Waiting for the Radical to Arrive: Day with Dan Kennedy (1 of 4) | #Marketing - Ep. 15

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Watch the Hulu original series "The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives," now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+ for bundle subscribers. Terms apply. 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 want to 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. This is The Russell Brunson Show. What's up everybody? This is Russell. Welcome back to the show. I've got something fun for you for the next couple episodes. So this year's Funnel Hacking Live, you may have heard, we did a special VIP day with Dan Kennedy before the event started. And Dan was my original mentor, he's who I learned marketing from. I still to this day listen to more Dan Kennedy than any other marketing person on the planet. I have calls with him once a month, like I still, he's my, he's the guru to the gurus, he's who I learned from. Anyway, it was really fun, the whole VIP Dan Kennedy day. But the very first 2 hours of the day, I had a chance to sit down and actually interview Dan. Specifically for the event, wanted to talk about a concept he actually brought up at the last Funnel Hacking Live. He shared this really cool thing about how any market, there's people that are frustrated, they're waiting, they're trying to figure things out, but he said that in every market, people are waiting for the radical to arrive, for the person to step up and say, no, things are different, things are gonna change, this is where we're gonna go, right? So you think about our businesses, we as the attractive characters of our businesses, we are the radical in our industries, right? We come in and we, have different ideas, different things, and from there people will then follow us. And that's kind of the— that's kind of how it's supposed to work, right? And so the whole Dan Kennedy Day, he went deep into that philosophy and principles and how we do it and stuff like that. And so I'm going to take my 2 hours with him, I'm going to break it up over the next couple episodes with you guys so you can learn some cool ideas. This first episode, we specifically start off by talking about how a lot of people think that our business is different and these things don't apply to them, where in reality they do. And Dan will talk about that. And then number 2, we're gonna talk a little, start going deeper into markets and understanding them and how you as the radical can step in and actually dominate. It's gonna be a lot of fun. So the way it works at these, usually I'll ask Dan a question, he'll respond for 15, 20 minutes, I'll ask him a second question. So you'll have a chance to hear the first couple questions from my Q&A with Dan Kennedy from our VIP day. I hope you enjoy it, I hope you love Dan Kennedy. If you're not a Dan Kennedy member yet, go to NoBSLetter.com. There's a really cool— you cover shipping and handling, we ship out this whole box of Dan Kennedy stuff and give you a trial to his newsletter, which is amazing. So go to NoBSLetter.com if you want to go learn more about Dan. With that said, here's the first part of my interview with Mr. Dan Kennedy. Welcome everybody today with Dan. We're excited to have you guys all here. Dan, I wanted to— before I get into all the core questions I wanted to ask you today and get into I wanted to set a pre-frame for everybody because the very first Kennedy event I ever went to, I walked in and there was a big, huge sign on the wall that said, my business is different. And then you kind of went on around that because I want to make sure that everything we cover today, that there's nobody in this room who's like, well, that doesn't work for me. My business is different. So what would be your pre-frame for everyone understanding how this stuff applies to all businesses?

Well, so I have that same sign in my conference room because people haven't stopped voicing the idea in 50 years, and there's very little difference in any business, right? The structure— somehow we have to attract people to the business, and we have to sift and sort them between appropriate for that business and inappropriate for that business. And if we bring them in as leads, then we have to convert them to a sales opportunity of some kind. If we bring them direct to a sales opportunity, those are the only two paths there are. Um, and then a sale has to be made. And in many cases, the game begins because your customer acquisition cost is, you know, equivalent to or greater than the sale. So that's the same in every business. Some businesses are— the economics are harder, right? A Dairy Queen, obviously, customer acquisition cost needs to be a lot lower than a Lamborghini dealership. But then there's offsetting benefits to owning 10 Dairy Queens rather than owning a lot. So, so everybody is quick to discredit methodology when they haven't seen it apply directly to what they define their business as. And it backs all the way down to What do you define your business as? So most people will always answer that question with their deliverable. So they will say they have a dental practice, or they have an e-commerce site, or they have a shoe store, or they have a restaurant, or I'm in the insurance business. So they, they will give you the deliverable answer., and that then causes this: my business is not like that business, so what that business does can't apply to me. If they more intelligently think of themselves as being in the marketing business with a deliverable that is far less important than is the marketing, Now they get closer to, gee, all businesses are really the same. It's a big impediment for a lot of people. Many times they don't realize they're doing it. So, you know, they'll be here in Vegas for 4 days and they're going to see the second most effective place in the world at dollars per head per day. And so every place they go should be a seminar, um, and they'll miss 80% of it because they're not— they, they own jewelry stores and a jewelry website, and they're not in a jewelry store when they are seeing a fabulous sales technique, right? They'll go to a great restaurant and and they'll have a great time, and they will never translate what they're experiencing to what should be happening in their business because their business is different, right? And it's not. Yeah.

So you said it's the second best here in Vegas.

What's the best? Disney beats them. Interesting. Yeah. And Disney does it with no hookers. So, you know, that brings the dollars per day down right there. No adult shows and no gambling. And Disney still beats them. They passed them about almost a decade ago and they've held it. So Disney gets the greatest number of dollars per day per person present, and Vegas is right there nipping at them second. Interesting.

Okay, so that's a good preframe for everyone as we go through this stuff, just to kind of figure out how these things apply for your business. I remember going to the very first Kennedy event, seeing that sign, and a lot of stuff that I was learning was like, how does this actually work for my business? And where I started shifting the mindset to like, okay, this is happening over here for a realtor or for a stock, whatever it might be, like how it applies. That's what changed everything for me. So, okay, so we have a lot of cool stuff we're gonna be talking about over today with you. And, um, I'm excited because what I wanted to kind of lead with is, um, is talking about like if you're in a market or you're going in, uh, going into market, how to disrupt that market and But to kind of preface that, I want to talk about, or I wanted to mention that when we started building ClickFunnels, and 12 years ago is when we had the first idea, we started building it. During that time, I had downloaded every one of your courses from all time, and I put them all on my phone. And I would listen to you for between an hour and 2 hours a day every single day because I wanted, I was trying to figure out again how to create this business, how to go into an existing market and how to disrupt it and how to do things. And I wanted, you in my mind just like talking through this thing. So I was heavily listening to you. I said every single day while we were building ClickFunnels, while we were launching ClickFunnels. And so I thought it'd be fun because I think everyone here, either they're in an existing market or they're trying to create a business and to disrupt a market. And so I wanted to go deep in there because the same things I was thinking about and learning from you a decade ago. And so I think the first question I kind of wanted to lead with is when you're deciding like this is the market I'm going into, Obviously, it's easy to see like the tip of the iceberg of what's happening, but what are all the things that are happening underneath we have to be aware of if we want to come and actually disrupt the market?

We're going— well, so it's a good characterization. When you look at a, a, a market, a business category of any kind, you are typically from outside, you are typically only seeing the tip of the iceberg. If you're already in it, you tend to be limited in what you let yourself see because you only see your methodology and the commonly used methodology. You know, technological advancement for the Amish is very slow. Because they try only to see each other. So getting to 2 mules hooked to the plow instead of 1 was like a 2-generation revolution. So one of those 2 things happens. From outside, you only see the top, the tip of what's visible to the naked eye. And you hear what's being said at that level. But what's not being said, and what is not seen by the naked eye, is what's most important in breaking into, disrupting, attracting attention, and leapfrogging in a market. The many markets, the disrupting effect has been built around direct marketing, but it's also been built around personality. Because most established markets have an organized, established ruling class a leadership that has a book of rules that it enforces principally for its own purposes to maintain their position and the status quo. Almost every market has that. And so I kind of experienced everywhere I've gone this phenomenon is if there's money and there's a fairly good-sized number of people involved, there will be an establishment created, and it will create a set of rules. So it doesn't matter if it's your homeowners association, right? Who's on the homeowners association committee? Typically, it's not you, it's not me, it's not anybody who welcomes independent ideas. You know, they're a bunch of petty tyrant bureaucrat-type people who have no power or authority anywhere else. And so they get to, you know, make up rules about how high the hedge ought to be, right? And then defend that rule to their death.

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Um, when I started in speaking, in 1978 and joined the trade association. There were two, but the other one was insignificant. So I joined the National Speakers Association. There were only 4,000 members, but that's enough to cause this phenomenon of a group of people who jockey their way to heads of committees and onto the board. And then they create rules of how the business is supposed to be done. And in most cases, wittingly or unwittingly, mostly wittingly, a lot of the rules are created to discourage new competition because Every new success they think takes gigs away from them. There's a whole discussion of do you have a limited pie or an abundant theory? So, and for them to admit that some outsider, some newcomer has a better way of doing this, They can't admit that because to do so would make them an ass, right? So if they have been doing this a hard way and they have entrenched it as the dogma and they beat it into everybody's head the minute you walk in the door, here's how we do things in this business, and you do it differently and more successfully, you get to a level of success faster than they ever did, um, uh, they have to say, well, I've been an ass for the last 8 years because I should have figured that out. Damn few people in positions of authority will ever say that, right? So instead, they become kind of violently defensive about their rules. Now, what's important from entering that market, any market like that, is that there is a segment of it that is already quietly grumbling to themselves. They are already saying only in their self-talk, or maybe to their spouse, or maybe 3 or 4 of them off in a corner are saying, "This does not compute." Right? This doesn't make sense to me. But they feel like they're the only one, and so they shut up and they play along. But they're just waiting. They're just waiting for somebody to come along and say what they're already thinking. Some version of what they've been telling you about how to do this is stupid, and here's why, right? And, you know, the Protestant religion exists because of Luther. And of course, most people know about Luther putting the manifesto on the church door. All that, which I'm going to talk about a little later. But so Luther's big thing that he objected to with the Catholic Church was what was called buying indulgences, right? So at the time, you could like pay for your sin to be okay., right? So adultery was, you'd go to hell unless you put the right amount of money in the indulgence box with a note, which they had in every church, and now you're okay, right? And everybody went along with this to some extent because, hey, not a bad deal. And to some extent, because everybody else was going along with it until he said, this does not compute, man. You know, the guy that's going to decide which elevator you get, he ain't getting the money. So this is stupid, right? So there's a bunch of people always waiting for that. I found it, the opportunity in the speaker community. Which became my first infomarketer audience. Because the dogma was so stupid. I'll give you a great example. So there's awards. So almost every association, every membership organization, you included, right? We come up with awards, okay? Theoretically are designed to encourage behavior that will make you more successful. Right? So NSA's first big award, Certified Speaking Professional, at the time, you had to have 100 fee-paid, not sell product, fee-paid speaking engagements from 100 different clients in order to apply to get your pin. I said, so let me get this straight. If you're really good and a corporation invites you back 10 times, that doesn't count as 10 engagements. So The way to win the award is to be so lousy that nobody wants to use you twice. This doesn't really seem to make sense to me. And here's all these people killing themselves to get this stupid award by getting a new gig and a new gig and a new gig and a new gig. I said, I did one. And then I entered a contract with this company to do 20, and I really don't have to worry about paying the light bill for the year. You are waking up every morning having to worry about paying the light bill, and you're there because you're following this asinine, you know, award system. And really, their whole dogma was that way. And so you had to be so bad you didn't get invited back. In chiropractic, when we disrupted it with prepay, so chiropractic was all pay-per-visit. You went in, you got an adjustment, you went to the desk, you paid your $39 or $29. I don't know. So I was involved in a 1970s, late '70s, early '80s wave in chiropractic of prepay. Diagnose you, tell you, you need to come in 3 times a week for the first 6 weeks and twice a week for the next 5 weeks. And every other time you come in, we're going to hang you upside down in a corner and you need to have heat therapy. And here's what all that adds up to. It's $23,800. Would you like 10% prepaid, or would you like to pay it in thirds? Right there. So that was prepaid. Well, the professions establishment went nuts. I mean, you can't do that. Well, why? Why? Well, you just can't. You know, and the truth is you can't because we haven't been and we don't want to look like jackasses. So you can't do that. And they got pretty militant, the publishing industry, again. And there's even a current example. If you watch Shark Tank, They have a particular built-in bias about bringing a new product to market that sometimes causes them to give really bad advice to people because they really don't understand direct response. They really don't even understand direct response online. And Kevin privately admitted to me that 3/4 of their successes now are only possible because they have the others and they can use the customers they already got from these 8 businesses to launch this one. So they don't really know how to build one from— and so often they will give— there's a guy out there with really a really expensive golf club And I had a client many years ago that we sold, we sold a driver for $5,800, one club. In today's dollars, it'd be twice that probably. Very successfully, but only by direct response. You can't put that in a store at the, you know, at the country club. You can't put it at Dick's Sporting Goods. You just can't, right? That thing's got to be sold. And they just— this guy had a new whiz-bang, you know, golf club, and they just crapped all over him because it wasn't going to work in 3 distribution channels that they're really familiar with, right? So this is a dangerous thing, but it is also the opportunity because there are always people doubting what they are going along with and keeping quiet because they don't want to be, you know, the odd man out, right? I'm thinking this, but I must be wrong because all these other people are going along with it. So I'll go along with it too. But they keep saying to themselves, there has to be a better way. Something's wrong here with this. And that's your, that's your door into, into the market.

Interesting. One side note, good news is Daymond John actually of the Sharks is the only Shark I know who literally most of the deals he does now, he puts them on ClickFunnels. He's a team that like builds direct response funnels and ClickFunnels for the Shark Tank deals, which is really fun because we'd help consult on a lot of those after they buy the company and come in and we can help them like actually run a good funnel, which is really fun.

Yeah. And I don't mean to— I mean, I think Cuban's the biggest idiot of any of them, but—

Why?

Just kidding.

I don't want to go there. But you could edit that out if you— you're the one that probably will get the lawsuit, probably won't be me. But people can be really smart, but narrow, right? And people like to repeat what has worked for them, which makes sense, but it causes them to block out other ways of doing things and other opportunities, and those people are not immune from that.

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Priceline. All right, so the first thing was figuring out, like, understanding the, the markets. So the next question I have is, like, after we understand, like, here's the, here's the things that people are in control, how do we, like, understand what's happening so we can reverse engineer what we need to do to be able to come in and be the disruptor in the market.

So the longer tenured the rulebook is, the better. So your, your, your opportunity to be explosive grows, the more entrenched the establishment is because the dissatisfaction, the silent but skeptical go-alongs, their dissatisfaction is growing, right? Their willingness to hear a new and different and better way after, if you will, 10 years of oppression is greater than it was after 3 years of oppression. So long-tenured, here's how we do this business stuff, that's like a marker of opportunity. When the dogma immediately seems silly to you, that's good, because that means it seems silly to others. But again, they are intimidated by being in the club and having nobody else say it. The red cap phenomenon of the moment, right, did not happen with first term, but it is happening with the second term because people's dissatisfaction with what was going on grew and grew and grew and grew and grew. And a greater number of people were ready to hear certain things and then voice them. They felt free to voice them. And all of a sudden, a ton of people are voicing them, right? So that's what happens. And the more dogmatic the rules of the road are, the bigger your opportunity. Lawyers at one time were not allowed to advertise in America. A guy by the name of Dan Osteen from my hometown, took that case to the Supreme Court and won. Because it's a free speech issue, it's a constitutional speech issue. So they all have the right to advertise because one guy said, how come everybody else has a right to advertise and we don't? Why? Well, how does that make any sense? Right? And he started saying it loud. And then a few others said, you know, that actually doesn't make sense. And then in his case, he had to litigate it, but in most cases, you don't. Your dumb phone That whole thing exists if you track history because of a guy named Bill McGowan who founded MCI. Because AT&T had a monopoly on long-distance telephone. That was, that was long-distance telephone in America. That's it. The local was Ma Bell's and then there was AT&T. And McGowan said, who'd they get their monopoly from? Because of course monopolies are illegal in America, right? We have an antitrust division of the Justice Department. Well, nobody could answer where they got it from, but they got it. Only AT&T can do long distance. So McGowan described the early years of MCI as running a law firm with an antenna on the roof. AT&T, of course, sued him. He had to sue them. They went to the Supreme Court and boom, Supreme Court said, I don't know. You know, I don't know how that could be. But if you want to be in the long-distance telephone business, go ahead. And here we are now with no long distance, right? Nobody pays long distance charges. Now you buy data. So, the more entrenched it is, the better, because when you break that dam, it's, you know, it's really profound, and then the last thing you're looking for is any sign at all of restless natives of some little breakout group over here, some weird newsletter over there where somebody is objecting to this is the way things are done in this business, in this field, in this sport, etc. And The people that are attracted to you because of that are really more rabid than just normal customers because they essentially have been locked in a little box pushing against it mentally, but not willing to really knock it apart, and you come along and give them a permission slip to knock it apart, they get pretty excited.

It's cool. So we start, When you start doing that, you're going to the market, you start disrupting, like, what are the things— like, how do you start? I mean, obviously, you identify and start pulling them.

Well, you need to define your against position, right? Because you are now going to be against some portion of the dogma and the rules of the road and the protocols of how things are done around here, right? And then you start to craft your radical position, which is sort of an extreme version of Ogilvy's, you got to have a big idea. You know, so you need your radical statement essentially about what's going on. In NSA with speakers, mine was, and the first time I really delivered it, I did, I only got away with it once. I did a free one-day seminar the day before the National Speakers Association convention. Since you were coming anyway, right? And I probably had 300, 350 there. Maybe 100 walked out as we went along, but 250 stayed. Because I told them, Speaking is not a business. And you're being told this is a business. It's not a business. At best, it's a good job. But it's not even really a good job. Because if you get sick, you don't get paid. You can never stop showing up ever, ever, ever, ever. The only way you get paid is to show up., right? And there's no barriers to competition. You can't put a moat around it. There's no benefit plan. There's no retirement plan. It's a pretty shitty job. And if you figure out your hourly money, because they would all tell you, like, the fee range in the late '70s was about $3,000. So they would tell you they're making $3,000 an hour. I would go, did you travel to get there? Well, yeah. Did you stay there all day? Yeah. Did you travel to come home? Yeah. So that's 3 days. So even if you do 8-hour workdays, that's 24 hours divided into $3,000. You ain't making $3,000 an hour. Right? You're making whatever 3,000 divided by 24 is. Plus you got expenses. Did you eat? Yeah, I ate. Buy a candy bar at the airport? Yeah. Well, you got to deduct all that, right? So now you're down to like minimum wage. So, I mean, again, you show this to them. Some get really mad and walk out. But others are going, you know, that had dawned on me. I just never really said it. But You know, and so no, this is not a business because you have no customers. So by definition, a business has customers. You don't have any customers. You have gigs. A meeting planner hires you, you go speak, you get a check, you leave, and you got to get another one. You don't have any customers. You don't have any recurring revenue. Other than if you're lucky, that place will have you back again next year or the year after. But you don't have recurring revenue. You have no revenue that occurs unless you are working. So when you take a day off, there's no revenue, right? Shoe store, you take a day off, somebody still comes in and buys shoes. The guy may not sell as many shoes as he would if you were there, but somebody's going to buy a pair of shoes today. So for all these reasons and others, this thing is not a business. And then I would explain that it was pretty good media with which to build a business, but here's what the business should look like that you build with speaking, right? Well, this, this was as radical as you could get. And at the time, selling from the stage was looked down on. There were a few, you know, Zig, Kevin Roberts, there were Donnie Hudson, there's maybe Tommy Hopkins, there's maybe 20. And they were celebrated to their face and looked down on behind their back. Because the NSA prestige model was all about fee-paid engagements. And so you had to— I had to explain to them that the only way to get customers that you get to keep, aside from going and giving another gig, is you have to sell the product to start with. So that part of this is all wrong too. In fact, the fee is kind of irrelevant, uh, because you can't show me the $3,000 you got from the Illinois Hardware Association last year to go speak there. You— the money's gone. You spent it. Your wife spent it. Your kids spent it. You can't show it to me, okay? But if you got 300 customers, you could show me those customers, right? So the fee is kind of irrelevant. The business is all about customer acquisition, like all businesses are, right?

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