#240 - What is a Sales Ecosystem and why do you need one for your course?

Hey. Hey guys, it is Kate here from hello Funnels. And given that it's the holiday season, my team and I are taking a very short but well deserved break. So there are no new episodes these next couple of weeks. But what we have decided to do is we've gone back through the archives and we've pulled out your most loved, most listened to and our most requested episodes from this year and we're going to be sharing them with you over the next couple of weeks. So maybe you missed them first time or maybe they just need a revisit. But these are the the three most popular, most value packed episodes and I hope you love them. So dive right on in. Trying to build a business that relies on one single thing is terrible advice. Most people out there who have seven figure businesses didn't do it with one offer. They didn't do it with one funnel. So this is why I want to kick the whole, you know, like one funnel away thing. And I want to talk to you today about ecosystems.

Hello. Hello everybody. It is Kate here from hello Funnels and welcome back to the Doing It Online podcast. Today I am wanting to talk to you about not just funnels, but I want to go one level deeper and I want to talk about ecosystems, sales and marketing, ecosystems. Because for years and years there has been this sort of fallacy in the industry. A much quoted line of BS, to be honest, that you are one funnel away from a million dollars. And I want to talk to you today about why that's really, really bad advice. Why that's also probably not going to happen for 99.9% of people. And what you can do instead, that works better and easier and faster and that is ecosystems. And that is what we're going to talk about today. So let's dive right on it.

Okay? So I want to start off today's episode by doing a bit of bullshit busting and that is with the whole tagline of one funnel away from a million dollars. So there are two reasons why I think this is terrible and very outdated advice. First of all, it is just bad business sense to be putting all your eggs in one basket. So even if you were, even if you did magically create one funnel and then have a big enough ads budget to boost that funnel for long enough that it made you a million dollars. And that was the only thing you were doing. Even then, imagine if something happened to one thing in that one funnel. Imagine if your ADS account got shut down. Imagine if your offer all of a sudden like something came out and that offer was no longer relevant. Trying to build a business that relies on one single thing is terrible advice. Now, yes, I do think that you need to focus on one thing at a time, master it and move on. But I don't think that getting this obsessive focus and this like, I can't do anything else until I've hit a million dollars with my funnel or even with my launch or with my one offer, I think that is just always bad advice. It's not how it works for most people. Most people out there who have seven figure businesses didn't do it with one offer. They didn't do it with one funnel. So that's the first thing. It's dangerous. The second thing is it's really hard. Like you, most people who we work with, who, you know, they come to us to set up their funnels and their ecosystems, which is what we do. They are usually really good at the thing that they teach, the thing that they help people at. They're not master marketers because marketing is a skill like anything else. Like, I wouldn't say that I could read a couple of books about brain surgery and be a master brain surgeon. They wouldn't even let me in there. You know, And I'm not saying marketing is as hard as brain surgery, but it is definitely a skill. It is definitely something that takes practice, that takes time. Most people just don't have that because you out there mastering the thing that you are good at. So to be able to make a $1 million funnel from one thing, then you need to be really good at that. You need to have the best offer, you have the best emails, the best ads, the best sales pages. Like everything needs to be dialed in to 11. And most people just aren't going to do that. Like there's a really high and impossible bar for most people. And then you spend all your time obsessing over this. You're neglecting the other parts of your business and, and it's just not feasible. It's not likely, it's not feasible. There are easier ways. So this is why I wanted to kick the whole, you know, like one funnel away thing to the curb, put in the bin where it belongs. And I want to talk to you today about ecosystems. So the whole premise and the whole reason why we started helping people to rather than just create one funnel, which is what we used to do is we had one funnel and we had a lot of clients get very, be very successful with their one funnel. But they always got to a point and then it stopped like that one funnel could get you so far. And then to get to the next level, you needed to add in another layer. And to have that one funnel even get you to that first place again, it had to be really good. Like you had to be happy to do the reps to make sure that those emails were amazing, that everything was amazing. And not everybody has the time, not everybody has a natural inclination, not everybody has the budget to outsource it if they don't want to do it themselves and get a professional copywriter in and all of that stuff. So instead of having our clients focus on like this one single thing and having to perfect it to make it work, we thought, what if we split the focus and what if instead there are three systems? They can all work kind of okay, but because you've got the three of them and they're building on each other, the combination of them actually works better than the single funnel on its own, even when it's been dialed in to 11. So what if we could do that? And that is where the ecosystem was born and that's what we do inside ecourse empire. So we now have three steps. It's a three phase approach and you build them one by one. And just adding one is going to make improvements, it's going to help to make sales easier, it's going to help to bring in sales in a more leveraged and passive way. But when you add all three, it's a game changer. It's kind of like when you have a chocolate sundae and then you add the banana or the sprinkles or the gold flakes or whatever you're. For me, it would be peanut butter. But whatever your sort of little special ingredient, when you put those three things together, it's so much better than just on their own. And that's how the ecosystem works. So what is the ecosystem? And I walk you through like the three things that you need, three systems you need to have in your business. Now, of course, if you want help with that, if you want templates with that, that's what we do in outside ecos empire. So let me talk about the three steps. So step number one, this is what most people think about, and this is usually the first one we get people to focus on is the email engine. This is your core, this is your heartbeat of your business. This is what any new subscribers, and that's important to note, new subscribers come through. It allows you to warm them up, to educate them, to connect with them, to engage with them, and to make multiple offers to Them usually over roughly a 60 day period. So the way we do it, so it's like a three phase approach for the different sort of buying and awareness phases as people go through that. That is really designed so that you should be making, you know, multiple sales every week. And the goal of this email engine is that you want to scale it to a point obviously beyond that. But like our first real important milestone is that you get that to a point where it is making you enough sales every week, it covers all of your expenses. And so we call that the financial freedom checkpoint. Very excited when people hit that inside the programs. And so what this does and what this allows you as a business owner, when you have that in your business, and it's something you know you can count on and you know that you have enough money to pay the bills, to pay yourself, to pay your team, it's always gonna have a little bit of fluctuations, but you know that when those even out that on average you're gonna earn this amount every week, every month. That gives you a really good level of certainty, stability. It's really good for your nervous system and it just allows you to show up as a different person in your business. Cause you're not just stressed about like where's the money coming from, where's it coming from? So that's, that's the core, that's engine. That is what we always started with. But like I said, that alone often isn't enough because then people go, okay, well how do I grow that? How do I get more people through this email engine? And usually that's like grow your audience organically, which everyone knows takes time or spend on ads, which everyone knows has gone up in cost. So it's not always that easiest switch to flick anymore. So what can we do instead? Well, what we now want to do is we want to add two more systems to this to make the ecosystem that is going to increase your conversion rates, increase your average order value, increase your profit together without actually increasing any ad spend. So system number two is our social selling system. So this is the simplest and easiest one to implement. You got to do it right, of course, you got to have the right strategy behind it for you and for your office. But this is a system that you use to go to your existing social audience, if you have one or not, you can use it paired with ads and you're going to use it to be able to sell really, really irresistible little bite sized offers and get people through the door. And the point of this system is that it gives you A lever to pull if you're ever having a month where you're like, oh, sales are a bit down, what can I do? You know, you don't have to go out and whip up a webinar, you can just do a couple of 30 second posts and you can fill that gap. The other thing that it lets you do is that if you wanting to run ads, it, you know, it gives you another sort of reliable revenue coming through, but in a different way. And it helps you to bring in higher quantities of quality buyers onto your list. So they're not just freebie seekers, they are buyers because they've purchased. And the next thing is that if you do it right and if you set it up the way that we show you how to do it. So it's not just about getting that initial sale of like a $7 thing or a $27 thing, it's about adding in the upsell track. And so potentially you could be out there doing a 22nd reel that brings in 5, $500 plus sales because of your upsell track. And normally to do that you would have had to have gone and done a webinar or a free challenge, but instead you just did a 22nd reel. So that is the power of having that in your business. Like, is that going to get you to a million dollars? Is that going to be enough to cover your bills? For most people, no. But it does come in and it all adds up, it adds a layer, it adds another thing that you have control over, which I think is really, really important, particularly right now. And the bonus of this is also that if you want, if you are wanting to do paid ads, as we said, our email engine, like it has its little purpose and that purpose is to cover the cost of your business. That your social sales engine, it's optional purpose, is that it can generate an ads budget for you. So then you can reinvest that into ads which then will bring you in more sales through that little ecosystem. And that's going to help you to grow much faster too. So that's, that's one and two, it's helping you to bring in more, more buyers, it's helping to bring more people into your email engine, it's helping you to grow your audience and it's helping you to make sales every day if you want to and every week. So the final piece of the puzzle is what about launching, right? So a lot of people, when they think of funnels, I think it's like an and or so, you know, it's like either or like you'd have a funnel or you do launching. But actually, and I've seen this time and time again over the last five plus years that actually you need to have both. And the simplest reason why you need to have both is because that usually funnel and you know, this email engine that we set up, this is for new subscribers. So new people who get on your list, they go through this email engine and then they land in the bucket of your newsletter subscribers. And if you don't make offers to them, then they're just going to sit there and probably go and buy from somebody else. So, you know, this engine is that you've built the email engine, it's just for the new people who are coming in. So you need to do something to, to optimize and to make the most of this audience that you've built and to make sure that they still have opportunities. Because maybe when they came through the funnel, they didn't get that level of trust high enough yet, or maybe the timing wasn't right or, you know, there's so many different reasons why someone who may end up buying from you in six or 12 months time wouldn't do it right away. Some people are ready right away, majority aren't. So that is what your launches are for. But launches have been problematic historically. They usually take up way too much time, they're too expensive, they're really risky. And it leaves you with no time or energy to do anything else in your business. That's why I've always lent on funnels and why I've always liked the more automated, you know, passive, although passive is alive, but you know, that more leverage kind of way of doing things. But we need to do something with, to be able to engage with and connect with and convert the people who are sitting in your email list. So this is where Evergreen launching came in. This is basically the only type of launching my team could convince me to do because I'm like, I do not have the energy, the capacity or the social battery to do these big, massive, risky launches. It's not good for me. I don't want to do it. So. So what we did instead was like, okay, what we're going to do instead is smaller but more regular office smaller, more regular mini launches. Like I could get behind that, like, all right, I can do that. And it worked really well. In fact, it worked better than the bigger launches and it also was better for me, for my mental health and also for the business. So that is the third piece of the puzzle that you have to come in. Now, of course, how you do Evergreen launches, it's not a simple matter of just stripping back your existing launches. There are certain types of campaign that work best for different types of offers and also for different types of niches and business as well. So you've got to have the right evergreen launch plan. But when you get that right, when you get that plan in place and you have those three things working together, it is, it's amazing. It just works so well. So that is the ecosystem, guys. That is what I, you know, what we are loving helping our clients to implement at the moment. And that is what is just such a stronger thing. Like you're not just relying on one thing, whether it be one funnel or one, you know, very irregular type of launch. You now have three pieces, all adding a layer, all contributing. And if one of them does fall down, like if your funnel breaks, if your ads account gets shut down, if you are about to have a promotion and something horrible happens in the world and you aren't able to really show up how you would have liked to have shown up, or maybe you have to cancel it altogether, or maybe your Internet dies and you can't run the webinar, it doesn't matter because you have not only these two other systems making you sales in between, but, but you've got, you're going to be able to make another offer in a couple of weeks to refill that gap. So it just gives you back so much more control. It makes, it puts you back really in the driver's seat and it makes you sort of rather than, you know, feeling like all you're doing is running on the spot and hoping things work, it just makes you feel like you are in control, like you can plan like, you know, if I do this, this happens and that if this doesn't work, that's fine because I've got this as a backup plan and that's just such a nicer place to run your business. So if you have found this helpful, guys, let us know. Just a comment or do a screenshot share over on social. We would love to know what your biggest aha or takeaway was from this episode. As always, guys, it would mean the world to me if you could help us get the message out. Share this with someone you think would get a, you know, an aha or a value bomb out of it. It would be so, so helpful. So thank you guys. I hope you love this episode. I will see you see you with more nerdy goodness next week. Bye.