The psychology of persuasion | Benjamin Hardy & Marie Forleo

I'm going to start with just showing you two quick pictures. I'm going to flash a lot of things that you're not going to actually be able to see a lot. But the main things I actually want you to see are actually the things in red. So 7% and 15%. So I'm going to explain those pictures in a minute. The question is how. So what I'm going to cover in this talk is how to create a frame. How to actually have the people who are watching your messages or experiencing your material being in an environment like this. How to put the correct lenses on them. That's actually what Robert Cialdini's work is all about. And then ultimately how to get people to make big decisions. How to make people or get people to take action. That's basically what this is all about. And I actually. Gina, I'm pretty sure that this is the wrong set of slides. I'm pretty confident this is the wrong set of slides. Anyways, that's me and Joel practicing this. I gave this talk at 100k about a month ago and so I decided to reshare it. Anyways, we'll start with Robert Cialdini. So here are some of the quotes he said. There's a critical insight for those who want to learn to be more influential. The best persuaders become so through pre suasion, the process of arranging for recipients to be receptive to a message before they encounter it. To persuade optimally, then it is necessary to pre suade optimally. But how? In part, the answer involves an essential but poorly appreciated tenant of all communication. So this is the key. What we present first changes what people experience. So what we present first changes the way people experience what we present to them next. That's the key. It's all about creating the context. And, and then when you create the context, you shape everything. So I'm going to just share with you one of my favorite psychological studies. This is a really funny study. You can look it up if you want. It's called Mind Over Milkshake. And so as you can see in the picture, basically there was two groups. One group was given a milkshake that they were said was very healthy, low fat, gluten free, all those things, 104 calories. The other group was told that the milkshake that they were drinking was indulgent, totally filled with brownies, all sorts of stuff, 600 calories. The truth is that both of them were the exact same milkshake. This was all about framing. What the psychologists did is they ended up testing the people's blood and kind of the biological response of what happened after people took these milkshakes. And basically what it showed is that people had different physiological responses based on the framing of what they thought. There's a lot of interesting, more stuff that Jamie Hope would understand, kind of component of all that stuff. But basically the idea is that your framing not only influences your insights and your mindset, it literally influences your biology. So now I'm going to talk about how I've applied that principle to webinars recently.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can simply go to Joe's free book and you can get a copy there.

So this is a video that people land on when they come to my webinars. And basically what I say when people come to this video is I actually tell them that I don't want them to watch my webinar. I tell them that it would be a waste of time for them to watch my 60 minute training if they don't have the right perspective. I would rather them not consume more information. They already consumed so much information online. It's going to be a wasted 60 minutes, both my wasted 60 minutes and their wasted 60 minutes. And if they do not have the right perspective. And so when they click that registration button, I say, if you really want to watch this webinar, I want you to watch it from the right perspective. And so I've put together a seven minute video that's going to help you get into the right perspective. It's one of the things that Joe says, it's one of the things that Robert Cialdini says you have to have the right mindset and the right setting, set and setting in order to have a transformational experience. That's actually true of therapy as well. Joe said it, he said people go to therapy not for information, they go for an experience. And so if you want people to have the right experience, they have to have the right perspective because you've got to create the right context. And so basically what then happens is when people click the registration button, they go through this pre webinar training, it's seven minutes long, they watch it. And I just teach them a bunch of stuff that I'm going to already teach them in the webinar. But One of the things I do at the very end is, and I don't see a clock either on a 10 minute thing. So hopefully I'm not going too far overboard. But anyways, at the end of the training I make an offer, essentially a tripwire offer. I offer them a $7 journaling course. And one of the things I say is if you buy this course, you don't have to buy this course in order to watch the webinar. You've actually already registered for the webinar. But if you buy this course, two things are going to happen. You're going to be able to go through a few exercises that are going to help you have a much more powerful experience with the webinar. But also by spending $7 on this thing, we. Good, good. By spending $7 on this journaling course, you're also going to be invested. So this is one of the things that Joe says, let's see here. Joe Polish, Ph.D. he says if they don't pay, they don't pay attention. So one of the things I actually say at the end of that seven minute thing is I say, look, you don't have to buy this, but if you do buy it, you're going to have a completely different mindset for the webinar. It's only $7 to buy this journaling course, but it's essentially like buying a ticket. And if you're more invested, you're going to have far more commitment and you're going to have a different lens. And that $7 lens could be worth a lot of money to you. It's just like why we paid $25,000 to be in this room. The information we get in this room is valuable in a lot of ways because we're so invested financially, it puts on a different set of lenses and commitments. And so I just, I literally explain all this to them. And one of the things as part of the pre suasion principles is that you're striving to align their identity with what they're trying to accomplish. And obviously you're striving to have part of that be that they're making a decision that you're trying to help them make. And so that's actually one of the things that Dan Sullivan says that's what marketing is and selling is that you're helping people get intellectually, you know, interested or stimulated and emotionally committed to making a decision. And so this is just all part of training their identity. And really what the context is that you're creating is their future self. You're creating a context that they already want. It's their future self. And so they're coming at it from that perspective. And so these are all just things that I say in a lot, kind of quicker stream in that seven minute video. And so over a six, this was without it over a six month period of time. And it's a very similar funnel. I made that much money on a funnel selling a particular online course by just adding, and these are two separate webinars. But by adding the $7 offer, so you can see the $7 offer and then the thing down below it, I've actually sold probably 4 or 5,000 of the journaling course, which is $7. But what happened is that the conversion rate of the actual thing I'm selling, which is an online course, between 500 and $1,000, that conversion rate almost doubled on the sales page. Because you can test the sales page, you can see how much people when they land on a sales page. So before the sales page conversion rate was 7%. That was the first picture I showed you. The conversion rate on the same sales page, essentially a little tweaks, but not really is now 12. Actually no, it's 15%. So the conversion rate on the sales page doubled, but by adding in this pre suasion component. And it happened for a few reasons. One is because far more of the people who are at the webinar now actually paid to be at the webinar. Thousands of people have now paid $7 to watch the webinar that used to be free. Those people are far more likely to buy the program. But also for me, who's someone who wanted to give material that was useful. I wanted them to have the right perspective. I wanted them to have the right perspective, the right lenses, so that when they watch the webinar it was a transformational experience. Not just them consuming more information. This is the sales page pretty much the same thing as it was before. Another kind of very important principle that I've learned about pre suasion, that this is something that has fundamentally improved the program. So I've had thousands of people go through this online program that I sell. It's a year long experience. And one of the things that I've learned after having thousands of people go through it is that a lot of people, I actually have far lower like refund rates than typical. But when people join a program like mine, and even if they join Genius Network, there's a lot of new information that they have to gather in order to be successful in that new environment. So when I give them this new online course, a lot of the feedback we got was that people felt overwhelmed. People were like, there's so much information, I don't know if I can apply it all. And so what we then did is we built an onboarding program. So my program's called amp. And so what we did is we designed a. An AMP warm up program. There's about 300 people in it right now. And actually a lot of the former people who have been in AMP for like six months who are floundering, we put them back in this program. And essentially what this onboarding prep program is is there's a video at the beginning. And I say, this is after they've bought my program. I say, you actually can't have access to my program or not my program, but you can't have access to AMP what you purchased until after you go through this prep program. This is a buffer. And essentially I explain to them the core mindsets, the core things that they need to understand in order to be successful with the thing that they just bought. And they actually have to accomplish a few requirements in order to actually get access to what they bought by doing this, by creating this AMP warm up program. And it's essentially like a buffer. Our refunds are so low, but people are so happy because when they walk in, they. They're no longer overwhelmed. They can take this program at whatever pace they want. And that's one thing I tell them about. You take this at whatever pace you want. The fastest you can do it is in two weeks if you're really a rock star. And then once people actually get into the program that they bought, they have such better results, not only because they worked for it, but because now they're ready for it. They've got the right mindset for it. They actually know how to do it, rather than just jumping onto a rocket ship. So this is the thing that me and Joe actually have been working on. Joe filmed an onboarding process. He spent three hours filming some of the most amazing stuff, helping people to, when they join Genius Network, prep their mindset so that once they come to these meetings, they know exactly how to execute at the highest level. So I'm now going to finish. But These are the two pictures. 7% versus 15%. The difference was persuasion.

And in this talk, Elko will show.

You exactly, step by step, how to.

Build your own army of powerful influencers. Elko's title is how to build an.

Army of influencers to promote your products. Please join me in welcoming Elko.

Thank you, Tim. So today I'm going to talk about how to build an army of influencers. So in this picture, you'll see a lot of people that I have no clue who they are, but they all have one thing in common as they're holding up my book. And this is my Dutch book that I'm selling. I've been selling this book for over eight years, and we've seen a big growth in sales in the last couple of months simply because we started using this technique that I'm going to share with you today. So how does it work? How can you get an army of influencers promoting your book or your product, your offer, whatever it is that you want to offer? Well, it's very simple. What you do is you pay influencers to post about your offer. And this is a book in my case. So let me see. So. And that's it. You just pay people to promote your product, and that's about it. So why would you want to do that? Well, first of all, you can have very fast growth if you have other people, other influencers. So an influencer could be somebody on Instagram with a large following or who not even that big of a following, and they start promoting your book. They put a post or maybe a story where they talk about your book, and then they say, like, swipe up to get the book works very well. So you have fast growth. You have a lot of social proof. So I get a lot of messages from people that I know that send me screenshots of other people that are promoting my book. And again, I don't have a clue who these people are. Um, I'm gonna talk about how it comes that I don't have a clue. So what you're gonna have is you have a lot of messages from people that say, like, hey, everybody is talking about your book, because from a lot of different influencers, they're promoting your product versus hey, man, I see your ads all the time. So also, it's very profitable. If you do it well, it could be way cheaper than normal ads. And for example, Facebook ads or YouTube ads or stuff like that. So how do you do that? How do you have an army of influencers? Step number one, and I will send all of you guys the step by step plan. I'll send it to Eunice, and she'll send it to all of you guys. But step number one is slide in the dm. The DM is a direct messaging system of Instagram. It's very simple. You ask for their physical Address. So you tell them, okay, I got a free gift. Can we surprise you with a free gift, free of charge? Step number two, and very important before you go to step number two, even before we go to step number one, is who not how. So I said, I have no clue who all these people are.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description or you can wait till the end of this video or you can simply go to Joe's freebook.com and you can get a copy there.

The whole strategy that I'm explaining to you right now, I have not invested any hours of my personal time in it. It's just one person in my team, actually two people in my team that are consistently doing these steps. So it's not my hours and as we all know who not how, is the way to grow. So if you want to apply this step by step system, I would advise you not to do it yourself. But have somebody that you can trust to do this and then it can be very profitable. Step number two, first you ask for the address. Step number two is you send the book for free. And you don't charge shipping costs, you just send them the book or your product or whatever it is that you have for free. Step number three oftentimes, and that's a bonus, that's not step number three, but it's a bonus. Oftentimes when they get your book for free or your product for free, they already posted on their social media. Not all of them, a lot of them don't, but a lot of them do as well. So that's a free promotion. But that's not even the goal of this step by step plan. Step number 3A. Sometimes they receive, they respond like, hey man, thank you for the book, that's amazing. And then you respond to their message after they receive the book and you ask if they are open for a paid promo. So you send the book. Then they reply on DM like, hey, I got your book. It's amazing, thank you so much. And then you reply and ask them if they want to promote it to their following as a paid promotion. So you just pay them. Or step number 3B is if they don't respond after they got the book, if they don't out of themselves response, you just follow up, say, hey, I think you got the package, did you get it in good order? And what do you think of it? So that's step number 3B. And then you just ask them, like, hey, man, can you. Can we do a paid promotion? And what you then do, if the price is right, you agree. You don't negotiate, but you agree. You never negotiate on the price. You just agree or you don't agree, you're like, okay, it's too much, but thank you so much. So what you see in this image as well is I'll just say, like, all right, let's go for it. We're easy partners.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out. And if. If you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video, or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

Step number five is pay them fast. So if they say, like, yeah, it's a hundred bucks, or it's 500 bucks or whatever, if they send the Invoice, pay within 24 hours, they love it. They'll be like, wow, you're the best partner that we ever had. And then they start promoting it on their Instagram, in this case. And then what you have to do is track the sales. So, for example, you pay 500 bucks, they start promoting, and they see like, hey, man, we only got like 14 sales of a book or we got like 140 sales of the book. That's when you see when you have a winner or not. So is it a winner? Is it a winner? For example, in this case, I don't even know for sure, but we might have paid like 500 bucks for this promotion. And you see, these are book sales, and this is all within one hour. And this is within one hour. So probably we had like over 100 book sales just from this one promotion. We paid 500 bucks, which means that we only paid like 5. $5 per book that we sold. So that's a winner. And if it's a winner, what you're going to do when you have a winner is you schedule another promotion. And this is the goal of this step by step system, is when you have an influencer that has a really good engagement with his or her audience and he or she gets a lot of results for you, then you schedule another promo, let's say other month, the next month, and another promo, and another one, and another one, because they are gold for you. They are like your sales reps, but they're way more effective because they can close in larger amounts and they're oftentimes pretty cheap. So with this whole system, this is my long term vision. I want to build an army of influencers that are happy to get paid and happy to promote at any time. So at any time that I want to send out a promo for a new product, a new course, a new webinar, new offer, a new opt in page, whatever it is, we send them an email and they promote to their following and boom, we have omnipresence for years to come. So I want to build an army for years to come. So reasons why I like this first of all, it cost me zero hours of my time because I have a who and I have a system. And this is extremely scalable as well. There's almost no technical stuff, no ad accounts, no click through rates, no nothing. It's just very basic, but it works very well. There's consistent traction around my brand simply because all of these influencers keep on posting about this guy with his book and he's amazing. And of course they know the right words to say because we teach them what to say. This is not depending on algorithms, Facebook or Google policy or you know, when you're ever your Facebook account is banned or your Google account is banned, doesn't matter. This is your own assets, like your partners are your assets. You'll have consistent sales. So whenever you do this and you do it well, you have consistent sales. So let's say you have a new influencer every day that promotes the book. It keeps on going and going and going. There's no need to ask for a favor. So you know, you can also work with other people like JV or affiliates, but it's asking for a favor. I'm very bad at asking for favors and I oftentimes don't like to return the favor if I'm not a big fan of like what they're offering or whatever. But now they can just promote me and we just pay them if it's very good for your follower growth. As you see, they always not just promoting the book, but also promoting my brand. So my adkerdebour handle, it's growth on demand. Like you just send them a message and they'll promote for you and then you have growth on demand. There's unlimited potential. This is just in Holland and we just been doing this for like two months. The potential of this is crazy. And again, this is just Holland. Like it's super small, but it's been super effective already. So I got some bonus tips for you. Bonus tip number one is you got Instagram posts, so in the timeline of somebody on Instagram, but you also have Instagram stories. And stories is where they can say swipe up and stories, they work much better than Instagram posts. So we have much better results. If people promote on their stories and they oftentimes would like to promote on stories, they prefer to promote on stories as well. So that's a good thing. Bonus tip. So that's the difference between a post and a story. On the left you see a post which is good, but on the right you see a story and then they can swipe up which is even better. Bonus tip number two is give influencers clear instructions but challenge them to be creative. So I have an audio you see at the right. You see I made a little audio of a couple of minutes where I explain to them what I like to see whenever they're promoting. And so I give them a three step thing. So step number one is that they're in screen and they're having my book in their hands and then they, they talk a little bit about what, what impact I made on them or the book made on them. And then they talk about the reason why people can get the book now for free is because there's some spelling mistakes in the book and then they need to say swipe up. So I got a simple three step plan and most of them, they follow it and converts very well. Bonus tip number three is give your who the permission to close deal. So I told my who. So I have two who's who are doing this. I told them like you decide on the deals. I mean if it's really large deals like a thousand euros and up, or 2 or 3 or €4,000 and up, just ask for permission from me. But anything up to a thousand bucks you decide to close the deal and I'll get the invoice and I'll pay the invoice and afterwards we'll start, we will see if it worked, yes or no. So this is how you learn quickly. So I just trust but I verify afterwards if they are great deals. Bonus tip number four, very important something that a lot of people don't see and don't think about is you got micro influencers. So for example people with 8 to 80,000 followers on Instagram, you also got like the bigger influencers, like 100 plus thousand followers on Instagram. We noticed that the micro influencers have way better engagement with their following. Very good Results, they tend to want to work harder for you, so they have better promotions. They're more happy with a promotion because they're smaller and they're way, way cheaper. So let's say somebody with like 10,000 followers is not 10 times cheaper than somebody with 100,000 followers. It's oftentimes like, like 20 times cheaper. But the results are, like, way bigger compared to the amount of followers. Bonus tip number five, think outside of your target market. So this is a famous Dutch guy. He's a. He's a hip hop artist. And this is crazy. Like, he has a good amount of following, like 50 or 60,000 people. And on the left, so on the right you see him with my book. And on the left he says, and this is Dutch again, because I didn't have the time to translate. But he says, I just smoked a big fat blunt and I've been thinking. And then he starts to pitch me, so. Which is very funny. This is outside of my target market. My target market is not potheads, not people who smoke a lot of weed. But he has a big following and they really love him. He has good vibes. And a lot of people, based on his promotion, started buying the book. And he already promoted twice for us, so he's a great partner. The crazy thing is, again, he only charged 100 bucks. 100 bucks, and he got like 50 or 60,000 followers. Bonus tip number seven, use a second Instagram account for your who? So you keep your personal Instagram Instagram account safe. So I don't want to communicate from my name when it's not from me personally. So we have a second account which is on the right, the Winston account. And so my who's on that account? And they, they target people, they send them dms and they talk about me, but it's not from my personal account. So. So they're not in my account. They don't see my DMs, all that stuff. And so that's. That's much better. So that's bonus tip number six. So in closing, why would you want to build an army of influencers? And why could it be an amazing growth strategy for all of us at Genius Network? Well, if you build an army of influencers that are happy to get paid and happy to promote at any time for years to come, you will have amazing results. It costs literally zero hours of your time. If you have a who, there's almost no technical stuff. You will have consistent traction around your brand. It's not depending on algorithms or Facebook or Google policies. Or bands or all of that stuff. You will have consistent sales, no need to ask for a favor because you simply pay them. You'll have a lot of follower growth because they're mentioning your name. As you see here, there's growth on demand. So anytime you want to grow, have them promote your product or your offer. There's unlimited potential. And again, this is just Holland. Imagine going bigger. So there is so much gold out there, you just have to be willing to pick it up or have some who's that can pick it up for you.

Thank you.

I actually do my homework on stuff. And when I was talking to Steven yesterday, I was like, you know what? And I didn't ask, I asked Joe this and I talked to Susan. I was like, what will be the most helpful thing for people? And I think, you know, the only way that anyone ever does well with marketing is they gotta appreciate it and respect it. When people say I don't like marketing or marketing isn't important, that's like saying I really don't like oxygen. You know, that oxygen just isn't really that big of a thing. I mean, hold your breath for three minutes and see how gasping for air kind of sucks. And if you don't utilize marketing and appreciate marketing and reframe it, we can take any painting here, you know, any painting and we can duct tape it to the wall and it's going to look a certain way. If you put it in a nice frame, you position it well, it's going to look completely different. Your whole business is that way. Some of you can make incredibly beautiful art, but then you don't do the same thing for yourself. You don't create bio videos. You don't make your brand and the way you position yourself desirable and attractive and awesome. You cannot bore people into buying. You're not even going to create a desire that already doesn't pre exist. And so what I would encourage you to do, and I'll do some Q and A if we have time for that, and if we don't, I will be happy to hang around. Because more than anything, it's really hard to share 20 years worth of marketing experience in a short talk. But I have a couple hundred hours of amazing content with some of the world's greatest thinkers in business and entrepreneurship and in marketing that I will share with all of you for free. I'm not going to try to sell any of you guys guys anything. I'm happy to just provide this stuff because I'm going to actually take Joe as a case study And I'm going to, he's going to teach me how to be like a better artist than I am and he's going to actually show me how to throw. Thank you. Thank you, but no. We're going to throw some pots and we're going to videotape this stuff. And I'm actually going to, I'm going to see if we can actually create a multi million dollar campaign with Joe's art because the guy's incredibly talented and he already does. Well, he's made a living doing this.

And.

I actually, I'm going to do a skunk's work thing and I'm going to see if we can actually utilize him as a killer case study. And if we document it, we'll share it with you guys next year when you all come here and do that. So I'll do Q and A. I'll do whatever I can to be useful. Does the carpet cleaning thing seem not to resonate with all? With anyone? Does it resonate? Okay, I like it because it's like again, if you have to figure out how to sell something nobody wants to buy, you have to figure out how to persuade. And so let me share with you a couple of things. The number one thing, the number one question in all consumers minds is who can I trust? All of you are walking like if I was trying to sell something. All of you right now, you just met me. Other than Joe came up and said something nice about me. Susan did, maybe you saw a video of mine, whatever. So because they introduced me, there's this implied this guy maybe knows what he's talking about. But none of you really know me. So you don't know if I'm a good person. You don't know what my motivations are. You don't know if you can trust me. What? So the whole process of doing business with someone is rapport. That's why McDonald's, although you should never eat that food. Or Pizza Hut, I saw Krispy Kreme doughnuts, which is just hysterical. But basically, people, McDonald's is not the best food in the world, but it's the biggest restaurant chain in the world, right? And you can go into any country and it's familiarity. Okay, so there's a certain level of even though it's not good food, you can trust it to a degree. If you can trust that it's crappy food and not healthy for you, but maybe you know you're not going to get food poisoning. But here's the interesting thing, and I've Thought about a lot of stuff related to business. And so the number one question is, who can I trust? And so your job as an entrepreneur is to establish trust and rapport with people. And it is so much harder to make the first sale than it is to make additional sales. It's so much harder to get a cold prospect to do business with you or to buy into something unless they just happen to see something you have and they love it, and then, boom. And that does happen here. So that's the interesting thing about art. I'm the type of guy that if I walk around and I see it, I'm like, I want that. And I'm also in the position where I can buy most things that I want. I mean, I net over a million a year, so I have money where I can actually buy stuff. But at the same time, I'm not a chump. And I also know that a lot of the in. And this is maybe the worst thing to say to a group of artists. I think a lot of art that is put out in the world as art is simply pollution. But it has a great marketing story attached to it. So they're like, oh, this is real art. But I look at some art and I'm like, what the hell? Lack of creativity, insane sort of brain created this. But again, if you can sell it and you can, I appreciate that sort of stuff. But then there's other art, which is incredibly powerful. And so the whole thing with. With trust, when you're selling, like, carpet cleaning services, nobody wants to buy it. So when I first started reading about direct response marketing, which is the type of marketing I use, it's very copy intensive, using powerful words. And so I have one of my first marketing tools. I think you guys will crack up at this. But one of the very first things that I created was a consumer guide to carpet cleaning. Now I learned marketing. Before the Internet, there was no Internet. And we were using direct mail, which I'm still a huge fan of direct mail. If I could only rely on one method of selling my services, what I sell, I would use direct mail. There's less noise in people's mailboxes today than ever before in history because so much attention has been put on the Internet. Now we make a lot of money on the Internet. I have many websites, we do a lot of conversion, all that sort of stuff. And certainly all my podcasts are delivered, delivered because of technology. But I love direct mail. So back in the day, all my competitors were running price advertising. Like I said earlier, if you don't have a system for selling your services. Every consumer has a system for buying, and it's price. Because when you don't know what something costs and you're interested in hiring a plumber, or you're going to get your house painted, or you're going to buy an article of clothing, or people are walking around here and you don't have price prices on your art and they want it, what's the first thing they typically ask you? Yeah, how much you charge. Well, the reason you ask how much you. And you all do it, every one of you does this is because you don't know any other way to make a buying decision. So you would have people call me up if they ever called me up and say, how much you charge for carpet cleaning? Because I didn't really know quite how to price. So I was using price advertising. And I hated that question because I would be on the phone with someone, normally a woman, for anywhere, 15, 20 minutes, explaining my method, what it is I do, and she'd say, let me talk to my husband or let me think about it and I'll call you back. And I did that over and over again. And I was like, what a waste of freaking time. This just sucks. But why are they asking me that? I mean, because they don't have any other criteria to make up price. And if I advertise price, that's the bait. You know, if you don't like the fish, you got to look at what's the bait you're using to catch them. You know, people have disdain for their clients because all these people care about is price. But you're fishing with price. You know, if you don't like the, you know, only the hungriest fish will snap at the crappiest bait. So it's kind of like, well, what are you fishing with? So I read this. I read a lot of stuff from a guy named Gary Halbert. He was a copywriter. He was the first guy I learned marketing from. And he said that any problem in the world could be solved with the right sales letter. And I would encourage you to write that down or think about it. Any problem in the world could be solved at the right sales letter. When I first heard that, I was like, there's many problems that can't be solved with, you know, a sales letter. What if you have cancer? What if you have a relationship problem? What if you don't have good health? You know, can that be? Well, as a matter of fact, most of those problems can be solved, or at least Assisted with a sales letter. Because all a sales letter is are worth. Words that are designed to persuade people in order to do something.

I will just admit right up front, 10 minutes has got me nervous. I don't do nervous on stage, but here I am. Okay, so let's see, what are we at? Let's try this one. Okay. Yeah, the next half billion dollars in launches. So you ever notice when Apple launches a product and people just, you're anticipating that you're excited about that. The market's just talking, talking about it and everyone's just, they're counting down. It's all about anticipation. It's when is that product going to get released? People line up outside the stores, right? This guy, first in line for iPhone 5. Woo hoo, you know, put that on his gravestone, you know. But they get these lines outside of the Apple stores, you know. You ever notice how I am an Internet marketer? I sell stuff online sometimes servers crash. Well, the iPhone, I think it was the 4. The Apple site crashed. I'm like, okay, if Apple's site can crash, my site can crash. I'm good with that. But they do, what do they do? They do tens, hundreds of millions of dollars immediately, right off the bat from, you know, from 0 to 100 miles an hour, right away. So I've wondered, how can we do that? How can we do that in this room? You know, we don't have those resources, we don't have their branding, we don't have their advertising, we don't have their teams. How can we do that? So for 18 years I've been working on how we can do it, but actually that's bullshit because 18 years ago I was a stay at home dad and I was like, I was just desperate to make some kind of money to try to impact my family in some way. So I started publishing. I started publishing online. This is 1996. So back then my first email went out to everyone I knew with an email address that was like 17 people. But it gradually grew from there. And I grew this platform, okay? I grew this platform. Anyone out here have a platform? You've got an email list, you've got a social media following. Are you guys just not willing to raise your arms or what? Thank you. Okay. So I gradually built up this platform. I did what they now call content marketing. So I published. And then I got to this point, well, maybe I can actually sell something to these people. But I was actually. We have born closers. We got closers in the room. Raise your hand proudly if you're a closer. So we've got some closers, right? You guys know what I'm talking about. You know how to sell. Unfortunately, I'm not one of you. I don't have that sales gene. So I had this little platform that was growing up and I was like, how can I sell something to them? And I was terrified. I was actually terrified to ask for the order. I was terrified to ask for the order. And that actually that little thing allowed me to sort of invent this process that has made all the difference. Because what I did was I romanced my people, I romanced my followers. Then I asked for the sale. I built relationship first. And even for the closers out there, you all do that, right? You all build relationship. But now in this day and age, we're able to do that in a way we never could before. We have the speed of communication, interactivity that we've never had before. So I tweaked this, and I tweaked this. I did my first launch. Some of you heard the story. That did $1,650. That was enough to make me do backflips. I was $1650 changed everything with that first launch. But then I got better. I instantly knew I could get better at it. And I did get better. And I got better. Here's a photo. I put this in a book, but I've never really made this one public. That's actually me. I am at my kitchen table and I'm in a bathrobe. And this was not staged. This is actually when I did a launch. This is the first six figure launch I did. It was $106,000 in a single week. I did, I think like I was sitting there for an hour, you know, we did 28,000 in sales. And that was like unbelievable, life changing money for me. So I gradually got better and better and better. And then in 2005, I started teaching it. And my students and clients have now done $500 million in sales. In fact, it's way beyond that. But that's the number I feel safe saying publicly. You know, I've got clients that have done tens and even one that's done 100 million in sales. So what I wanted to share with you is basically what I've learned. And you know, it's funny, cause I was thinking about, like, I did just roll out this book. Okay, There it is. In fact, there's a book. It's in all your bags. I bought one for each of you and we rolled that thing out and I was talking to Pollock Holligan and he's like, yeah, dude, I think the title of your talk, you should just go up there and say this shit works. Because I came in, I was completely unknown author and boom, it was like up to number one. In fact, what happened was the first week the New York Times decided not to put me on the list even though I had the sales. And so then we doubled down and I had several conversations with my good friend Brendan Richard and came up with a strategy how we were going to come back and sell even more the next week. And then we were able to put it up to number one. There's the proofs in the pudding. That was screenshot. I gotta print that one out and put it on the wall. So how do you do this? It all comes down to three things. Sequences, stories and triggers. And so sequences. You can't ever. You know, there's so much noise in the market now that to gather someone's attention, you have to put your stuff, put your material into a sequence that tells your story. Then your story just. It's almost like what I call the sideways sales letter. We used to have these long form sales letters and they worked really, really well. Now they don't work as well. So I took that 10 page sales letter, I turned it sideways into a 10 day process. And now you do very much the same thing you do in a sales letter, but now you do it over a series of pre launch content of value videos. We typically do this now with videos that build over time. And then the triggers are simply things like we all use all the time. Authority, reciprocity, scarcity. And in those three videos they allow you to deploy those triggers and you build up this anticipation just the way Apple does. And you get the situation where people are like, they cannot wait to buy. They absolutely cannot wait to buy. So you want to know how you want to, you know, this is obviously very, very compressed what I just gave you. That's normally the first two and a half days of my three day event. So do you. Anyone want. In three minutes. Anyone want to see that sequence for the book? Because the book is a little bit different. And are they. Can we put this on camera? So what we did was we had an offer for the book and basically we were selling it for $7. It was actually free with shipping and handling. Okay, so we give the book away for seven bucks. So we're gonna put a B here for the book. Someone comes in to buy and they get an instant upsell. Okay, so this is a one time offer, OTO, and this is for $197. Okay. I would have liked to say I got 8 or 10% conversion, but we got about a 7% conversion on that. Okay, but at a $200 product, that means that everyone coming in and getting a free book is worth 14 bucks right off the bat. Now the key here, the really important thing is that in doing this it allows you to incentivize partners to mail for you. Because all of a sudden I can pay commissions and I gotta give a shout out. Brendon Burchard is the one. Brendon in 2011 I think bought my product and he's taken it and did really well. But then he morphed it and he came up with this process. So Basically, book for $7 to upsell for $197. And then either way, whether they take the upsell or not, then they go into my PLF product And that's at 1997. And the conversion for there is around 1.7%. You can do the math on that. But it comes out pretty well. But what we do is basically now I've got partners, lots and lots of partners, partners driving into the book, driving traffic into the book, saying, hey, go check out Jeff's book and get it free with shipping and handling for seven bucks, ten bucks, they'll ship it anywhere in the world. If you're outside the U.S. i'm able to pay partners at commission on this one click upsell. And I'm also paying them commission down here. Boy, that writing is nothing like a time deadline to take your writing all to hell. But in any case, that's how I sold 41,000 books in just a couple weeks time frame. That's how we put it on number one in the New York Times bestseller list. So remember your marketing, Joe talked about this in his little introduction. Your marketing has to tell a story. Nothing captures people's attention like a story does. Stories win. And when you deploy that story over a 10 day time frame and you give three great value videos that define the opportunity, define the journey, define how your prospects, lives are going to transform. Then when you land them on your sales video, they don't even need to watch that entire sales video.

They are ready to buy today and.

This whole two days, we all know that when you come to a Joe Polish event, you are definitely going to get ideas to get more customers in the door. You're also going to learn some ideas to catapult conversions and can pretty much Guarantee you're going to learn how to increase sales. But not for me. Today, I'm going to tell you how to prevent sales. That's right. I'm going to talk about sales prevention. Now, before you think that I have lost my damn mind and you want to run out of this room, let me tell you why.

Sales.

Sales prevention can be not only really sexy, but extremely lucrative. So some results for my business over the last three years due to sales prevention. Really effective Sales prevention, We've increased our revenue 725% thanks to sales prevention. We've watched our B school enrollments, which is the program that Joe is talking about, grow 2,996%. And one of my favorite stats, which I'm most proud of, we took the refund rate from when we started B school, which was hovering around 19%, which is not unusual for our industry in information and education. And we've taken it downtown to 1.5%. That's been consistent over the last three years. So I want to show you how sales prevention works because it's literally produced millions of dollars in my business. And more importantly, it's helped me produce a brand that not only we love internally as the company, but our customers love even more and they can trust. So hopefully there'll be some ideas in here for you that you can translate into millions of dollars for your brand and your business and help it to grow. Cool. So two examples of sales prevention. First example, when I'm promoting B school, I do what many of us do in this room. You go out and you start talking about. So whether you do speaking engagements, for me, I do a lot of videos, a lot of webinars, and often teleseminars. So one of the most recent teleseminars I did had a couple of thousand people on it. Super fun. I love talking to people, hearing about their businesses, and of course, telling them whether or not B school is right for them. So I'm on this teleseminar, good time woman gets on the line and starts telling me about her life and asking all kinds of questions. And of course, she got to the place where everybody gets to on these teleseminars. Marie, is B school right for me? It became evident that it wasn't, and I knew it. So after just a moment of awkward silence, I said, no, B school is actually not right for you. You sound amazing. You sound lovely. But based on everything that you just shared, I recommend X Books, x resources. They would deliver more value to you than my program. My program would be a Waste of money for you right now. The host of that teleseminar was shocked as shit. I could feel the uncomfortability, but it was the right thing to do. Now why was sales prevention in that instance so powerful? Three reasons. Number one, it's a pattern interrupt in our world where there's a lot of marketing, marketing, marketing, sell, sell, sell. For customers. To hear the founder of a company volitionally telling someone, no, do not give me money. This is not right for you. They sit up and pay attention because you know people on teleseminars are doing like 15 other things. That's like a record scratch.

Yes.

Reason number two, for the people that we do encourage to join B school, they feel like the chosen ones, because they are. This isn't a manipulation technique, it's the truth. When people know that you actively not sell to people, when you discourage them, the people that you do sell to believe you because it's honest and it's true. Cool. The third reason is that level of brutal honesty is so refreshing. Let me ask you this. Has anyone here ever gone clothes shopping? Have you ever gone clothes shopping on your own? Right? All by yourself, got no friends, you walk into the store, but pull a bunch of clothes off the rack. Go into the dressing room, you come out, you're nervous, you ask the sales associate, do I look okay in this? Does this look good? And you know, you've had that experience or something, oh my God, you look fabulous. Don't worry. It's a little tight, but that's really in. You should take it, go. You get the clothes home, you try them on, you look in the mirror, you look like a frigging sausage. You should not have bought those clothes, but you were sold to them them by someone you trusted. Now counter that with another experience. If you've ever had this one, go into the store, get some clothes, try them on, walk out, does this look good on me? And the sales associate says, you know what? Not so flattering. You should try this or come back when we have more inventory. Which store would you go back to? Which store would you talk about? Second example of active sales prevention. This is my favorite one. This is really what helped us take that refund rate down from about 19% down to 1.5. Now we did other things, but this was one of the main changes. So I'm a student and a fan and a lover of marketing. So when I started B school, I used one of the timeless marketing principles, risk reversal. We all know about risk reversal, right? Usually it's an awesome idea. Try my stuff. 30 days. You don't like it, just let us know, we'll give you all your money back. Anyone ever used that one before? Sometimes it works. So we had that guarantee for B school when we first started the program. But that 19% refund rate, I know I'm not supposed to take any of that stuff personally, but I do. I saw that number, I wanted to friggin throw up. That was disgusting to me. I put so much time and energy and heart into everything that I produce, every single thing that to know that one in five people were walking out of my company, not only taking their money back, which gets the business side of me, but the other side of me thinking they weren't happy, I didn't give them a great experience. This sucks. So I got to change it. So I looked at the curriculum, I didn't think it was that. I had this intuitive hit, it was that damn refund policy. So I said, you know what, I want to change this. I'm going to try something different. I'm going to create an action takers guarantee. Here's what it sounds like. You can come and try B school, do it for 30 days. If you don't feel like we've delivered on our promise. All you need to do to be eligible for a refund is turn in your completed homework. If you do the B school work and you don't get value, we do not deserve your money at all. One change, super powerful. And again, we did some other things but I really believe that was the big change. Took that refund rate all the way down to 1.5%. So let's dig a little bit deeper and look at why. One of the reasons sales prevention. It helped get all the PETAs and the pains and the asses and the whiners and the non committed people, they are not signing up for my shit. My shit is expensive. So if they know they got to work in order to be eligible for a refund, you really think they're going to come in the door?

No.

Then the second thing it did for the people, it is right for and for me. I'm looking for people that are very action oriented, very committed. That's a challenge to them. They know I take this program seriously. If I'm saying, look, if you do the work and you don't get value, I'll give you everything back. They're like, whoa, she actually cares about our success. The third thing that it did, which was amazing and is it helps bond the community. One of the best Things that we have going for us is our amazing community. They sell for us. So when people are in B school together and they know based on how we've structured things that, A, we care about their success, but B, even more importantly, everyone else in there is a player. Doesn't matter where they're at in their journey, they are in it to win it. That gives them them a reason to bond stronger. It's a stronger community, and they spread the word more prolifically. Make sense? So I know I've had fun here framing this discussion around sales prevention, but what it's really about is how can we make our marketing more honest, more transparent, and more courageous. How can we have a little more courage in our marketing? So I want you to ask yourself, in your business, are you doing enough active sales prevention? Are you giving enough attention to articulating and creating obstacles to keep the people out who you really are not meant to serve so that you can devote more energy and more love and more caring to those you do? And I'll leave you with just this one final thought. What if the big secret to exploding your sales was having the courage every so often to prevent them?

All right, sorry, guys. I should have told Joe I'd pay only ten grand for that advice. So. Hindsight, you know? Anyway, so I want to share with you a strategy that we've been using at my company and I teach my clients that has helped us to dramatically improve our chances in closing the opportunities that we get in front of. Okay, so just to kind of give you an idea, we are closing roughly between 23, 24% of the raw leads that we generate, and we are closing 70% when they get to the point where they're actually talking to a salesperson. And it's for a $3,000 product. And I don't know if you consider that really good or really bad or whatever it is, but that's what it is. And this process has helped us. And what it is, is instead of handling objections the way most sales training teach you, it's about thinking about what the objections are going to be in advance and killing them before they've ever been brought up. Okay. Because I think sales training fails in the sense that they teach you how to handle objections. And I believe that if you try and handle an objection once the customer has delivered it to you, you're not handling anything. You are arguing with them. Okay, so let me give you an example. My clients sell outsourced IT support services, right? And how many does anyone in here outsource? Some aspect of it, Right? Okay, so let's suppose you're talking to an IT person and I'm going to read you. This is a sales trainer. I'm not going to mention who the sales trainer is. Very well known sales trainer and I'm not discrediting what he's teaching. But imagine you're sitting across the desk with a potential IT company. You're thinking of outsourcing, sourcing to, and they tell you what they can do and they give you the price and you think out loud or you say out loud, I don't know, that price seems a little bit high, I can get it cheaper somewhere else. That's what you tell to this salesperson. Now imagine them responding to you and saying, well, that might be true, Mr. Johnson. And after all, in today's economy we all want the most for our money. And a truth that I have learned over the years is that the cheapest price is not always what we really want. Most people look for three things when choosing an IT provider. One, competence, two, a highly responsive service and three, lowest price. And I've never yet found a company that could provide highly competent technicians and a highly responsive help desk for the lowest price. I'm curious, Mr. Johnson, for your long term happiness, which of the three would you be most willing to give up? Competence, responsiveness or the lowest price? Now I had to read that because there's no way in hell I'm going to memorize that. But can any of you imagine being on the other end? Like, you'd laugh, right? I mean, I would laugh. I'd be like, okay, can you say again, I gotta record this on video? Because this is pretty damn funny. And how many of you can imagine actually with a straight face articulating that to a customer? You can't, because you're arguing. It's condescending. At this point I've just verbalized something that I'm not comfortable with or a question I have or something. And now you're trying to argue with me and tell me that I'm stupid or I'm wrong and, and so forth. So that's why I think when you build your sales presentations, you have to know what the objections are in advance and you build it into your presentation and you deliver it as an educational piece of content. So for example, the way I teach my guys to handle that. Objection. Is we actually have a report that I wrote, actually, which is what you should expect to pay for IT support in like la, if we were in la. Now this is a report. It's very well written, it's well researched. It shows the different pricing models of how the industry charges, what the average price is. It talks about gotchas in a contract, some things that are excluded and what you want to look for. Now when we give that to a prospect in advance of the sales meeting and we ask them to read it or even in the sales meeting itself, we reference parts of this and say, well, according to the industry research that we've done, I can tell you that this is what most people charge, yes, we're a little bit higher, but this is why we're a little bit higher. And you give an intelligent answer to that. Now, the prospect's more likely to trust you and more likely to buy. So in my business, we think of what are going to be the objections in advance. So a lot of it is what we send to the prospect before they meet with us. And if I could get this screen up, I want to show you something that we've been working on. This is, we call it our online shock and awe. Now what this is, it's a customized personalized URL. So where it says Aaron Light up there, it would be whoever your prospect and what you can do here in this video we actually have two versions of this one has, this is Jeff Johnson, who's my VP of the high end coaching we do. And so you can have a personalized video message for the prospect. And you can see over here there's like a little video. This is going to be a video testimonial. There's an audio, but I'll show you this one. So in this case, this one for example, is a testimonial video. So they come to the personalized URL and instantly it starts playing a testimonial video.

Increased sales probably about 15%. Last year was 30% and I expect no less.

This year my net profit was up by almost 150%.

Wait, say that again.

Your net profit was up 150%. My net profit was up 149 plus percent. Yes.

Last year I spent three.

So I'm not going to play the whole video for you, but you get the idea. Now that could be a personalized video or it could be a testimonial one. What I want to show you though, which has been extremely helpful for us, is in these personalized websites, we can stand them up in literally 30 seconds. But we send this in advance of the consultation that my salesperson is going to sit down with this prospect. And so one of the things that we know for example, is they might no show for their consultation, right? Because they kind of know it's a sales pitch. So one of the things we tell them is you have to be in front of a computer because we do not send them things, the content of the presentation in advance. So for example, if you do any kind of report of findings, if you're giving any kind of value with our consultations, we actually give them a marketing roadmap and it is a very high value piece of content. We make sure that they are on the call, all decision makers are there, and then we email them. So that handles one objection. Another objection we know is that the decision maker might not show up. So what happens is the CEO doesn't show up. At bottom, the marketing person does. And what objection then does that create? Does everyone know, I gotta talk it over with the boss? And we know they always say they're the decision maker, but then they use that as an out. We will not hold the consultation if the decision maker's not there. And in advance we've got on the letter, you know, to get the most out of the consult. We have three requirements. One is you're in front of your computer in a quiet place, in front of email. That way we can send them the roadmap number two, that the decision maker is there and we have a whole script. If they come back and say that they can't be there. And, and we also asked them to watch a couple videos and the videos essentially are handling objections. Another thing that we've done now, depending, these little reports down here are customizable and depending on who the person is and what size company they are, what type of company they are, we change the content at the bottom. So let's suppose, for example, we found when we were doing consults with companies that are larger IT service providers, they're doing 20 million a year, 10 million, 15. 20 million. They might say they were saying to Aaron, my sales guy, you know what, your stuff probably doesn't work for us. We're a big company, it's too small and vice versa. So if he is talking to a larger IT services firm, we actually have this, which is little page of testimonials that will pop up that are all from companies that are doing anywhere from 12 million to 24 million and testimonials about the program. So that handles that objection over here. You know, this is basically a testimonial book and we make sure with our testimonials that we have a variety. So we make sure we don't just have men, we don't just have women. We have some people that are from India, Indian descent, because that's a percentage of the IT industry. Is that over here is an audio that if I played on this is.

An interview marketing secret.

So I'm not going to play that for you, but that is somebody interviewing me on basically handling objections. So couple things to take away from this. Number one, this is a cool factor which gets people to consume it because they start clicking around. So that's number one, you gotta get people to consume your marketing. If you don't do that, it doesn't matter how brilliant it is, it falls on deaf ears. Second of all, because of the cool factor, people share it, right? So they, hey, check this out and they email it to other people and we can see how many views there have been. Alright, now, how do you put this to work in your business? Even if you don't have this kind of a shock and all box here, here's what I would recommend. Make a list of every single objection that you get in your business. And if you get right down to it, there's probably only three or four really big ones. Think about how are you going to handle that in advance before they talk to you? How are you going to design your marketing and your sales presentation so that you kill those objections so that when it comes to asking for the order, they can't weasel out of it with something, some kind of excuse? All right. And the other thing is be listening to your salespeople phone calls because there's so much value in that. As I grow my company and I hire salespeople and I'm not doing the selling as much anymore as I used to, you can sort of lose touch with that end customer. So it's really important that you're actually interviewing, you're reviewing some of the recorded calls with your salespeople, listening to those objections and then building the marketing out in advance so that those objections are basically erased.

All right, well, I'm excited to be here. First off, so the concept of funnel stacking and this presentation kind of came from. As many of you guys know, we own a company called Click Funnels. We have almost 15,000 entrepreneurs who have moved their entire businesses over to our platform. And inside that has been over 350,000 sales funnels built. And so I have this really cool, unique view to look at what everybody's doing and see what's working and not working. And December this year I sat down and I wanted to look at what was working in My company. So we ran all of our numbers and. And I'm like one of those sales funnel strategists who sit for days in front of whiteboards mapping stuff out. And it turned out after looking at all of our numbers, 98% of our income came from three funnels, not all the other crazy ones we made up. And so that became this process. Like, okay, these are the three funnels that actually matter in our company. And looking across the platform as a whole, almost the majority of the income is made through one of these three funnels. And there's a really cool way they actually work together. So that's what we're talking about today. And the other part here is how I made. I'm gonna talk about how I make up to $238 for every free book we give away and how you guys can too. Now, the reason why that's actually important, one of my mentors, Dan Kennedy, who looks like the walrus, according to Joe, he told me when I first got into this business, he said, because money's cool, right? But that's not the reason. He said that the person who can spend the most money to acquire a customer always wins. And so for me, this whole sales funnels and everything we're talking about, the goal isn't just to make a whole bunch of money. It's so that I can out market everybody else. I can spend more money to get every single customer in the front door so I can serve more people and change more people's lives. And that's the real goal kind of behind it to begin with. I want to explain a concept I like talking about. On my side of my team is a concept called the value ladder. At the top of the value ladder is the best thing that we all offer our clients. The thing that we have that can change their lives the most, right? It's the thing that probably would cost a whole bunch of money, right? So I was thinking about Robin yesterday. I met her. She's the green smoothie girl. So, Robin, for you, your dream thing, if you could serve some of the highest level, I'm assuming it would be for you to pack up your stuff, fly to their house, go through their cupboards, throw away everything out, and teach them how to juice and spend a week there just detoxing them and helping them, right? That would be amazing. I'm sure that every one of us, we have something inside of our company that's similar. It would be the most amazing, most valuable thing you could possibly offer. The problem is that it's hard to go do that, right? You don't have time to fly and spend a week at every single client's house. It doesn't make financial sense. Most of the time. It's hard. For me, the best thing I can do, the thing that I do to people at the top level, is they come to me, I sit down with them. I actually build their entire sales funnels. We do all the copy, we do everything. And if I could do that to every single person, it'd be awesome. The problem is we charge 100k just to start the process, plus we take a percentage of their sales, which is usually about 50% or more. And so for me to come up to somebody on the side of the street the first time I meet them, like, hey, my name is Russell Brunson. I know I look like I'm 11 years old, but this is the deal. If you give me $100,000 and half of your company, I'll build you a sales funnel. And most people are like, dude, no, that doesn't make any sense, right? And the reason is because I provided zero value at that point, they have no idea who I am. Can I even execute what I'm talking about? And so a lot of us, that's the thing, we know we can change people's lives, but the thing that would do the best, we can't do. Like, Joe, if you walked up to a typical business owner, like, hey, I got this thing, 25K. You come in a room, it's kind of like we're going to talk about addictions and weird things like that. And it's 25,000 people are like, what are you talking about? Right? Like, I've known Joe for a long time, and it's like, I keep always getting value over and over, and that's why I ascend up, right? And so for me, our business is all about giving value and ascension. So if you look at this model, the very bottom is less value and the price is lower, right? And so we bring somebody in that world, we give them some value, and if they have a great experience, what naturally happens, they want more. That's how humans work, right? We get a little bit of value, like, oh, that was awesome. I need a little bit more. And they get value there and you get a little bit more. It works in relationships, works in business, works in everything. And so my world, it's always like, I need to get someone down here where I can give them some value, and if they get value, they're going to naturally want to ascend to the next level and the next level. And that's kind of how this value ladder and these funnels work.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video and I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

Alright, so these are the three funnels where the majority of our income and the majority of all the entrepreneurs I know income comes from. One is called the tripwire funnel, one's called the webinar funnel, and one's called the high ticket funnel. And I'll walk through these three funnels and I'll walk through how they all kind of interconnect and they work together. So the first one is. This is kind of what they look like. So the first one is a tripwire funnel. A tripwire funnel is typically a really low ticket thing. So for me, in our company, one of our best tripwires is my book funnel. So this is kind of what if I was sitting on a whiteboard with you, I'd sketch out this is what a tripwire funnel actually looks like. Here's all the pages and it looks kind of geeky. So let me walk through page by page, what it looks like. Page number one, we're gonna be giving away something for free, plus shipping, right? And so for me, last year when we launched clickfunnels, we launched with the book. So this is my book called Dotcom Secrets that we gave away for free plus shipping. And if you look at the actual stats, the campaign, I'm going to be sharing the results. This is over 200,000 people came through this funnel. We sold 27,000 copies of the book during this time. And so these are really big numbers across a whole bunch of traffic sources. But trying to give you idea of how the whole thing works. All right, so here's the math so far. So first step, we gave away the book, right? I told my wife initially after I spent a year writing a book and I was like, I'm going to give it away for free. She's like, what are you doing? You can't do that. It doesn't make any sense. I'm like, I promise this works. So the first step, we give away the book, right? So from the shipping cost during this campaign, the initial 30 days, we made $219,000 in shipping, which isn't in my pocket. That's money disappears. That's based on $7.95 a book, times the books we sold.

Right.

The second step now is after somebody bought the book, it's just like, going to, like, if you're at the grocery store and you're walking out and you see the gum and the tic tacs, and you're like, oh. And you start grabbing something. The next step in our funnel is called an order form bump. And it fits right after they put in the credit card, but right before they click the submit button. So my order form bump right here is just saying, hey, you're about to buy the book. Do you want the audiobook version for the extra 37 bucks? Really quick, fast thing. Usually, on average, between 20 and 30% of people will take that bump offer for us. The math that bump offer add an extra $286,000 to our overall revenue, which right now, total revenue so far in this funnel is $18.31. I made for every free book I gave away at the point they finally clicked submit. The next step in the funnel is our first upsell. Our first upsell, we sell a course, one of our info product courses. This one's $200. The math from that, we made about $506,000 from the first upsell, which now our profit per book is $27.39. Then we take them to upsell number two. From upsell number two, we sold a $300 course, and we. We made $130,000 for that one. So at this point right now, by the time they finished the first initial funnel, we made $31.10 per book. So why is that important? This is why this is so important. That means I can spend right now up to $31.10 on advertising to give away a free book. Right now, on Facebook, it averages about $12 to give away a free book. So I'm actually profitable day one. The very second it happens, I can go to affiliates and say, I'll pay you $20 or $30 to give away a free book. And it gives me the ability to get insane amounts of customers coming through our front door every single day for free. And then everything that happens after this is just pure profit. We always talk about lifetime value of a customer. I hate that because it makes us start making stupid decisions. For me personally, if I don't break even on day one, I don't do the campaign or the funnel. So that's how we build a Funnel that breaks even on day one and then everything after that is pure profit. All right, so the last step on the page, typically after some buys a free book, then we say, thanks for buying. We had something called an offer wall that has links to our other products. And from there we made a whole bunch of other money that we won't talk about in this presentation. Now some of you guys are saying, well, Russell, I don't have a book. What do I do? If you don't have a book, that's fine. In my process, I was talking about, you gotta figure out who your customers are and what bait will get them in the door, right? So some of you guys, the book is the bait that'll bring your customers in the door. A couple of our clickfunnels members, one of them sells a gun membership site. They give away free gun targets. Did $30 million last year giving away free gun targets, bringing them into their world. Perry Belcher and Ryan Deiss, they have a suit company, they give away free cufflinks and then bring people into the world that way. They also have a credit card knife. And we just are working on a funnel right now for Marcus Lemonis, for Camping World, which is a huge thing. And we're doing a free toilet paper funnel to bring people into their world. So it works with any kind of business. You gotta think about what's the bait your customers actually want. Okay, step number two, you got them in, now you've broken even, you made money. Now we start moving them and sending them to funnel number two, which is a webinar funnel. It looks kind of like this. That's what the perfect webinar funnel looks like. And first page, registration page, Couple things on the registration page, big secrets. The key to get people to opt in is curiosity. Do not have a video. I've never seen a video. Increase conversion rates on a webinar page. Curiosity is the key to get people in. Here's kind of the numbers. The first thing is every single person who buys my book, within two weeks, they introduce to our webinar funnel automatically. We also drive ads directly to it. So we drive cold traffic in the webinar funnels. We average about $3 per registrant for a webinar. Our goal internally, our company is to get 3,000 people to register per week. So we spend $3,000 from the thousand people. We get a 25% show up rate. 10% of people usually close on a webinar. So right now we're at $25,000 in sales. And then Typically from the follow up sequence we'll make another. We'll usually double the webinar sales in the follow up sequence. So we put $3,000 into ads, make $50,000 a week. And that happens week in and week out in our company consistently. And that's how we run the webinars.

Thank you.

Page of the webinar funnel looks like this. We upsell our continuity program. They have indoctrination pages, the email sequences that go through. And then you actually do the live event, which you guys do events and then we have replay urgency and scarcity. This is the follow up sequence that happens after the webinar's done and we do a whole bunch of cool things there. If you do the sequence right, you get a whole bunch of sales on webinar day and a whole bunch of sales happening again on the next day. And then the last step now, after they've gone through the webinar, which is usually a thousand dollar product, now we're sending to our highest level, which for us is 25 to $100,000 and beyond. We introduce them now to the high ticket funnel. High ticket funnel looks like this. We lead with a case study success story of somebody. We take them through a desired amplifier page and homework and connection. I'll go through these really quick. So every single page has a button like this that pushes people to our high ticket. We have email sequences sharing case studies with people in our high ticket program that pushed them in there as well. And everything now is pushing people and sending them up to our highest level. To our highest level. And the last page here is homework and connection. That's what it looks like. And that is how we make $230 within six weeks for every book we give away.

Jason, explain how you utilize this the most in selling and marketing because I think that'll make sense to people sitting here. Yeah, I'm not so scientific as Dr. Allen is obviously.

Right.

And so I took it more as a viewpoint to look at how to create marketing. So you take an average customer in our space, grow your business. It's always build the business, make the business bigger, yada, yada, yada. It's always more, more, more, more, more. We're going to make tomorrow better. We're going to make tomorrow better. And my theory was always from theory of constraints was, well, what is the constraint? The constraint isn't the future, the constraint is the present. So what are the problems that my prospects are facing in the here and now and how can I speak to them? So instead of trying to have a business make a million dollars, how do we get you your next customer? And so my focus and my viewpoint went to a localized level of what I thought was the most important bottleneck in the prospect's thinking. And how could I destroy, remove that obstacle? My theory that I had based on your theory was if I remove that obstacle, then the sell will happen automatically. If they don't have a reason to say no, then they will say yes. So where everybody's looking at how do I get them to say yes? I just say, how do I stop them from saying no? And so in every single strategic meeting that we have, every single thought experiment that we run in our company, we always try to take the invert position. It's not like, how much does this cost? It's like, how much does this cost if you don't buy it? Not just how much does it cost if you do buy it. So that's the main way that we use it at a practical level. But the other level that we always use it at is exactly what Dr. Allen is saying. We don't just assume that this one way is the way that's going to grow the business. We try to take a holistic approach and we try to say, here are seven probable ways in which we can create this business. Now let's run the actual math. And of those seven probable ways, which one seems most likely? It's the difference between deterministic thinking and probabilistic thinking. And so we run those models and those scenarios that I've learned reading the goal and studying Dr. Allen. And we make hypotheses and we test them, which is very not common in business. I've discovered like, entrepreneurs are allergic to like experiments and testing. And it's crazy, you know, now the laboratory rats, the clinicians, they're allergic to doing it in the real world. So you have a disconnect. Yeah, you do, right? You got geniuses over here that are just dissecting rats, and then you got entrepreneurs over here that are just making hip fire decisions, like CEOs, billion dollar companies, napkin mathing it out, right? And so we tried to figure out a model that could bridge those two together. And so intuitively I knew the answer that Alan was going to say for that example with the book, because we were doing, we have like a little business together. And I told Alan because we were doing a webinar and I go, you got to show it. Because people aren't going to believe that a 10% increase in price will result in 100% increase in your net profit. It just doesn't seem to make sense. But nonetheless, there it is. And that example didn't necessarily mean you had to raise the price from 20 to 22. What they discovered is they were using the middlemen, the distributors, and they were giving them bulk purchasing discounts and they clawed back a little bit of that. So the combination of two actions of clawing back a little bit of the bulk purchase discounts, increasing the price a little bit, running localized tests was sufficient enough to make the biggest impact into the bottom line. And so what I know is reading the goal was in every single situation there is one thing, there is something that is non obvious on surface that if you use it will have a more dramatic effect than everything else. It's like Price's law. Have you ever heard of Price's law? The square root of the workforce produces the amount of production. So if you got a thousand people, what's the square root of that? Man, you guys suck at Matt gets.

The hell out of me.

Let me make it easier. What's the square root of 110. Oh, thank God. Okay, so 10. So 10 people in an organization out of 100 will produce 50% of the results. And so the reality is if you have like 10 decisions to make, or let's do nine for the square root of that, three of those decisions are going to produce at least 50% of those results. It's Price's law. So you use these different models, at least that's how I think about it creatively. And we run a series of tests on a simple level to determine if they actually play or if they don't play. Because what do we miss? What didn't we also account for? So tell the example, Alan, about the ore in the ground.

This kind of. I shared this morning this idea of impossible unless it's sort of the story how I came up with it. I'm invited to go and speak to a mining group, walk into the room like this. But 60 huge mining guys, right? I'm pretty tall, but I see from the body language the last thing that they want to hear is a lecture about some theory. So before we start, during the coffee I said like what's the issue here? Why all of you guys look so upset? I said we have a target of 12 million tonnes a year. We in month four we had 3 million tons. We're already a million behind. If we continue, we'll end up at 9 million. Most of us will be fired. We'll have to pay penalties on contracts etc. I said okay, I get it. So I stand up, I said I was planning to give you guys a lecture about debottlenecking but here's the issue. So I dropped a little curve. You know, you have to get to 12 million, you're running at 3, at about, you know, 750amonth, etc. There's that gap. How are you going to get there? We don't know else we would have done it. So I said okay, I'm just going to do two things for you today. Ask you to write down on a flip chart what's the number one thing that's consuming your limited management attention and budget. That's our ultimate constraint as entrepreneurs is our limited attention, right? So what consumes your limited attention and that of your team and the limited budget that you have? And now imagine that big mining group. How many initiatives do you think they were that were consuming their attention and budget? When they got to 100, I stopped them, right? I said okay, now what I'm going to do is I'm going to ask you a really unfair question. Below the belt question. We've just agreed that the number one problem that you have is you are not making enough tons. Agree. If you can't solve this problem, nothing else matters. It's the one thing that makes the whole difference. They said yes, said okay, I want to go right down on those flip charts that's now stacked around the room. How many additional tons is that initiative going to give you? What do you think happened? Three of the initiatives actually would have put helped them to produce more tons. Only three out of that hundred. So I said guess what we're going to do? Stop the majority of them like right now. Because without that all that you are doing is you asking people to do something more. You're asking them to start another thing. Whereas most of your limited attention and budget is already occupied. We immediately agreed what we're going to stop. I said okay, but that doesn't yet help us to know what to go and do now. So I call up the first group manager, he says responsible for exposing the or. I said how are you going to get from an average of about 750,000 tons a month to 1.25 million because remember you've fallen behind so you need to catch up. It's not just good enough to get to 1 million, you have to go more. And this big guy standing in front of me. And remember I have no intuition or experience in mining, right? Nothing. So imagine yourself in that position. There's no silver bullet that some magical way of rescheduling the plot. So I said, how are you going to do it? He said, it's fucking impossible, else he would have done it. And I stood in front of him and the only thing that came up was I said to him, it's impossible unless. And he looked at me and I looked at him. We stared at each other for a couple of minutes, probably a few seconds really. And he said to me, if this was my mind, this is what I would do. I would go and get a bunch of land moving equipment and there's this area there, these idiot accountants. And he pointed me to the accountants tell us it's unprofitable. Go and mine there. I said, great, so let's do the numbers. How much worst case is this, these equipment going to cost you? He gave me a number. It's like, you know, a million dollars a month. I said, worst case, how many additional tons will you get from this? He gave me the numbers, we multiplied it. A hundred dollars a ton. It's like, do you want 20 million and spend only 1 million? And that by the way, if you have to make a big decision, if the worst case cost is still better than the worst case benefit. What a fantastic decision.

Can you say that again?

If the worst case cost is still better than the worst case benefit, it's a hell yes decision, right? Like this. We actually suck at predicting the likely outcome, but we're pretty good at estimating the best and worst case outcome. And that's generally all that you need to make really complicated decisions as you estimate the best and worst case. So immediately it was approved and then we went to the next operation because we don't want the bottleneck to now move to another area. And we get kept on this process of impossible unless. And then we repeated it at levels, right? This was all executive level. Then we repeated it up to the operator level and they all came up with ingenious ways to make the impossible possible.

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Watch them.