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**Sales Funnel Radio**

My first 5 years in entrepreneurship was 34 painful product failures in a row (you heard me).

Finally, on #35 it clicked, and for the next 4 years, 55 NEW offers made over $11m.

I’ve learned enough to see a few flaws in my baby business…

So, as entrepreneurs do, I built it up, just to burn it ALL down; deleting 50 products, and starting fresh.

We’re a group of capitalist pig-loving entrepreneurs who are actively trying to get rich and give back.

Be sure to download Season 1: From $0 to $5m for free at https://salesfunnelradio.com

I’m your host, Steve J Larsen, and welcome to Sales Funnel Radio Season 2: Journey $100M

Latest Episodes:

SFR 236: Examples Of Sales Messages In Each Industry... Apr 23, 2019

Show notes

These are some quick methods to create a sales message in each industry...

If you go to clickfunnels.com, (and you don’t sign in), there's a quiz that asks:

“Which of These Best Describes Your Business/Service?”

Agency / Freelancer

Information Products

E-Commerce

Coaching / Consulting

Network Marketing

Local Small Business

B2B Lead Generation

Blogging / Affiliate

Non-Profits

Just Getting Started / Other

Initially, we found that there were six major industries using ClickFunnels. Once you answer the question, ie shows you the patterns that are MOST effective to help you ‘destroy it’ in your industry.

Over time, it's kinda flexed out (as you can see above) to ten categories…

During the last OfferMind, I walked through each industry to show how I would create a very simple sales message or a hook for each industry.

I didn't write the entire sales message. Instead, I showed an example of the type of origin story I’d create or tell to sell in that space.

When I talk about building a sales message, most people are like, “I can see how my industry has a sales message, I get that.”

There has to be a sales message or the industry would NOT exist.

So most people don't have a hang-up about creating a sales message, especially when it's basically just an epiphany bridge script.

(If you don’t know what an epiphany bridge script is, you need to read Dot Com Secrets… or I’m afraid we can’t be friends ;-))

However…

Offer Creation is where a lot of people start to get hung up.

“Well, Stephen, I sell really high ticket, (we're talking multimillion dollar corporation to corporation contracts), there's no way that your Offer Creation method's gonna work for me.”

… and that's the one where I wanna slap people and jump through the window!

That’s NOT true at all.

Then…

We get to Sales Funnels... and that's where there’s the MOST kickback.

People are like, “Well, I don't think this could work for me.”

Again, I wanna go nuts on 'em.

So I'm briefly gonna show you the Sales Message Creation I’d use in each of those 10 industries.

I’m gonna walk through and show you the hook that I’d start to create if I was selling in that space.

SHAMELESS PITCH The reason I’m sharing is twofold:

I want to teach that to you how I’d create a hook for different industries.
# shameless pitch: I want to convince you that you should come to OfferMind.

This is NOT the kind stuff that you’ll find in any other place.

If you’re planning to come to OfferMind, and you haven’t got your tickets yet, Offermind.com is up.

The room only holds 1,038 people. That's not that many people. We’re literally MAXING IT OUT.

We’ve already sold hundreds of tickets… and it's not for about four months yet.

WHY OFFERMIND?

I coach pretty much every day, and I have a lot of great success stories... but there are the things that EVERYBODY struggles with.

So I asked: How do I take the things that everyone struggles with and deliver those answers? That's what OfferMind is designed to do.

It's NOT your normal event.

I teach frameworks that cause success as a rule.

What you’re gonna read next, is directly taken from OfferMind last year…

GROUNDBREAKING STUFF

Have you heard of Albert Lasker? (Yeah, all my copywriting people)

Albert Lasker was ‘The Man.’

He is often called the father of modern advertising. He lived in the late 1800s to early 1900s, and he was one of the first people to take advantage of human psychology in ads.

People thought it was the most groundbreaking thing ever, and at that time it was.

Until Lasker, most advertisers were just making noise. Lasker was like, “No, let’s consider how people think.”

...and because of that, people were like, “Whoa, who's this guy? This is amazing.”

Albert Lasker played a major role in shaping modern advertising. He was one of the forefathers of the industry.

I want you to know this because *this* is the market origin story.

...

SFR 235 - Focus And Systems... Apr 19, 2019

Show notes

A while little ago, in my Facebook group, someone hit me up with a question.

The question was:

“Stephen, would you have made $1 million faster if you’d just focused on ONE business?”

...the question shocked me.

Because ...*I ONLY EVER FOCUS ON ONE THING*

So, I started thinking about how it can look like I’m doing MORE than I actually am... and it has EVERYTHING to do with how I focus and what I focus on.

So if you wanna get a crap ton done, (without burning out), this is for you!

BECOMING THE OFFER GUY

At the beginning of 2018, I had no product, no business, NOOOTHING. I only had ONE focus…

My first product was in the MLM space. I built a product and a high ticket offer.

Then, I spent two to three months just putting the systems in place and testing them to see if they worked...

I didn't take my focus from that ONE area until the systems in place to run it.

But I was kind thinking:

“Hmmm, I love offers, and frankly, no one else really geeks out about 'em as much as I do. I'm gonna be the offer guy.”

Russell said: “You should be the offer guy!”

Dana Derricks said: “You should be the offer guy!”

I realized that there hadn’t really been a full-on Offer Creation King since the early 1900’s #Claude Hopkins...

...so I was like, “Yo, I'll be the offer guy!”

BUT… that didn't happen until September 2018.

BUILDING BUSINESS SYSTEMS

Thankfully, by that point, the systems I’d been testing in my MLM business were ninja awesome.

Unless we're launching something, I spend only about an hour a week on maintenance… so, now my MLM product is kind of my back-end business.

I’m not gonna shut in down…

We put $1 in and we get $8 to $10 back out. Why would I shut those ads off?

It helps a lot of people, the content is good. It delivers and people make a lot of money from it.… *if they just do it*

It's something people want.
It's extremely valuable.
No one else is doing it.

I'm not gonna turn my MLM business off, but I don't have to maintain it that much either.

On my side, it's all automated and systems are in place.

I have:

Support.
Fulfillment.
Phone people who chat with customers.

BUT…

I'm NOT touching the business on a daily basis. I'm the orchestrator.

Once a week, I'll check in, but I don't really do that much of that anymore…

Coulton handles the majority of stuff over there, and now he's got systems and people in place to free him up too.

That's what's soooo funny about the whole argument that I would have made more money if I’d only focused on ONE thing. I ONLY EVER DID!

I only focused on ONE business.

HERE’S HOW IT WENT DOWN…

#1: I left my job

January - March: I focused solely on just that main MLM product.
For the next two months, (up until about the end of April): I set up systems and teams to take over what I was doing.

#2: The one thing on top of that was that I'm still pretty involved in the ClickFunnels space.

So that might be the thing that some of you guys might try and slap my hand about… I DON’T CARE.

I love Clickfunnels. It's like my second home. Heck, I even have Russell stickers on my phone ;-)

So, I was contracted as a 2 Comma Club X Coach. I was creating a lot of content for ClickFunnels, and I was doing a lot of events and stuff still…

In August, we did the first One Funnel Away Challenge, so we were developing that content as well.

However, so much on the MLM side was already automated, so that I didn’t really have to touch it.

Do you understand?

For the One Funnel Away Challenge, I go live once a day for 30 minutes to an hour, (except for two or three days each month when it’s a little bit more than that), and honestly, I just enjoy it.

I tell EVERYONE to start coaching. People overcomplicate thing. If you start coaching, after a while, you'll notice patterns, and see the BIG problems people have...

Then you make that a product that solves that problem. BOOM!

That's the real reason why I coach. It keeps me sharp. I'm not gonna stop that.

I’M NOT THE FUNNEL GUY

By about September, I started thinking:

This MLM stuff is fun, but what is it I wanna be known for?”

I'm not gonna be the funnel guy, ( even though I’ve built a whole bunch of funnels), that'd be dumb. Russell is the funnel guy. He's the category king of funnels.
How can I create a business that’s complementary to funnels, but not in competition with Russell?

Well, I freak out and dive into offer creation more than anything else.

I just bought another book called The Science of Emerging Markets; it’s super nerdy, and I'm so excited about it...

My fifth bookshelf is topping out. I geek out, man. Offers are my jam. I love just offer creation.

I'm trying to be the offer guy.

… but that decision wasn't official until September.

MY OBSESSION

You have to understand that when I'm putting a product together... no other product exists in my mind.

I have CRAZY FOCUS. It’s obsessive, (probably too obsessive), kind of focus.‘I can't sleep that much for six weeks’ kind of focus. And, honestly, it’s not that healthy, but it's how my brain works.<...

SFR 234: Eustress, And The Wall... Apr 16, 2019

Show notes

E-U-S-T-R-E-S-S... is a massively important concept in my life!

Eustress comes from the word euphoria... and the dictionary definition is beneficial stress.

I googled it…

Eustress means beneficial stress, either psychological, physical, biochemical, radiological.”

It literally means “good stress.”

So…

There's Distress and there's Eustress

What does it have to do with Sales Funnel Radio? A LOT, lemme tell ya!

EUSTRESS... NOT, YOU STRESS!

When I coaching people, there’s often a certain amount of stress that gets caused in that person's life as they take action or do something for the first time.

If they're NOT normally an action taker this stress can feel overwhelming.

However, know the difference between distress and eustress can be a game changer.

Eustress is positive growth stress; the kind you would get from pushing yourself at the gym.

BIG MOVES BY MY LITTLE SIS…

My sister Marie, is awesome.

She's getting married soon, so by the time this episode goes out, she will probably be married. (Congratulations, Marie)

However, about two years ago, she was a poor college student who wanted to go to Funnel Hacking Live. She didn’t have a business or any real savings…

She reached out to me and asked:

"Stephen, I have enough money to either buy a Funnel Hacking Live ticket with a plane ticket and a hotel room... or my groceries and bills for the next month… What should I do?"

Talk about a Big Brother Moment...

I decided to I ask a question to help her weigh up her options and make a decision.

I said: Marie, if you were to go and pay for your groceries and your bills for the next month, what is the likelihood that you will put yourself in a place of eustress and come up with the money to go to Funnel Hacking Live?

She said: "I probably won't."

I said: "I agree with you, you probably won't… most human beings wouldn't.”

Next, I asked: "If you were to go buy a Funnel Hacking Live ticket, plane ride, and all that stuff... what's the likelihood that you are NOT going to figure out how to eat and then die?"

… and she goes: "I'm gonna figure out how to live and eat."

There you go: "In my opinion, that’s your answer!"

If you know that it’s good for you…

If you know that it’s the thing that's cause more success…

… then put your back against the wall voluntarily, and do it that way.

And that's exactly what she did.

She bought a ticket to Funnel Hacking Live, a plane ticket, and all that stuff…

Shortly after, (like the next week), she started getting her first real clients and started doing work that paid her bills.

There's a principle behind this…

THE LAW OF ACTION

Things will begin to conspire for your sake when you get clear on what you want, honest about where you are, and willing to put yourself in situations that cause good stress.

Eustress = Growth

So here’s what happened to Marie next… (I tell these stories with her permission)

Marie went to Funnel Hacking Live, and they sold the 2 Comma Club X for the first time.

Russell did his pitch and it was amazing and there was a CRAZY table rush.

For 30 minutes after Russell's speech, people can purchase and ask questions…

There’s a countdown clock showing the time left before the next speech, and after it ends, the program will be closed.

People were running to the back to sign up…

There were only 10 minutes left on the timer when I sat down next to my sister who was talking to a friend in earnest.

Marie turned to me and said:

"Stephen, what should we do? We're thinking of putting our money together under one account… then we’ll just share all the 2 Comma Club X events "

I said: "You could do that, but do you mind if I give my two cents on this?"

(I’ve talked about how questions invite revelation in the blog before… I learned this from a mentor/ leader that I had 10 years ago.)

I very much believe that questions invite revelation.

Here’s how it goes...

When you ask the question:

How can I get a discount?

How can I do this, but not as a full participating member?

How can I do this and not pay the full price?’

… you get an answer to that question.

So I said to Marie, “ I dare you to ask a different question."

ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS?

I've watched how wealthy people deal react to a situation where they want something that's more expensive than what they were planning on.

instead of saying, “I don't know how to afford this…”

They say, “YES,” and then

SFR 233: It's All Just Learnable Formulas... Apr 12, 2019

Show notes

Once you get clear on what you want as an entrepreneur, the rest is a lot of learnable formulas that you DO NOT have to be pro at...

Every once in a while when an interview is just so awesome, I ask:

“ Do you mind if I repost this on Sales Funnel Radio?”

... and usually, they're very excited about that.

This interview was with Marian Esanu from the High Ticket Client Acquisition podcast.

Sometimes the right questions get me to teach something in a way that I haven't taught before.

Shout out to you, Marian, this was a great interview.

I’ve pulled out the BEST bits where Marian asks me about what I look for when I am trying to decide what to sell.

We talk about the whole red ocean analytics thing, (which by the way is a huge focus of the last OfferMind).

The next OfferMind is coming up September 2nd-3rd.

They’ll be a bunch of really cool speakers coming in and Russell's keynoting.

But back to the formulas…

Marian asks me:

What do you look for when you decide whether or not you should enter into a market.

What do you look for when you're deciding what to sell?

How do figure out what hooks to use?

You have to understand like I can close my eyes, and I can see the whole formula…

It's all a big pattern to me.

I know the formulas that cause success at each part of the value ladder. I know the formulas before we even choose or start brainstorming an offer to promote.

That should be really encouraging to everybody because that's what I teach:

That's the point of my OfferLab program

That's the purpose of EVERYTHING I do...

The offer is part of the sales message. The sales message is part of the offer. They're separate, but they're combined in their purpose. They're equal but different.

FINDING YOUR VOICE

Marian: What's your thought on somebody starting publishing for the first time? How do you find your voice?

Do you just talk about stuff that you're good at, even if you don't know if people are gonna respond to it? What do you think about that?

Steve: That is one of the most frequent questions. It’s also one of the questions where the answer is NOT inspiring.

We created this event called the Funnel Hackathon Event. We called it the FHAT event.

Russell's inner circle was there; these people were paying 25 - 50 grand to be in the room. The room was filled with very rich, very successful, smart people.

I had gone through the previous 12 years of Russell's content to organize it.

I thought through like, “Hey, in order to know this, you really need to do that. In order to know this, you really need to do that.”

… and I put it in a digestible way... and we launched the original Two Comma Club coaching program from that.

We decided to test the material against the inner circle, so it was a BIG event for me.

Russell was gonna teach, and so I was excited to see how he was gonna do it.

I was walking to the event room side-by-side with Russell, and he turns to me and goes, “Stephen, dude, do you want to introduce me on stage?”

Immediately, I was like, “No.”

I was so scared, like... there's no way.

I'm very formula oriented, and I was like, “What's the formula dude? What's the script? How do I MC? How do I bring somebody in?”

...and Russell starts laughing. He's like, “Dude, no wait, wait. Okay, settle down.” I was freaking out, so he took me back out of the room, and we went to this little side conference room.

Russell said:

“Stephen, I got to tell you something... It’s impressive how well you model me... that's very rare, but dude, it’s time for you to find your own voice. Stop asking how would Russell Brunson introduce somebody on stage. How would YOU introduce somebody on stage?”

I focus so much on modeling success, it sounds stupid saying it, but it was the first time in my life where I found my voice.

It was the first time in my life that Steve Larsen was born on stage.

I was already podcasting... because I was listening to what he was saying... but Steve Larsen started becoming born on my podcast. Around episode 70 or 80, I felt it….

I started doing it the way I would do it.

I feel like a lot of the model's we follow will get you to 80%.

They'll jumpstart you and help shortcut decades, lots of pain and money that you otherwise would have to spend, but eventually the whole find your voice thing, in my opinion, is very unteachable.

I believe that there are things in this business that we can design, but there are other things that we have to discover... and your voice is one of them.

So you can follow some scripts and blueprints for a while, and then after a while, it's like: “Okay, how would you say it? Just okay say it that way.”

Marian: Got it. So it's more like practice, practice, practice, and the...

SFR 232: My New Funnel Building Team... Apr 09, 2019

Show notes

I’ve been working on the NEW OfferMind funnel. I have a 7 person funnel building team now, (which is awesome)…

So I thought it'd be neat to walk you through:

WHY I took the old funnel down…
The structure of the NEW funnel...
The TWO checklists I use to make sure my team can do their job…
How I plan to get MORE big names to speak at the event...
The EPIC offer creation that gonna knock this outta the ballpark!

WHY I KILLED THE ORIGINAL FUNNEL

The original OfferMind funnel that I built was incredible. It was working extremely well...

A lot of people had already bought tickets, but I took it down because I when Russell agreed to keynote I wanted to make sure that the funnel was the caliber of Russell freakin’ Brunson.

… there’s also another way that I’m gonna use this NEW funnel to create the BEST OfferMind experience EVER… so keep reading ;-)

HOW TO MAKE A FUNNEL AWESOME

The first page is the sales page. Sometimes we put the order form on that page too, but for OfferMind we actually have a separate page.

When people join the One Funnel Away Challenge they get a discount code for OfferMind tickets.

When people use their discount code to buy an offermind ticket it subtracts 150 bucks from their ticket.

Then…

And this is brilliant, (if I do say so myself)...

When you buy a normal OfferMind ticket, we’ve set it up so that you can get a ticket plus a discovery call for the exact same price.

Crazy Cool, eh!

For the exact same price, you can grab a discovery call with your ticket. You add your phone number to the form and it sends that data through a zap over to my phone team who then walk anyone who wants one through a super epic Success Strategy Session.

Next, there's a bump coming up…. I don't want to spoil everything, but it's a freaking cool, and I'm gonna leave it at that… ;-)

WANT MORE?

On the next page, there’s a sweet VIP upgrade...

At a recent event, they had a directory of all the VIPs printed in a booklet that was handed out to EVERYBODY.

I was like, "That's so freakin’ cool. Oh my gosh, that's awesome."

Think about it…

What better way to meet the ‘Who's Who’ that you wanted to connect with when you booked your ticket in the first place!

OfferMind is 1,100 seats, but…

Only the VIPs get:

Their names in the Directory.

Early access.

Dinner with me.

VIPs get all this crazy cool stuff, but EVERYBODY gets the ‘Who's Who’ booklet, and you ONLY get to be in the directory if you're a VIP.

I was like, "Oh my gosh, that's awesome."

BUT WAIT… THERE’S MORE!

Then one morning, I was thinking about the second OTO ... (I think about this stuff in the shower sometimes)...

Check this out...

This is so *LEGIT*

I've never seen anyone do this. I learned this when I did door-to-door sales.

Here’s what happened:

I was knocking in one area and I met a guy. He told me that he was in a real estate thing….

He said, "...but don't do real estate.”

Instead, he went to local businesses and told them:

Hey, when new people move to the neighborhood they create new habits and patterns very quickly.

Can we place some of your product in their house for free?

We’ll put you on a list which will be included in the bundle of products.

It's $50 a month per house that we place.

Typically we place 200 houses a month.

...so basically he’d get companies to donate their product plus pay $50 a month to be part of this thing.

They were collecting several hundred thousand dollars, and doing nothing.

I was like, "That's ridiculous. That's crazy."

So check this out:

The first upsell is to VIP, but then the second OTO is the opportunity to buy a one-page ad in my Capitalist Pig Ads Book.

Everyone can place an ad for NOT much money at all.

At the event, I’ll put these booklets on every single person's chair.

So for $500 you can put a full page spread ad in front of a targeted audience of 1,100. That's crazy.

Then as part of the offer, we’ll use that booklet in future OfferMinds and other events...

You can go use Funnel Scripts and all these cool things that we teach you to make sweet ads. Plus, it'll give me even more things to talk about on stage.

I'll give a shout-out to the coolest ones, and immortalize you in the videos.

What a freaking sexy offer, right!

SFR 231: Finding My Performance Coaches... Apr 05, 2019

Show notes

This is one of the first things I did to expand my team on the flight back home from Funnel Hacking Live...

Ray Higdon crossed the million dollar mark extremely quickly, and at Funnel Hacking Live he shared some of the tactics that he uses to grow his business at epic speed.

He had a great product, but that doesn't mean it's gonna sell, right?

...and that's something I focus on a lot.

Anyway, Ray dropped a tactic that I thought was brilliant…

So I want to share the genius way Ray discovered to boost his Facebook Community...and some of the surprising things that happened when I used the same tactic in mine…

(You are gonna be surprised) ;-)

SOCIAL AMBASSADORS

There's a lot of negativity on this planet, and sometimes we need safe havens to go where our dreams are still okay and we don't have to constantly be in defense.

So to keep engagement high and help people to know that their online community is a well run and safe place for them Ray created Social Ambassadors.

Here’s what he did...

He put out a post to his group which said:

Hey! I’d love you to be a social ambassador for my community. We expect around five hours a week from you... and just to be completely clear, it doesn't pay anything…

But you will get:

MORE access to me.

A chance to chat with me a bit more.

Exclusive behind-the-scenes stuff.

To be part of team huddles before we do events.

Exclusive swag, etc.

...and that was kind of it.

I thought: “Hey, that's really interesting.”

So on the way back from Funnel Hacking Live, (on terrible Delta Wi-Fi), I decided to apply his strategy.

What happened next shocked me…

FINDING TALENT

I created a Wufoo form and posted it in the Science of Selling online and a few other groups along with a post that said: “Help Wanted!”

I asked everyone who was interested to answer a few questions:

How long have you been in the group?

What programs of mine are you a part of ?

I wanted to know how much they could help people if I made them a social ambassador for my community.

The last question said something to the effect of:

“Do you understand that this is NOT a paid position? This is NOT a position that comes with monetary pay, but you’ll get MORE access to. Are you okay with the fact that you will NOT be paid?”

It was very forward about the fact that there was NO MONEY involved, and the applicants had to tick “Yes” or “No,” to show that they agreed

About 72 hours later, I checked the stats. 116 applications had been started…

BUT…

...by the last question, ONLY 26 actually finished.

There were even some responses from people who were just a little bit mad about the no-pay thing.

So I wanna explain something to you guys about this…

MOTIVATION MATTERS

I learned this somewhere in my childhood...

Sometimes you just do stuff to do good things...

Sometimes you just do things in order to be more known and gain proximity around other people…

When I got the call to let me know that I’d been hired by Russell, I was like:

"I know this is terrible negotiation strategies, but I would do that for free. You're saying you're gonna pay me to come sit by Russell so that I can help him build funnels? Yeah, totally, 100% absolutely!"

When I'm looking to hire somebody or bring somebody into a team, I want them to be married, first and foremost, to the mission that I’m serving.

I’m The Capitalist Pig (#got the t-shirt)

I'm trying to teach people to get rich.

I'm trying to teach people who didn't have an upbringing with a silver spoon.

I'm trying to show people who actively try to launch the formulas they can use to make money in easy ways on the internet.

However, if one of the first questions out someone’s mouth when I try to hire them is:

“Well, how am I gonna get paid?”

“How am I gonna get compensated again, Stephen?”

“How are you going to be helping me?”

“Okay, Stephen, this is what I need from you.”

… that SUCKS!

Instead, I’m looking for people who ask:

“What is it that you want me to do?”

“What does your audience need?”

“How can I serve?”

“How can we help more people?”

HEAR ME CLEARLY…

The “I need to be making money from you before I'll even think about serving you” mindset is a very different mentality.

Now, I understand that this is a 100% a give-and-a-take situation, (all business is), but when the first question out of someone’s mouth is:

“SHOW ME THE MONEY?”… #warning sign

I don’t want to say names here… but someone extremely famous (that you probably know)

SFR 230: Designing A Launch Campaign... Apr 02, 2019

Show notes

If people are learning about your product for the first time on the day it launches, it's a massive blow to your sales..

Launch campaigns are starting to die.

There are a few books out there that’ll teach you how to launch something, but proper campaigns are kinda becoming a thing of the past... :-(

I was talking with Russell about six months ago, I said, “Dude, I feel like the term campaign is starting to die. People are forgetting what it is. They're forgetting the fact that a campaign is NOT setting up a Facebook ad.”

When you set up an ad Facebook calls it a campaign...

If you set up a YouTube ad they call it a campaign...

But you have to think back to before any social media platforms existed…

How did these old-school guys create noise?

How did they launch and bring a product to the marketplace?

How did they do that without social media and without the Internet?

A: They Created A Campaign.

An ad can be part of a campaign, but it's NOT the campaign as a whole.

A campaign is NOT freakin’ Facebook ads. Facebook and Google and YouTube are destroying the term campaign.

Old school campaigners and direct response marketers, when social media wasn't around, those were campaigns.

Ads are part of the campaign, but it's NOT the campaign itself!!! (Urrg… Another riff there.)

So I want to show you how I design and structure a Launch Campaign in away that’s far more methodical than I think most people realize.

There's a pattern I use whether I have a week or six months to launch…

I am a pattern seeker.

So I wanna teach you the pattern with an actual launch I did recently.

A lot of times, I've found is when someone's product doesn't sell well it's NOT because the funnel wasn't good or the sales message wasn't good or the offer wasn't good.

Sometimes they just didn't accurately create pressure ahead of the launch.

So I want to show YOU how to create that pressure. It's pretty valuable stuff!

THE PROBLEM

I've coached a lot of people and helped them design their:

Messaging

Positioning

Offer

Funnel

… and here's what happens.

They build the funnel, and then they push the launch button, (even though there's no launch button in ClickFunnels), they press launch... and literally, nothing happens…

NOBODY sees it because there’s NO PRESSURE created.

So I wanna teach you how to create pressure ahead of time... A LOT of pressure.

You have to understand that a marketer is an event thrower. We build pressure to events whether they’re virtual or not.

There are multiple campaign styles:

Launch campaigns

Evergreen campaigns.

Sadly, most people sidestep Launch campaigns and go straight to evergreen.

What they'll do is:

Turn on the funnel
Start driving ads

I'm not saying it's wrong, but…

There's a lot of cash that you're leaving on table when you go straight to ads. If that's the first time someone's heard about your product, that's a problem.

That should NOT be the case, EVER!

It's just like Hollywood…

COMING SOON

If the first time you heard about a movie was on the day that Hollywood released it, they wouldn't make much money...

Literally, the entire business model of Hollywood is to build insane pressure... lots and lots and lots of pressure for a specific time and date so that people talk about it and mark that date on their calendar.

… and it's because of this whole thing about anticipation.

Russell (and a lot of other people) have always said that Scarcity and urgency are some of your biggest tools as a marketer, but there's another one…

Scarcity and urgency are your biggest tools of a marketer post-launch, but pre-launch, (or before receiving whatever you purchased), your biggest tool as a marketer is anticipation.

So how can you structure and build anticipation to create emotion so that people start telling their friends, and it's so talkable that they literally put the date on their calendar???

I swear if you do this, the chances are that you’d make MORE money.

You ready for this, my friend?

HERE’S THE SECRET

What I do, (and my strategy behind it), is this:

I build a launch campaign for whatever I'm putting out there.

I launch the campaign

The day of the launch, all this cash comes in.

I take all that cash and I dump it into my evergreen campaigns.

In my brain they're separate; they're very different roles, but they're both equally important.

Evergreen campaigns are gonna include things like:

Facebook ads

Doing podcast interviews

Getting on influencer's shows

Those are things that are everg...

SFR 229: Just-In-Time Learning... Mar 29, 2019

Show notes

This is how to remove noise in your head and keep high momentum in your business…

A few days before Funnel Hacking Live, Russell reached out and said, "Hey do you wanna speak for another 5- 10 minutes on one of the last days?”

He said, “I want you to talk about your concept, what do you call it, where you just learn a just little bit at a time?" I was like, “Oh, I know what you're talkin' about…”

So I'm gonna walk you through my 5 STEP PROCESS that I use to stay focused and achieve my goals.

HOW TO STAY FOCUSED WHEN YOUR HEAD HAS OTHER IDEAS

First of all, you have to understand that my head moves very quickly and I have a hard time turning it off to go to sleep.

Sometimes, I have a hard time focusing on things, and when I do focus it’s a hyper-insane focus.

A lot the time, I pop music on 'cause it quiets my head, and then I get crazy focused with a magnifying glass kind of energy on the one task I'm doing.

About six-seven years ago, when I started trying to be an entrepreneur, one of the things that I had a really hard time with head noise.

You get noise coming from all different angles:

Internally noise from you trying to understand some new concept you've never heard of before that you know is crucial.

Self-doubt: I hope this works. I hope this is good. I hope this is the product.

But then, there's all this external noise too:

Friends and family who don't quite get what you're trying to do... “Is this the one that's gonna work?”

People who are actively trying to sway you from NOT doing your dream and your goal… “Maybe you should you get a proper job?”

Even if it’s only a handful of people, that noise can cause more head noise than everything else.

So there's noise, noise, noise, noise, noise all over the place, and it’s frustrating sometimes... and sometimes it's hard to move forward.

So to deal with my frustration and all the head noise, I developed 5 questions that I use to keep me on track.

I wanna teach you the process that I go through on a regular basis to reduce the noise in my head, gain insane clarity, and keep momentum high inside of my business.

It's an exercise that I encourage you to run through at least once every three to six months.

Some of it I do pretty much every day... but part of it, I make sure I come back to it every three to six months.

LEARNING LOOPS

This whole process actually started when I started beating myself up for still being broke

I remember I was riding my bike home from college one day. I still had a lot to learn, but I was saying things in my head like:

I know what I'd do in that guy's business.

I know exactly how I'd go handle that guy's business.

Why is his business like that?

… but, I was the guy who's broke; how hilarious is that!

So…

I started asking myself:

Dude, why are you still broke?

What is wrong with you?

Something’s gotta be wrong with YOU because you've been studying for two years and your wallet’s still pretty darn thin!

Why isn't it working?

I spent a long time trying to answer these questions... and a few things happened.

Number one, what I realized (right there on that bike) was that I was stuck in these learning loops.

I was actively learning, seeking and studying. I was learning A LOT, and I truly did feel like I knew what to go do in ‘someone else's business’ to increase their sales…

But I was still broke because...

I was learning, reading, and studying for the sake of feeling the semblance of motion, but NOT actually moving.

I was stuck in learning loops.

TIME TO BREAK FREE

I want to teach you something that I think will really help you dramatically get clarity on what you're trying to gain in your life.

The questions that scared me the MOST when I first started were:

Stephen, what do you want to do?

What do you wanna be?

What do you wanna have when you grow up?"

It was scary when people asked me that question, 'cause it felt so final.

I didn't want to say what I wanted... and only have stick to that! I wanted to have some flexibility. I wanted to be able to develop different things that I had interests in… Do you know what I mean?

... and so it scared me. It was a false belief, I had to overcome... and it was challenging.

I didn’t just have a whole bunch of false beliefs about money; I had to recreate my relationship with money.

The fact that you're an entrepreneur means that you CAN do different things. There's something to focus and getting something done, but that doesn't mean that you can't go build other things as well.

(And we'll talk about that in just a little bit…)

I’ve got MORE done in the last six, seven, eight months... far more than in the first three, four, five months that I was out on my own.

Even though I was hustlin' like crazy...

I was barely sleeping. I was just getting the product out the door. I was selling to make sure that we weren't gonna die in a gutter.

It was SCARY for a while.

We were like, “Crap no one really bought off the webinar that time. Is this gonna work? Crap, crap, crap!”

So these where are 5 Steps I used to

SFR 228: Leveraging A FunnelHub... Mar 26, 2019

Show notes

FunnelHub is kind of a new term, and it’s something that Mike and AJ Rivera are experts in.

A funnel is not a website… but sometimes people still get confused...

About a year ago, somebody reached out to me, and said, “Hey would you please take a look at our funnel it's not converting very well?”

They hired me to come in workout what was going on. I went to look at their funnel… I opened up all their URLs, and I immediately, off the bat, I could tell:

This is NOT a funnel. This is a website.

When I told them they were like, “No no, no, no, no, no. This is one hundred percent a funnel.”

I said: “No, one hundred percent, without a doubt, I swear on my life, this is NOT a funnel... because for starters, you’ve got exits all over the page.”

A funnel is a funnel because there's only one way to progress. You either have to purchase or opt-in. If you can exit in any other way, besides the one way forward, that's NOT a funnel. That by definition is a website.

They had exits in their headers all over the place.
Exits the middle.
You had to scroll down to the bottom to even opt into anything and move forward in the funnel they'd created.

I was like, “Guys!”

So we switched a few things up to make it a legitimate funnel, and just that one switch alone, BOOM!

WHAT THE FUNNELHUB???

This is the 228th episode of Sales Funnel Radio, and it's funny to me that a lot of people still have no idea about EVERYTHING that I offer…

And I get it…

It's for a lot of reasons:

I've focused on building a lot of stuff and linking it together.
There have been little launch campaigns together to get noise around them.
I've been working on fulfillment and systems for fulfillment.
I've quietly launched some stuff to hyper-users just to see what would happen.
Other stuff has made loud entrances with big old launch campaigns behind them.

… there's a lot of moving pieces.

However, there's gotta be a way to help everybody understand what it is you're selling at all times…

And that’s what I'm excited about what I’m gonna share with you next.

I have two very special guests today and they’ve created what they call a FunnelHub. It's NOT a website. It's almost like a directory.

A FunneHub looks very similar to a website but it has a different intent.

This is the official launch of my FunnelHub.

The old Steve J Larsen site is completely gone and SteveJLarsen.com has been TOTALLY REDESIGNED.

It's very exciting!

So now you're going to read an interview I did with my AMAZING FUNNELHUB creators so you can learn MORE about FunnelHubs and why your business needs one.

So let me introduce, Mike Schmidt and AJ Rivera...

WEBSITES ARE DEAD…?

Mike and AJ are members of the Inner Circle and they own an agency called they’re from AnchorWave…

Mike: Awesome, thanks so much Stephen for having us.

AJ: Super stoked, man.

Steve: Oh it's gonna be awesome. You guys approached me... when was this? It was a while ago.

Mike: It was in October, we were at the Traffic Seekers Events in Scottsdale.

Steve: That's right, yeah, yeah. And basically, they came to me and said something that would be very dumb for me to say no to: “Stephen can we build you something for free?” I said, sure!

… and as kind of a case study, we want to walk through what they built. because I believe that what they've got will revolutionize websites.

A lot of us make fun of websites. I make fun of websites. We all know that Russell in ClickFunnels' world definitely makes fun of websites.

Mike: Totally.

Steve: But you haven't built a website, you’ve built what you call a FunnelHub. We're definitely gonna get into that... but beforehand, we'd like to know about you guys.

What do you guys do?

Mike: So we have a web design digital marketing agency based in Tucson, Arizona. We have about a team of 20 people here. We started in 2003, so celebrated 16 years in business this year.

We've built A LOT of websites. More than 1300 by our closest count at this point.

Steve: Oh my gosh.

Mike: What's funny is we heard Russell recently renew his efforts around the death of a website.

Steve: He did.

Mike: And for those of you guys who were at Funnel Hacking Live, he enrolled us in the promotion of that message. I had to turn to Anthony here and say:

“I don't think that we can share that video for Russell, given what our company does.”

We have a lot of experience helping a lot of different types of clients build websites in order to build credibility and help them serve a local market.

We joined Russell's inner circle about four and a half, five years ago, before it was cool to be in the Inner Circle.

It was just a bunch of nerds in a room giving Russell a lot of money to geek out on stuff.

And now, thanks to what he's done, and what you've done, it’s kind of elevated that status quite a bit… but originally, we joined in order to start our expert business.

Given our experience of running a sizable team, building websites, and doing digital marketing for a local type client, we just kind of understood inherently that there was something we needed to get out there and teach to:

Our marketplace
WordPress developers
Digital marketers

So about three years ago, we started some...

SFR 227: Physical Vs Digital Products... Mar 22, 2019

Show notes

There are specific differences in value between physical versus digital products...

I want to show you the benefits of both and how I combine physical and digital products to increase my average cart value significantly.

This teaching comes directly from my Live Event, OfferMind

Over the years, I’ve coached thousands of people and gradually, I’ve discovered holes in the status quo of what’s delivered... versus what it actually takes to be successful.

I created OfferMind to fill in all the holes that I've seen from my (kinda unique) position.

The next OfferMind is coming up this fall on September 2nd - 3rd.

Russell is keynoting (which is very very exciting). He’ll be speaking on the last day. I'm gonna try to get a few other heavy hitters as well. It's gonna be awesome!

To join me and Russell, go to OfferMind.com to get your ticket.

HACKING VALUE

I want to show you one of the easiest ways to increase:

How much money people spend with you
How much money you get to keep

...sound good? Let’s do this!

If you look at a lot of the funnels that we create around low-end free plus shipping products…

For example, A BOOK.

A lot of times, a funnel starts with a physical product and then progresses to digital products as the funnel continues.

There's a VERY good reason for this strategy, and that's what I wanna teach you about here because...

It's one of the easiest ways to:

Create a lot of income very quickly
Get a lot of eyeballs/ customers that are very excited
Get a lot more money in the door than your spending on ads

PHYSICAL PRODUCT VS DIGITAL PRODUCTS

There’s a beneficial relationship between physical and digital products, (and to state the obvious) they're not the same and they don't serve the same purpose.

My point is that whether you're in the e-com or the info product space, adding some products from the other side of the fence is one of the fastest ways to get A LOT of extra cash in your pocket…

I’m gonna ask you a few questions here:

Q: What's the benefit of an info product?

A: We did the numbers on my info products, and they have like a 98% margin. The margin is huge. *HUGE* (all caps)

Q: What's the benefit of a physical product?

A: It's tangible. It can be touched. The Perceived Value is High.

Your customer’s mind will be getting the anticipaton of a dopamine hit as soon as they place their order.

“I'm gonna hold it soon.”
“Oh, imagine what it's gonna be like whan I have...”
“What'll it feel like using it …. doing it…. driving the vehicle…” (whatever it is the thing is).

Physical products have a gigantic emotional advantage over digital. However, it's the exact opposite when it comes to the margins.

Info Products = very low perceived value.

Why?

The perceived value of an info product is typically low because the customer knows that it just takes an email to fulfill it...and it's probably already made.

So while the perceived value of your info products is inherently low, the margins are huge.

BUNDLE YOUR PRODUCTS

On all of my webinars, I ALWAYS ship an awesome physical product EVEN THOUGH it's mostly a digital thing. When people show up they get a t-shirt. I do the exact same thing at my live event too.

There's a physical thing that they're gonna be able to:

See
Hold
Touch
Taste

…(whatever it is), actually in existence.

BUT...

My actual profit comes from INFO… because it cost almost nothing to fulfill on.

A lot of times, on free plus shipping offers, we lead with a physical product…

For Example, A Book:

Low Cost
Low Price
High Circulation
High Perceived Value

Here’s another question for you…

Q: With all the upsells, what have you noticed?

A: They're mostly all info!

Sometimes we’ll do MP3 players and things like that, but usually NOT. It's usually straight info.

We know that a percentage of people will buy.

After the first “Yes,” the second “Yes” is so easy... waaay easier.

So don't mess around with the first “Yes.”

Get the first “Yes” quickly by selling the high perceived value product that's (a lot of times) physical.

ADDING PERCEIVED VALUE

So a lot of times, in my offers, I’ll add a physical product to increase perceived value.

My Funnel Stash, I ship out a whole bunch of stuff; even though most of it's digital.

For Secret MLM Hacks, I ship out a lot of stuff when people buy … even though it's mostly digital.

That’s a huge hack to the game right...

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