Client Attraction Without Funnel Fatigue

Welcome. You are here because you signed up and indeed have showed up for Build a Client Attraction System That Works Without the Digital Marketing BS. You are in the right place if you are ready to at least consider, if not go all in on ditching funnel gymnastics and all the other digital marketing crap that we have all been taught is necessary and required if you're going to build a thriving business online or off. And what you should do next is get ready to take some notes and prepare some questions for when we get to the end. And then after we're done, there will be time for a short Q&A. And then of course, for those of you that are in the Inner Circle, you have your monthly Q&A 2 weeks from today where we can cover this or any other topic that you are needing to work on. So unless there are any other questions before we dive in, we're going to get started. Okay. So what I want to do is the ground rule today is it's not about funnels, ads, algorithms, deal customer avatars, power offers, any of that kind of thing. You can build a thriving, prosperous, purpose-driven business that funds and fits the life that you want simply by doing what has always worked in marketing and sales, which is to engage in conversations that prove your competence and are consistently engaged in with what I like to call empathetic antagonism. But you can think of it as just empathy and compassion. So we're going to start by talking about the funnel fallacy. And so those of you that know my backstory know that I am, you know, my name is Scott Perry and I am a recovering digital marketer. I have done all the things. I have done LinkedIn DM strategies, made a lot of money doing LinkedIn DM strategies. I have done power offers and no-brainer offers and done equally well with those. And I have powered it all with ideal customer avatars and funnels and Facebook ads or Google ads or YouTube ads. So when I'm talking about these things that I see now as the downside and the risk inherent in the, the funnel gymnastics, I'm speaking from direct personal experience. And so what we are normally taught is that you have to create a funnel, you have to create this ideal customer avatar, which doesn't exist. That's why it's called ideal. This imaginary person that you're going to write every piece of content for, craft every offer for, launch every offer for, design every email for. Then you're going to create your power offer, which is this very specific demographic psychographic thing that you're going to— the demographics and psychographics rather of your avatar, what you're targeting. You're gonna dig into their pain. You're gonna create urgency and pressure and force to get them to purchase this thing. This result that you're gonna promise them without doing any actual work, without doing anything that, that they actually hate. That's the usual power offer. I help X specific kind of person get X specific kind of result without having to do anything that, that you don't want to do. Then you're going to force them through some sort of email sequence. And if they drop out of the initial sequence, you're gonna put 'em through another nurture sequence so that they eventually end up probably on some sort of webinar. And if You are lucky enough to have them land on the webinar and actually watch the webinar. You're going to drive them to a sales page again, using all sorts of force and pressure to get them to click a purchase button. Funnels work. Okay. I want to— I'm not saying that you shouldn't do funnels because funnels don't work. I have proven that funnels work. The problem with funnels is not that they don't work. The problem with funnels is that they are very high resource drains. Especially for solopreneurs. You have 24 hours in a day. There's only so much of that time that you can actually give attention to the work that you want to do. And you'd rather be doing the work that you started your business for in the first place, not the work of becoming an expert digital marketer. You have only so much energy and effort that you can expend at any given time, and you have finite resources. And funnels take a lot of time. They take a lot of effort and energy. They require a lot of money if you're going to power them. And here's the worst part: for every 100 people that sign up for your lead magnet, your ethical bribe, your opt-in, whatever it is that gets them into the email sequence, that drives them to the webinar, that drives them to the sales page, by the time you get people to the end of that funnel, you are going to get 2 out of every 100. Your best digital marketing funnels are going to have a 2% conversion rate. That's why they take so much money to actually drive traffic into the top of the funnel so that enough drip out at the bottom. And so it can work if you have a— if you're not a solopreneur, but an entrepreneur operating with a lot of venture capital or with a lot of resources in terms of employees and freelancers and so forth, it can be a viable way to build a business. It's getting increasingly less so. I mean, just think of your own experience. How often do you opt in, give up your email address for anything that you land on online now? And of those things that you actually opt in for, how many of those things have you ever actually opened up or referred to more than one time after you scan through them? Everybody can smell a funnel. Everybody knows what a funnel feels like. Nobody likes being in a funnel. And most of us who are purpose-driven solopreneurs don't want to become funnel architects and, and funnel engineers. Feels very manipulative, it feels very extractive, and it feels like you have an agenda. You want to just get something from people, and that's usually out of alignment with the way the kind of difference maker avatar that is drawn to me and my work wants to operate. So you're chasing algorithms— that doesn't feel good. You're spending a lot of money, giving a lot of money to Zuckerberg or to Google to power those ads— that doesn't feel good. Your time and attention to spread across a whole bunch of channels where probably you don't even necessarily want to be spending any time. And all of that energy is lost just trying to game a system that you really don't want to be in in the first place, right? So you've heard me say many times, you can't win a game that you don't want to play. And that's what it feels like you have to do once you create your offer, this generous, helpful thing that you know if it just gets in front of the right people, it will enhance their lives. But then you feel like, oh, I've also got to become this digital marketer in order to get that offer in front of those people. It's absolutely not true. So one of the things that I would encourage you to do is if you already have an offer and you already are targeting an audience with that offer, how much of your current client attraction system is designed just to capture people's attention versus doing the work that you actually started your business for in the first place? How much time do you spend grinding out content to post on social media, post on your blog, in the hopes of driving someone to give up their email address so you can hit— put them in an email sequence, get them into some sort of training or content or webinar that drives them to a sales page? And what would it look like if you were to be able to recapture some of that time? So just a quick reflection from my own personal experience. When I was doing the digital marketer game, I spent easily 100 hours per week in my business, like literally from 5 AM to 5 PM. Most of that time spent on content funnel gymnastics, trying to create better email sequences and, and, and lead magnets and all that sort of thing. When I inverted and started doing things the way that we're going to talk about today, I reduced the time spent in my business from 100 hours a week to 10 hours a week, and I doubled my revenue in the first year of converting over to that system. So there is a better way, and it will get you closer to what you actually want, which is a business that funds and fits the life that you actually want to live.