MBA2233 Must Read: Expert Secrets by Russell Brunson

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Today's must read is Expert Secrets by Russell Brunson. The subtitle of this book is the Underground Playbook for creating a mass movement of people who will pay you for your advice. Russell Brunson, the author of Expert Secrets, is widely known as the most successful Internet marketer of all time. I'll explain why in today's episode, but also if this book actually fulfills on its promise, does it actually help you build that community of people that pay you for what you know? If you're a creator of any kind, if you are a coach, if you sell products or services, a consultant, then you're going to find insights in this book that can help your business. Now, no book is perfect of course. But in today's episode, I'm going to share with you some of the things that you really should take a close look at in this book. What are some things that maybe you can just leave behind? A lot of creators are great at their craft. They're great at what they teach, they're great at what they coach. But they're not so great when it comes to marketing themselves, building a business model around their expertise, and selling their products and services in a reoccurring way to allow their business to grow and scale. This book helps address those challenges. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. I want to start this must read by just talking a little bit about Russell Brunson, who's the author of this book. Now, full disclosure, I read his first book in the Secrets series, Dot Com Secrets. His second book in the series was Traffic Secrets. I did not read that book. And the third in the series is Expert Secrets, which is today's must read. Now, the promise of this book is to help you as a coach, as a consultant, as somebody who sells your expertise to create a mass move of people who are willing to pay for your advice. Does it deliver on this promise? Well, for the most part it does. It actually does give you some insights on what actually is an effective community, what actually is an effective product or service, and what are some of the things that you have to include in what you offer to make it a compelling offer for your audience. Now, a word of warning. It is a markety, salesy book. If you have a hard time with hardcore marketers, especially the online marketing style of marketing, you might find it a little bit challenging getting through especially the second half of this book. But I like to challenge myself. Even when I don't agree with everything that somebody talks about, I still can learn from them. I also like to challenge why I don't agree with it. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm not. But it's important for you to revisit your beliefs because you might be missing out. Now, I mentioned that Russell Brunson is known as probably the most successful Internet marketer, and that's because he built his business selling his expertise and helping people sell their expertise via his training via a software product called ClickFunnels. The company's worth over a billion dollars and it's actually quite remarkable given the fact that the company is self funded. No funding whatsoever from VCs or angel investors or anything like that. That's pretty impressive. Now he flat out says in the book that you can use his advice that he shares in the book if you're a coach and you're selling advice, if you're selling courses, you're selling training. Because that's what the book's all about, how to do that and create a sense of pull for those types of customers for your products and services. But he also talks about that you can use this advice in the book if you sell a product like a software product. And he flat out says, I've done this with Click Funnels, my software product, where I've bundled my software product with training, with coaching, with expertise to help people implement my product and continue to pay me for it. So it's an interesting angle on coupling coaching and training and courses with a product that you already have. Now let me walk you through the high level contents of this book. It starts with a forward by Robert Kiyosaki, the author of Rich dad boredad, pretty popular author in the business book genre. Now if you've read Robert Kiyosaki's books before, this forward really is not something to write home about. It's not really that spectacular. I love Robert and his work, but basically it's the basis of his books and the fundamentals that he teaches. And it kind of applies it to what Russell explains in the book in Expert Secrets. If you're in a rush to get started and you've read Rich Dad, Poor dad, you can skip the forward. Now, the book is separated in sections. Section one is all about creating your mass movement. Section two is about creating belief. Section three is titled your moral obligation. Section four is about funnels. And section five is what's next, which basically is the call to action at the end of the book. So essentially, if we put the what's next section aside, there are four major sections in my opinion. Section one and section two, which is all about creating your mass movement, becoming a charismatic leader, how to find a cause to stand behind and be a leader of, and then creating belief for your audience that you can help them out, that you have something that they need, and that you can help them get to their destination. So these two sections, section one and section two, in my opinion, are worth the book alone. If you read just these two sections or this first half of the book, the first 130 or 40 pages, you would get your money's worth and then some. Section 3, which is titled your moral obligation, which is really how to sell your product, how to create an offer and how to deliver it on a webinar, and the funnels in section 4, which is more of the same, is more sales oriented, how to sell your expertise using his methodology. Now, there are things in these sections that I just personally don't agree with. I don't think they're horrible, I don't think that they're evil. It's just a different style of sales that I don't prescribe to. Now, mind you, if you follow what he says, there's a good chance you will make sales. Right? This stuff does work. It worked for him, worked for other people. I just personally don't use these sales techniques because they're not aligned with my own brand, my own personal brand and how I feel is most effective for my business in the long term. This no way devalues the second half of the book. It's just not my personal cup of tea. Now you might be asking Omar, why, why is it not your cup of tea? Can't just leave me hanging like that. Well, let me keep it simple. Russell wants to help you make sales quickly. And in order for you to make sales quickly, you're going to use a lot of different sales techniques that apply a little bit of pressure on the customer, whether it's time scarcity, whether it's price scarcity, whether it's pushing certain buttons to make the customer feel like they're going to be losing out if they don't buy this product. Russell's very good at selling to a wide spectrum of people and wide spectrum of people on the journey of buying. So he's very good at actually helping people get off the fence and buy when they're not ashore. So this helps you get more sales and quicker sales. And if you're just starting out and you just need sales, then this is not a bad idea to kind of look at and choose what works for you. But it's not my cup of tea because I don't have that philosophy when it comes to sales. I'm looking for people that it's a hell yeah. I want to present my product or service to the right people that are a perfect fit for my product. I want to serve people that don't really need convincing. Once I show them the product, they know what I'm talking about. Now, it doesn't mean I don't do any sales, it just means I do most of my work qualifying my customers so that when I do make them an offer, it doesn't take much convincing. They just need education, basically. They need to understand what they're buying and how it helps them. And if it does, they buy I've already built trust with them. I've already built my relationship with them. Russell is actually quite good at showing you how to sell people that you haven't really built a relationship with yet. So I like to spend a little bit more time before making offers, cultivating my audience, giving them great value, building that trust, also filtering them out, seeing who's ready to buy and who's not ready to buy before I make an offer, seeing where they're at, their journey, and also saying no to people that I just can't serve. The other reason why it's not my cup of tea is that his formula for delivering a webinar is just not aligned with the way I like to sell on webinars or what I teach my students how to sell on webinars. And two people can be right, Russell can be right, I could be right. There are many ways to get to a certain destination. So now that we got that out of the way, what do I love about this book? The first half of the book is brilliant when it comes to how to cultivate a great audience, how to become their leader, how to make sure you're clear on the message that you're putting out there in the world. What is a message you're sending out that is calling people to what you believe. What are some things to look out for when you're in this process of trying to build an audience? And Russell, throughout this whole process, is sharing real life examples from his own company as well as other companies and organizations. He also gets into why people actually buy. At the end of the day, he thinks that the only reason why people buy is to change their status. And this can come in different forms. Changing their physical appearance, their intelligence, their wealth, their style, their happiness, their power. These are all levels of status. We feel better about who we are when we get healthy. We feel better about who we are when we make more money. Even when we do things that are not material, like say, we do volunteer work somewhere inside of us, we're doing it, yes, to help other people, but also because we want to be a person that helps other people. Again, changing our status. And the reason why he brings this up is to help you understand that when you are making an offer, selling something to somebody, or just trying to sell your idea to your audience through your content, your free content, you have to ask yourself, how am I helping other people change their status, improve their status, and all the different ways you can change status because basically you're answering the question, what's in it for them? And that's the first thing people are thinking about when they look at anything that you're offering, whether it's a free video or a podcast episode or a blog post or a webinar, it doesn't matter. They're gonna ask themselves very early on, what's in it for me? What's this all about? Get to it. Right? How many times have you watched a video on YouTube and person's taking forever to get to the point, I haven't got any value yet. And that value is supposed to formulate and change my status, make me smarter, make me feel more prepared for a trip if I'm watching a video about travel, whatever it might be. Now, there's a section in this book that I really want to get into, which is all about creating belief. At some point in your business, your customers or your audience is meeting you, consuming your content on your webinars, on your sales calls or whatever. And there's gotta be a transition between where they are and where you want to take them. And they need to believe that you can do that. That process he calls the epiphany bridge, where people have an epiphany, and they're like, wow, this person actually can help me get where I'm going, because I just had a mini breakthrough. And the bridge bridges an emotional state to a logical state. And one of the ways he recommends doing this is kind of busting myths. So you might say a lot of people think you have to starve yourself and eat less calories to lose weight, but I'm going to show you how you can eat more and lose weight faster than you ever thought before. So you're basically busting people's myths or thoughts in their head that are causing an emotional state. Like, I don't want to get another diet because I don't like feeling hungry. And then they have epiphany when you explain to them, oh, if I eat these foods, I can eat more, actually feel full all the time and lose weight faster than I did before. That transition allows them to believe you can help them. Okay? Because you just taught them something that was the opposite of what they believed before. You kind of changed who they are. They changed their perspective. It's a form of transformation, and it's a taste of what kind of transformation you can show them when they pay you.

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