Before the Lead: How People Actually Discover Your Brand

Check. All right. Bingo. Great to see you guys here today. Welcome, welcome. Funnel hackers, come roll in with us. Sorry about my audio. My microphone broke. I'm just using the computer today, so if I sound a little bit different than normal, I definitely do sound different. Sorry about that. We back up and run next week, but great to have you guys here for another training Tuesday. Me and Aaron are very excited for this one. This one we're going to live a little more theoretical, we're going to stay a little more high level, but we're going to talk about one of the most, if not the most important part of everybody's businesses. Leads. Getting leads into your business. Upon the backs of these leads, we will build an empire. Everything starts with leads. So let me bring up my good friend Aaron and let's get into it, man. Lead generation.

Yeah, absolutely. I really want to talk about this today because this is a recurring question I get almost every single week in the onboarding call. And just for some context, if people don't know what the onboarding call is, this is one of the first touch points for people in clickfunnels. So the intention is they sign up, then they come to the onboarding call. And what I do is I introduce them to the platform. So I walk them through a little bit, show them around the workspace, we talk a little bit about the apps and the capabilities there, but then we dive straight into funnel building. So we built a lead squeeze funnel in like 20 minutes. And people are always super excited, but at the end of it, they're always asking the same exact question, which is, how do I actually collect a lead? So that's really what I want to talk about today. Let me go ahead and share my screen here. Here we go. And I got collecting leads. You can see I got it in quotations here because like I just said, the question is always, how do I collect a lead? As I have conversations with these people, I truly understand what their needs are. And it's not how do I collect a lead? We need to take a step back and understand that the question is more, how do I garner traffic? How do I get my first eyeballs on my website for potential prospects? How do I get people in to my funnel? Right. So that is always the question. It's not so much how do I get people to actually convert? How do I get people in general? And I think we need to take a step back even further and look at a customer's journey from a wholesale standpoint, because the question they're asking is how Do I collect a lead? And that's actually landing right here in the second stage of the customer's journey. But we need to take a look at the entire thing and the awareness is the first stage. If we don't have people coming into our funnels, we're not going to have anyone converting. No one's going to actually become a customer, then become loyal and become an advocate, right? So first and foremost we need to get eyeballs in the door. Then once they're in the door, they're going to consider our offer. They're going to say, yeah, that's awesome, I want to pull the trigger, I'm going to convert on that. And now I'm a customer. At that point, we need to make sure that we're delighting our customers, making sure that we're satisfying them in every way, shape and form so that they become loyal customers and they want to come back to us. And in turn, if they keep coming back and they're continued to be delighted, they're going to advocate for us and come full circle and they're going to become an awareness opportunity for us. That's actually the first opportunity I want to talk about is going to be word of mouth. This is incredibly powerful, right? It's actually one of the highest trusted forms of awareness and it's also one of the most low effort forms, forms of awareness. So people trust their friends, their family, their co workers. Of course your mileage may vary, but generally speaking, they're going to trust these kind of things more so than advertisements or websites or influencers, right? When someone hears about your brand from a person that they trust, awareness and credibility come together at the same time and that is so, so rare. So you just want to make sure that you are always speaking word of mouth. Now, a lot of beginners or a lot of entrepreneurs that are just getting started, they underestimate this, right? They say, ah, this isn't scalable, right? If I tell one single person this feels maybe a little too low hanging or it's the digital world, right? It's 2026. Like if I'm talking to one single person, I'm missing out on opportunities online where I could be talking to a hundred people or it just feels unprofessional, right? I haven't completely nailed my elevator pitch and I don't have business cards, so all of this feels negligible, right? Forget all of that. Early stage businesses don't need scale, they need traction. That is the most important thing, getting people in the door first and foremost so when you talk to someone you trust, have a conversation with them, tell them the benefits of your offer or your service, give them a demonstration, or give them any relevance that you're providing, at the worst, nothing happens. But if everyone in your inner circle has awareness of what you offer, more opportunities will present themselves organically. In fact, I have a personal story. My very first sale on ClickFunnels was through Word of mouth. So I was just chatting with my mom. She has an old friend and, and he was trying to repair this old piece of machinery. He needs some sort of, like, cap fitting to it, and it was expired, like it did not exist. What I do is I offer 3D printing services for customized fittings like that. So he calls me, we talk it out, and I end up making my first sale. Subsequently, he tells more people in that same industry about me, and next thing you know, I have several sales rolling in the door. So word of mouth can be extremely powerful. Do not underestimate this awareness opportunity. All right, now let's go ahead and move on to a second opportunity, and that is communities. So you'll notice I'm going to take this kind of one step by step, word of mouth. Typically you're talking to one person or a group of people. Now we're going online, we're going to talk to some communities here, and there's, whoop, I just spoiled the third one there on accident. But two things that communities have that are really, really relevant here, they have shared interests and shared problems, right? So if you find yourself in that same avenue, you have found the perfect opportunity. Now, when I say shared problems, I'm using that term a little bit loosely, right? It could be as big of a problem as I want satisfaction or entertainment right now. So I'm going to go and buy a movie online, right? Like there's different ways of problems and presenting itself. But I just want to mention that I'm using the term problem very loosely here. Now, when it comes to communities, there's a few crucial things that you should know. They are not a place to promote, they're a place to participate. How many times have you been part of a community where someone new comes in and you're saying, hey, this guy just starts immediately advertising himself. That's not really what communities are for. The goal is to build trust. Then when someone presents a problem that you have the solution to, you can organically provide your solution and advertise yourself as the solution. And that will be so much more organic than just coming in and immediately promoting yourself. So It's a very, it's very powerful when you're able to produce an organic solution.

And Aaron, that's actually something that we've had marketers have been doing forever. You know, back in the day it was Facebook groups and we would say, go to your own Facebook profile, change your cover photo to reflect your business and what it is that you do, and then go to your about section and at the very top of your about section, put your lead magnet or put a free resource or asset or something. So now you, you go to communities and you're just posting high value information. You're not sharing your thing, you're not asking people to buy anything. You're just going and helping people solve the problems they're currently experiencing. And what happens when you help somebody solve that problem? Well, they look at your profile, they say, wow, that was great. That's everything I needed. Who is this that shared with me? They look at your profile and then they see, oh, wow, they do this thing and I can get this thing and. And then they go do the thing with you. It's worked forever. It will continue to work. Reciprocity is a real thing amongst humans.

Absolutely. And talking about these communities, how many different avenues of communities are there out there in 2026? Dante, you just mentioned Facebook groups. But there's so many other opportunities right there. Discord servers, there's old school forum boards that I'm still hanging out on all the time. But it's not even limited to that. I mean, we're talking comment sections on YouTube. You know, how many times are you just scrolling the comment section and you find a problem? I can provide a solution to that. So let me go ahead and do that. You're just creating that foundation that's saying I can provide solutions. And every single time you do, that's more eyeballs on your brand. So continuing to just look at all of these places. Subreddits, Right, that's another place that's really good. So anywhere people are gathering around a shared topic, that's a community and a great opportunity to provide your solution and more so your brand. All right, so let me go ahead and jump to the third topic of awareness, which of course is going to be social platforms. Now, I could talk about this for absolutely forever, but we all know social platforms are distribution systems, right? Their job is to show content to people. They're supposed to keep us engaged and surface relevant ideas repeatedly. So what should you be doing on social? Now, to understand what you should be doing, we first need to understand what social media is rewarding if you're clear, if you're repetitive, right? You're doing the same thing on a constant manner. If you're focused and you're engaging, your videos will convert. Now, they do not reward. Social media does not reward perfection. You can make the most perfect video out there, but if it doesn't actually tell anything, they don't care, right? Complexity is another thing. You can make it as complex as you want, but they don't care about that. They just want to make sure it's engaging. You know, one off post as well. You want to make sure that you're continuing to be repetitive there and then last, vague messaging. You really want to avoid that. You just want to make sure that you're clear. And once again, I'm going to keep coming back to the word engaging because if people are not engaging, they're going to drop off. You're not going to have views. So that whole idea here is that you can create a content machine, but you really, really need to make sure that it's focused on engagement, because that is the number one thing that will convert. Now, why does social media work? For early awareness. You can just start immediately, right? There's no rules, there's no ramifications, there's no gateways. Like, you can go create a profile right now and start posting right now. You don't need an existing audience that will grow organically if you create engaging content. So I'm always going to keep coming back to that main single topic. Now, a false belief, right? A lot of people say, well, I don't. I don't want to make YouTube videos. I don't want to make a TikTok. I don't want to do it because it's too saturated. Topics are saturated, but clear positioning is not. How many people out there. You've watched a video on something that you're an expert on and you go, I could do it better than that. That's the perfect opportunity. That's the perfect situation. There are so many different avenues. Yes, they are saturated, but clear intentions are not. So that's really where you can hone in and make sure that you're just creating clear, consistent content. Again, that's engaging. And I promise you, you will grow an organic audience audience. Now, with all of those three things mentioned, those are not the only opportunities, right? There are so many more that. Oop, there's so many more that I haven't talked about. I could probably bring Dante back on here and talk about a hundred different things, but I think those are the three main avenues to focus on most, right? Word of mouth, just talking to people and telling people about your brand. If you're confident in what you got, talk to them. Second, look at communities. Start creating posts, right? Create that brand, create that identity and people will become trust, will be able to trust you over time. And then simultaneously when you're talking in those communities, create your online social presence, create a few months of content consistently and engaging and I promise you, with those three things in mind, you will bring leads in organically. So with that being said, I want to bring Dante back up. Is there anything, Dante, that you want to share on opportunities or anything else in this topic here?

Not a chance. Aaron, you. I'm ready to hand the baton to you. That was flawless, Perfect, perfect. The only thing I'd add is go, do we have to implement from here? It's never enough to just learn. It's never enough to understand we actually have to do. But that was flawless, Aaron.

That's what I'm saying. If you just participate in these things, right? I'm not saying you have to be an expert on social media. Like I just said, you don't have to make the perfect posts, the perfect photos, the perfect videos. You just have to do it in a way that engages with people and I promise you they will come. So with that being said, let us know in the comments here what you guys want to learn about next. This stemmed from the question that I get on those onboarding calls, but we take a look at all of the comments all of the time. We want to know what you guys want to learn and we, and we're happy to cater these training Tuesdays to that exact thing. So please let us know. And we're happy to do that.

Absolutely. This is training Tuesdays built by Funnel Hackers for Funnel Hackers. Cannot wait to hear from you guys. Aaron, I think I'm good. I'm ready to go get some leads. How about you?

Yeah, absolutely. I'm ready to go make another video. Let's do it.

That sounds good, man. Rockstars. You guys have an amazing rest of your day. This will wrap up the training Tuesday. Can't wait to see you next week. Keep can't wait to hear from you. Have an amazing rest of your week.

Take care, everyone.