Two Awesome Lessons From The NCAA Wrestling Tournament

Hey everybody, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing in Your Car.

Welcome to the Marketing in Your Car podcast where you can increase your traffic, conversions, and sales in just 10 minutes a day. And now here's your host, Russell Brunson.

Hey everyone, it's been a little while. I've been out traveling the world, gallivanting. I don't know if that's really even the right way to use that word, but it sounded cool today. I was in New York all last week for the NCAA wrestling tournament with my dad, which if you guys listen, you probably knew that already. And it was great. I was planning on doing a bunch of podcasts from there. Actually saw one of my favorite marketing people in the world, Dagan Smith was there. We sat by each other for most of the tournament. And I was gonna share some podcasts with you guys and him, but just never happened. It was too crazy of a weekend. Too much wrestling, too much New Yorkin', too much good stuff happening. So anyway, I'm back now to report. And share with you guys some cool stuff. So, yeah, I hope that things are going well. We are a little over a week away from Funnel Hacking Live. We're completely sold out, which is a nice feeling to have. And so this week I gotta go and just work on my presentations. I got some cool stuff I'm gonna be sharing with you guys and with our community, and I just wanna make sure that it's amazing. So we were gonna launch Funnel University last week and then this week, and then decided just to kind of put it on hold till after the event. That way we can just focus on making the event flawless, and then we will have Funnel University when we get back. So it's all done and ready, it looks amazing. Our survey software's awesome, like just lots of good things. So that is kind of the game plan from here. So I wanna share with you guys probably what I think is the most important lesson I learned from the wrestling tournament this weekend, which will relate to you guys even if you're not wrestling people, okay? Which you all should be, but that's an argument and a sales pitch for another day. So NCAA wrestling tournament, is amazing. It's more like the World Championships. In fact, Coach Schultz, if you guys have seen Foxcatcher, Mark Schultz, who is the main character in that movie, was my wrestling coach at BYU. And I actually saw him this weekend, which was really fun. But one thing that he said is that the NCAA Wrestling Tournament, because this style of wrestling is only done in America, he says it's pretty much like the Olympics or the World Championships, which it is. So It's kind of a big deal. It's like the Super Bowl for our style of wrestling, which is cool. And so the best athletes from all the conferences around the country all come to this tournament, and it's a big deal. And it's really big for wrestling. It's on TV, which is like the only thing we get on TV ever. So that's pretty cool. But it was just awesome. So like, we're in the state— it was in Madison Square Garden, and the entire Stadium is just filled with wrestling fans, which is cool. And then we had tickets we bought that were on the 12th row, and it was right in the middle of Iowa Hawkeye fans, which if you know anything about wrestling, you know, Iowa Hawkeyes have had a dynasty for the last, you know, 2 decades, 3 decades or so. Dan Gable was their coach and built this huge thing, and so their fans are kind of insane. So we were stuck right in the middle of all these Hawkeye fans who were just going nuts the whole time, which made it really fun too. But what I want to share with you guys is just at the NCAA Wrestling Tournament, for whatever reason, is like, there are tons and tons of upsets, which are the fun ones, right? You see on the big monitor up top, like, hey, the number 14th seed's wrestling the number 1 seed, and somehow this dude wins, right? Like, how does the 14th seed, who's got like a, you know, whatever, 20-10 record, come in against the undefeated guy and beat him, right? How do these things happen? And I was thinking about that, and I was talking to Dagan a lot about it, and, you know, one part of it is interesting is belief. It's just weird. If you believe you can win, you can win. But it's just, it's all mental. It's all this belief. Like, do you believe you can actually do it, right? We watched this one guy. He was undefeated, hadn't lost the entire season. Or excuse me, he only lost once the entire season. He lost to this guy who wasn't that good, wasn't ranked that high. And they met in the semifinals. And I was watching that and I was like, I think this guy has got a shot at winning. The guy, the underdog, The only reason why is like on paper this guy should not even be close to the number 1 seed, right? Like it's not even, it's not even close, but because he had beat him earlier in the year, which was kind of a fluke, he had this belief that, "Wow, I can beat him." And because he had a belief he could do it, he went out there and sure enough he almost beat him. He lost, but it was like crazy close. I have had matches in my career where I on paper should have lost to people. But because I thought I could win, I had this belief, like for whatever reason, like that guy looks weird, he's whatever, I had this belief that I just knew I could win, I was able to win. It was just, it was weird. I remember this one time I was wrestling, there was this guy in my freestyle Greco club who I beat all the time. And I didn't have much respect for him as a wrestler. He wasn't that good, right? And one day I'm at this tournament and I'm wrestling this other kid from some other state and the kid was good, like we're having a close match and I was actually losing going into the third period. And my freestyle Greco coach I guess there's not periods in freestyle Greco, sorry. It's been a while. But during one of the injury breaks or injury time or something, my coach came out and kinda told me some stuff. He's like, hey, you need to work on your level change or whatever. And then he's like, by the way, he's like, Matt beat this kid by 8 last match. And instantly, something's like, Matt beat him? By 8? Like, in my head, all of a sudden, this kid in my head was no good and I had perfect belief that I could beat him. In the last minute and a half, whatever it was, I came out there and I tech-fouled him. Because all of a sudden it went, and it was the same match. I was struggling this whole match and suddenly my belief switch in my head changed to this kid should be really easy for me and then he was. There's this weird thing about belief. It beats all odds. If you believe you can win, you can win. I remember last year in state tournaments there was a kid, he was number 14 seed and he became a national champ. I posted on my Facebook wall and I forgot about it until yesterday because yesterday popped up saying last year here's a memory that you posted. And the thing I posted, a picture of the kid and they interviewed him at the end and they said you were the 14th seed. "how in the world did you come here and win this?" He said, "When I got here, I looked at the brackets and I looked at all those people and I said, 'This is who I have to beat to be a national champ.' And so I came and beat 'em." And it was just like, just pure belief. Anyway, so I thought that was important for all of you guys because it's not skill, it's not talent, it's not records, it's not anything, it's belief. And that same thing is true in your business. I think the reason why I win a lot of times is I just have such belief that what we're doing is gonna change the world It just does, right? And so my question, first question for you is like, how much belief do you have? Do you have enough belief that you can win, right? So that's question number 1. The second thing I wanna bring up, and this is the second half of the equation, is being able to look at a loss and not looking at like this devastating thing, but looking at it and trying to figure out what you need to change to win. Okay, good example, in the 175, 174-pound finals, which you guys should go Google this match, it was amazing, Bo Nichols from Penn State undefeated the whole year, was supposed to win the tournament against this other kid who was a true freshman from Oklahoma. And this true freshman had lost to Bo Nichols 3 times during the year. In fact, in the Big Tens, he got pinned by him. And so he had no shot at winning, no way he was going to win. He comes into this finals match and him and Bo Nichols lock up. He launches in, throws him to his back, almost pins him, gets a bunch of near fall points, and then Bo ends up trying to play catch up the entire rest of the match. Ends up losing. It was just a huge upset. True freshman wins this thing. Everyone's going nuts. And it was amazing. Like one of those matches where you— like I stood up and I stood amongst all these Iowa guys who were not standing and I gave him a round of applause. I was just like, he— I mean, to come back to lose to this kid, the best kid arguably in the world right now, and after losing 3 times this season, come back and win, like that's huge. And what is like— what causes that, right? I remember my junior year in high school, I had worked hard all my sophomore, that summer long, I had done freestyle and Greco and we worked all day long and I just knew my senior year I was going to be state champ. I go out there, first match against a kid who had taken second the year before and we go out there to wrestle and I had belief that I could win but this kid was better than me and he beat me. It was devastating for me. I got shown that I was going to be state champ that year and I lost my very first match, right? And my dad had recorded the match and then after the match, my dad rewinded, was watching, rewinding, watching it, and then my next match happened and he started recording and he actually recorded over the first match except for about 13 seconds. So we had 13 seconds of footage from this match against this guy named Nick Fresquez. And, and so my dad every day for the next 4 months watched that 13 seconds of film to see what he was doing and how it was working. And he would do these little funky moves on me. And so we would go and my dad would watch this match all weekend long. We go to practice next week, we drill it, drill it, drill it, drill it, drill it. And then we come back and he just kept— I remember my dad watching this little like little clip over and over and over again. This is all we had. It's all we had to pick apart what he had done to beat me. And we focused on that all season long. And I actually wrestled this kid in the state finals. And in the state finals, not only was he not able to do that move on me, but that's actually the move I used against him to win the state championship, which is kind of a cool turn of events. But what it was all about is I lost. After I lost, I looked at why I lost and we made adjustments. Okay, and this is the key. This is why wrestling was such a big important thing for me. There's some people that are just amazing wrestlers, right? They come in and they just they just win all the time, right? I was never that guy. So I would usually go into a tournament or I'd go into a season or whatever, I'd wrestle somebody and I could beat most people, but against the best people I would lose. So I would lose and I would be like, wow, why did I lose? Well, I lost because my elbows were out. I lost because I was overextended. I lost because I took a bad shot. I lost because of this. And we looked at what the reasons why we lost and then we went back to the room and we practiced and we practiced and we made adjustments and we took away those things that they had the last time to beat me and they came back and I wrestled again. Sometimes I'd lose to him a second time and it would be closer and I'd look at, "Okay, why'd I lose this time?" We'd make those adjustments, make those tweaks, make those changes and come back and eventually we would win. That's the kind of wrestler I was. I was not, again, an amazing athlete, but I was amazing at looking at why I lost and making adjustments to come back the second time stronger and harder. That's what happened in this finals match. This guy had beaten him 3 times during the year. In fact, he'd pinned him 2 weeks earlier. He looked at that. "What mistakes did I make? What adjustments do I need to make?" He came back and was able to beat him in the national finals. And so this is the second lesson. I see this all the time in our business. In fact, I'd say with our, with our inner circle members, this is where I spend the majority of my time, is they go and they create a sales funnel, they create a sales letter, they create all these things, they go out there and they launch it and it doesn't work. And then they're devastated, like emotionally, like, I can't even handle this. I lost, you know, like this thing I spent all this time and effort on didn't, didn't work. And they're shattered. And I get it, but because they haven't had— I mean, most people have a chance to go through wrestling or sports like that where where you get beat on and you don't have an opportunity to go and just quit, right? You get beat on and you have to go look at the film and figure out why did you get beat on and you make the tweaks and the changes. Same thing is true for us in marketing. We put out a campaign and we launch it and 90% of the time it doesn't produce the way I want it to at first. We get beat. So I have to come back and I have to make adjustments. I look at the numbers across the whole thing. How much did we spend on ads? Was that high? Was that low? Was it good? How many people opted in on the landing page? Was that high? Was that low? Was it good? How many people bought off the sales video or the sales letter or the webinar? We look at every single piece in this process just like I would in a wrestling match. We break it apart, we figure out like, what was I doing wrong? Were my elbows out? Was I overextended? Was I shooting far? Is my headline not captivating? Are people not opting in? Are people not buying? Are people not showing up to the webinar? I'm looking at all the things that went wrong in this process and I'm making little tiny adjustments. I'm not going and reinventing the wheel from the ground up, say, "Oh, this sucks," and throw it away and restart. That's not how it works. It all comes off of tiny little adjustments. So initially, when we create our first sales funnel, we're trying to make the best possible thing we got. Okay, then we launch it. People are always like asking me, can you critique this before I launch it? I'm like, no, I'm not gonna critique it before you launch it. Go launch it. We have no idea what's gonna happen until, until you're put in competition, until you see how you react to the real world, see how people react to you. Okay, and I think it drives a lot of my Inner Circle members crazy sometimes. I'm like, no, I'm not gonna critique this till we drive some traffic. I don't want to screw things up. It could be perfect and it could be far off, but we need to let traffic tell us. I don't want people telling us their opinions who are coming and looking at it like, "Oh, this is my opinion. You should tweak this." No, let people vote with their credit card. The only thing that matters is people voting with their credit card. If they're willing to pull their credit card out and give you those digits, then you're right. That's how you win this match. That's how you win this game. I never give people critiques ahead of time. I'd have them launch it. We drive traffic. We spend a couple hundred bucks and then we look at what happened and then we make the adjustments and then we come back for the second match stronger. And the second match we may not win either. That's okay. You make the— you look at the numbers again. You look at every step in this funnel, page by page by page, what's happening. We then make some tweaks, make some adjustments, we come back again. We make some tweaks and adjustments, come back again. We keep doing that until we have a winner. Okay, NeuroCell, our supplement, did not win the first time. If you look at the numbers, it lost the dual meet. It lost the tournament. It lost the conference. It lost the semis, but then in the end of it when it mattered, I think it was Nurture Cells, like the 7th or 8th variation of it, that's the one that took off and blew up and won, right? Same thing with ClickFunnels. We launched that, it wasn't the first or the second or the third, it was like the 5th or 6th or 7th variation that won. Okay, so you guys gotta think about that. It's not throwing out the whole thing, it's looking at what's happening, looking at the process, making those tweaks and adjusting until you're right. That's how you win in wrestling, that's how you win in business. So there you go, guys. There's two, two big things I hope will help you from my weekend. Number one is belief, and number two is getting out there, having the match, and making the adjustments you need to make to win. And if you do those two things in your business, Just like in wrestling, just like in anything, that's how you win. All right guys, I'm at the office. I'm sitting in the parking lot for like 5 minutes because I was so excited about sharing this stuff with you guys. But now I got to get back in the game. I got a big match today. I got a lot of work to do. So appreciate you guys. Have an amazing day and I will talk to you guys all again soon.

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson again. I want to thank you for listening to Marketing Your Car. And I want to make sure that you're plugging into everything that we're doing on a daily basis. And so make sure that every morning You're plugging into the Marketing Your Car training. If you go to marketingyourcar.com, you can join the email list to make sure you get email notifications when new episodes come out. You can also get links to all the transcripts of every single show we've done in the past. But then every night, well not every night, but most every night, I also do a Periscope show called the Marketing Quickie Show. And it's really fun. You can go to Periscope and search my name, Russell Brunson, and subscribe. And every single night you'll get a notification. It'll kind of chirp on your phone and you'll have me jump on there. And give you kind of the end of the day thoughts and ideas and marketing strategies we've been playing with during the day. Or maybe even and, say and/or you should go to marketingquickieshow.com and over there you can subscribe, you can see past episodes, you can read the transcripts, you can have a bunch of fun. So thanks so much for being faithful listeners. Again, register at marketinginyourcar.com and also marketingquickieshow.com.