into the—
yeah, the core? Yeah, so the Ascension model is, let's let's say that the salespeople can never get a hold of the person. Well, then we have funnels that start to retarget them to get them to go to our challenges. We used to do challenges, the 5-day events, like every 3 months, but our marketing team is like getting burnt out all the time. And so we switched that to— I think this year we're doing 3. We've already done a couple of them. We have our next big one end of September. And so they get funneled to those events, and then every 6 weeks we do like a 2-day master class, which is 2 hours each day, and the CTA is simply to book a call with one of our specialists to learn about our industry-specific training. But we get like 35-40% on that, that book in a call. And so now we're automating— like, we just did a big insurance workshop where we had like, I don't know, 5,000 or 6,000 people on that, and it was a paid workshop. They all paid like $50 to $100 just to be on, which I like the paid. The bigger ones, the big challenges, we do those for free with a VIP. But these smaller sets they're all paid. And I— every 6 weeks we do that. So they get— they might get funneled to that. If they don't book a call there or buy from there, they might get funneled to the next challenge. So they're always getting funneled to something, is what we do.
Something to reactivate them, re-get them fired up, and then push it back to the call again.
Now we have a whole community that's being built out, a platform. I don't know all the details. That's our community manager. It's not the one Hermosillo has. What's that one? School. It's— I think it's called Disco or something. I can't remember. I don't know. It's very— I don't know all the details. But anyways, so some of our platforms are for consumers and then others are for companies. Now companies are different. They're not necessarily in those consumer programs because they need more attention. And so it's all customized at that point. Most of the companies we train probably pay like a monthly retainer of anywhere on the low end of $2,500 to like NBC Golf Channel is one of our clients, and they probably pay us $15 grand a month, okay? And they have access to our portal, and they have like a sales trainer that does like 2 training calls, uh, a month for them. And then they get on a huge group training call that I do with all companies where I teach something every month. So there's different things to do, and some of them pay for more. Some of them then pay for workshops in person, you know. And depending on the, the funding they have, it's either me or one of our trainers that are that are doing that. So it's— yeah, businesses are a little bit different. Yeah, very cool. Well, thanks for just trying to learn, man.
I'm trying to learn from you. Yeah, well, my, uh, my funnel nerds on my side will love kind of hearing the, the behind the scenes of that kind of stuff.
I'm sure there's a lot more that I, that I didn't, that I didn't go over that our marketing people are going to get upset at me.
Yeah, well, for all my people, where's the best SLO for them to look at to get plugged into your world? Is it the Blackbook Questions?
Yeah. I mean, I don't even know the website to that. That's, that's how uninvolved I am. Anybody know the phone number? Anybody know the phone number? But I'd say just have them text me. Just have them text me. Okay, they text you with— what's the, what's the number? We changed the text number. Is it 480-637-2944? Yeah, yeah. Have them text me at 480-637-2944. So me and a couple of our sales trainers lock ourselves in a room every here and there. We answer questions through text. Yeah, really? Yeah, well, there's not just me, it's other sales trainers. I wish I could answer every question. Sometimes there's like, are you sure you want to give my people your cell phone numbers? Come in every hour. Yeah, but haven't— haven't texted us questions and we'll have them just text us on that number and just say, hey, I heard Russell, you know, can we get a link to the Black Book? Now there's an investment, $27 for the Black Book. I know, I know. If you need a GoFundMe page, just let us know.
If you can't afford this and you need to eat more, But hey, there's—
I mean, look, I know your audience is smart. Yeah, they're entrepreneurs. And you know, I love working with entrepreneurs like your audience because as an entrepreneur, they know that the biggest asset they have is their time. And once their time is gone, they can never— what? They can never get it back. So smart entrepreneurs, they know that investing in mentorship, coaching, and those type of things, and learning from others who have mastered things things, help them get to the next level. So yeah, got some smart people.
Yeah, very cool. Well, thanks, man, for letting me come hang out and over here your side of the world and, uh, sharing all these really cool things. Thanks for having me on, man. Thanks for being here. Do you have a funnel but it's not converting? The problem 99.9% of the time is that your funnel is good but you suck at selling. If you wanna learn how to sell so your funnels will actually convert, then get a ticket to my next selling online event by going to sellingonline.com/podcast.
That's sellingonline.com/podcast.
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