LIVE Q&A: The Real Secret Behind The Value Ladder (Part 2)
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---Transcript---

Russell Brunson: Hey, what's up everybody. It's Russell. Welcome back. I hope you liked the last episode. What you think about a live version of the marketing secret show? Anyway I hope you guys enjoyed it. First off, I think it brings a different energy level. When I know it's live, I got to show off to all the people I get to see their faces. It's hopefully you guys enjoyed that part of it. And hopefully, went to clubhousewithrussell.com and when registered so that you, that way, when we do the next live podcast, you can be on it. So that's the first thing. And then number two is, this episode we're actually going to share the Q and A's, there's about 40 minutes of Q and A with people who were there. And so in the future, if you want me to answer your questions, like, come on the show, go to the clubhouse with russell.com register, show up on the show, and then I'll talk about a concept and then we'll open the lines for Q and A.

And you see some people got hot seats coaching sessions during this Q and A, which is really fun. But I think the reason I want to share these with you here, because I think most of the conversations that happened, there's something that each of you could learn from those conversations. So I hope you enjoy it. And again, if you do, make sure again, go to clubhousewithrussel.com and register, and that way you can potentially be on our next live show and get your questions answered. So with that said, theme song, we come back, you guys will have a chance to do the Q and A, for part two from our last episode, which we talked about the real secret behind the value ladder, and you hear everybody's questions and hopefully we get some gold for you in the conversations. With that said, queue up the theme song, and we'll see you guys soon.

I don't normally do a lot of Q and A cause I just always get nervous that someone's going to ask me one of those questions. And so, but we're going to do it. Yhennifer, is going to help me out here. We're going to bring some of you guys up to stage. So if you've actually... Yhennifer, what's the process, they want to ask a question to come stage, they have feedback, or they want to talk about their value ladder or whatever, what's the process? How do we play this game?

Yhennifer: Yeah. So let's do this. So this is the process guys. There is the little hand in the bottom. I see it going up the numbers. So make sure that if you want to ask a question or add on to this conversation and bring some value, you can actually raise your hand. We'll start bringing up five people at a time, and then we will let you ask your questions. So make sure that you also invite some new people, right? We can still invite people as we're here on this call. Everybody will get a chance to listen in this awesome value. And then one more thing I want to share before we bring people up, is that a reminder that this is being recorded, so this conversation is going to be recorded and let's see, we're going to bring up a few people as you come on here, please mute yourself. And we'll unmute you one at a time, that way there is no static in the background.

Yhennifer: Okay. All right. We got a few people that we invited on this stage. So we'll start with the first one, Stacy. Stacy is a health coach Institute founding partner, bootstrap from startup to 270 amazing team members. So welcome Stacy to the call. We're so excited to have you here. What question do you have for Russell?

Stacy: Hi Russell.

Russell: Hi Stacy?

Stacy: I haven't followed you in a long, long time so I'm excited to finally get to talk to you.

Russell: Oh, really good.

Stacy: My question is when you are first introducing someone into your ecosystem and you have this product suite, do you have a value ladder that you present at the beginning? So just real quick, ours is, we have a call center, so we're doing cold traffic to a call center basically. I mean, we have a Funnel in all of that, but just in the beginning, people seem surprised that we're a school. So they take the initial program and that there'll be graduate programs on non and ours are all pretty high ticket offers. We're not doing $27. Our first program is like $5,000, but still we want them to be able to ascend. And so do you have an Ascension map and saying, "Hey, you're going to be here for the long term. Here's what it looks like."

Russell: Yeah, definitely.

Stacy: That makes sense question.

Russell: Good question. So a couple of things. So I'm going to answer two folks. One of them answers your question. One will answer probably people whose businesses may not have started at 5,000. So I'll kind of answer both ways and then we can go deeper. But so in our world we have so many front end offers because I love creating front end offers. And so we're driving traffic to front end offers plus the events all over the place. And so what happens to someone, they couldn't click on an ad and they made the first thing they see is just our events or a high-end coaching, excuse me, or something like that.

So whenever they do that, it goes through that initial sequence of three or four emails that are tied to that Funnel. And then they're done, it drops them into a followup Funnel that starts at the very beginning of our value ladder. And so it's a 60 email sequence that I wrote that I sat down and said, "Okay. If my mom was to come into my world, she doesn't want a Funnel. Is she barely knows an Instagram is, what would be the process? How would I grab her hand and take her through this process? What would it look like?" And so the first thing I would do is I would show her this video on YouTube that I did that actually explains this concept. Then number two, I would show her my book. Number three, I would have listen to these three podcasts episodes. Number four...

And I sat down and mapped that out, where I would take my mom if she was coming into my world for the very first time. And so we wrote that out and it took a long time. It was kind of a pain, but it was worth it. We wrote a six email sequence that takes them through all of the Funnels and the videos and the podcast things in order that I think is the best strategic order. So I'm go through them and a rolled those out put them in a sequence. And now everyone joins my world. They may get like one or two emails about whatever the thing is that they registered for. And it was done. It drops into that sequence and it takes them through the path that slowly sends them through all the core offers and training and everything we have a in the most strategic order. So that's kind of the first half of it.

The second side, I think you were more talking about is when someone comes in and they pay 5,000 and you have this Ascension yeah, for me, I used to have multiple high-end coaching programs until a year and a half ago, or maybe two years ago, we took down the Inner Circle, but at Funnel Hacking Live, we're kind of reopening three programs. We have our two Common Club X our Inner Circle in our category Kings. And inside of that, everyone's going to know that like, here's the Ascension, right?

If you're a zero to a million dollars before you got a two comma club award, this is where you live, you live in two comma club X until you've gotten that. And you've earned it, now you move up to Inner Circle. And the Inner Circles from a million to 10 million, that's where you live to get 10 million. And from there, you send up to a category King and so they see that and it's in front of them. And the more you talk about it, the more you mentioned it, the more people naturally want to send up. In fact, when I launched my Inner Circle, most of the marketing happened on my podcast.

I would just talk about my Inner Circle members all the time. And people start messaging me. Like, "I just want to be in the inner circle so bad." And they kept seeing that that was the essential naturally wanted to go. And so I just talked about all the time. I put those people on my stages. I told stories about them and the books I told about them. And I was always just talking about my Inner Circle members. And naturally, people keep seeing that. And they certain wanting to, this is what I want to go. This is the path. This is the journey I want to go on. And so, anyway, I don't know if that answers your question, but that's kind of how we structure it for people to be able to see.

Stacy: You did. You just totally sparked something for me that I wasn't thinking about before. Thank you so much.

Russell: Sweet. Well, great to meet you officially. Thanks for hanging out.

Yhennifer: Thank you Stacy for being here. Awesome. So now we're going to move on to Ryan Peterson. So Ryan is a digital marketing strategist, voice of the Entrepreneur Secrets Podcast and holds up the one percent summit. Welcome Ryan.

Ryan Peterson: Hey, I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me up. Yeah. Russell, my question which is people who are starting out start on their value ladder. I mean, mapping it out is one thing, but where should I really focus my efforts and energy to get the most value, I guess for myself?

Russell: So wait, say that again, your phone broke up a little bit. So you're saying you have your value out, you mapped it out. Where should you be focusing on? Is that what you said?

Ryan Peterson: Yes. Exactly. Like what stage of the value ladder should I be focusing on?

Russell: So show me where your business is right now. How much do you have built out? Where's it at right now?

Ryan Peterson: Yeah, so right now, I have a podcast that is been a little difficult to going to create content daily and whatnot with had a baby recently in any way. And then I had a summit that I launched was a lot of fun and what I realized I don't have a next stage of my value ladder built out yet. And sitting back and thinking about it. I figured I should have thought out kind of the more pillars of my value ladder before I really start on the front end. And I'm assuming I was probably premature in building out the beginning of my value ladder without something more valuable towards the end, if that makes sense.

Russell: Got you. I know where that's coming from. So I'd say a couple of things. I do think it's important people to start publishing and doing a summit or something initially, just because it gets momentum, gets you talking to people, finding your voice, like in our coaching programs, we start with that. But then the next thing is, you're saying, where do I make money, right? Where should I focus at? And so it's funny because when I first, this is like always been my biggest fear with talking about a value ladder is, if I can remember when I wrote the Dotcom Secrets Book, my first group of people that came into coaching afterwards was like, "Okay, Russell. So first I'm going to write my book, then I'm going to do my thing. And when they had the whole value ladder and all the stuff they were going to do."

And I was like, "Wait, what?" The book is the hardest thing ever. Took me a decade to write a book. Don't start there. That was the biggest thing. Or they were trying to get all the things in place before the launch, any of it. And I'm a big believer nowadays. I try to guide as many people as possible. It's like, "Start at the very beginning." Where if you're doing a summit, doing podcasts, whatever, just to get the motion, getting into momentum. And then for me, the thing that I think is the best and just can be different for everybody. But for me, it's doing something about the thousand dollar price point and doing a webinar for it, right? Because I obviously love webinars, but that's where I focus at. Or if...

I guess partially depends on the skill set of the entrepreneur, right? If you think you can be good at a webinar, that's where I would lead as my first big thing that I'm going to be spending a lot of money on, driving traffic and stuff like that. Some people are better on phone, right? If that's the case, I've started the higher ticket offer. Some people are horrible on the phone, horrible presenters, if so, I would do more of a traditional sales Funnel, where it's more written copy and stuff like that, kind of depending on your skill set, but I would definitely be picking one of those. I don't think you did out of order.

I think the order's correct. I think it's starting publishing, is doing a summit because the summit introduced you as your dream 100, you get to know people, you start building a little bit of list. And now with that list, now you're able to go back and say, "Okay. Hey guys, my webinars starting come registered for my webinar. You have a chance to test it against traffic who knows who you are." And the second phase is, "Okay, here's all the people I interviewed in my summit. Now it's dream 100. Now, let's do a promotion to each of their lists, promoting the webinar, right?" And then that starts getting webinars better and cleaner and more efficient. And then the third step now is like, "Okay, I promote to my list. I promoted my dream one hundreds of lists. Now I'm going to go out and start buying Facebook ads or buying traffic to push people to the webinar." That's literally how we launched Clickfunnels. It was exactly that, right?

I spent a lot of time building relationships with people through summits and other things. And then when Clickfunnels launched, we did a big webinar to our own list, made a bunch of money, which our dream 100 list made a bunch of money. And it wasn't till, I think we were probably year, year and a half into Clickfunnels before we ever bought our first ad. And before that it was all just focusing on those relationships we built through our own efforts. And so I think I would probably recommend something similar for you as you've done the first two steps. If you've done a summit, you got some relationships now, now it's like, okay, go and build your webinar or whatever the bigger one is. And now you can leverage your list and your relationships to launch it. And then from there you start transitioning to paid ads. Does that make sense?

Ryan Peterson: Yes, that makes a lot of sense. Thank you so much. That was invaluable.

Russell: Very cool. No worries. Thanks for hanging out.

Yhennifer: Awesome Ryan, thank you for being here. Now, we're going to bring up Mark. Mark helps real estate agents and teams to automate processes using workflows to scale their businesses while protecting their families time. Mark, what is your question? Welcome to the call today.

Mark: Well, first off I just wanted to say thank you, thank you, thank you, Russell, for what you have done. Honestly, I am the product of the value ladder. I had zero comprehension of what you do and have done all these years until November. And I've spent the last 30 years developing software for real estate agents using what we call workflows and it's different than Funnels and stuff like that, but it has some similar. Not sure where I needed to go. And whenever I saw, I forget what it was that actually started at first, there was some kind of free thing that you had. Then I got the three books. I read through the three books. I did the one Funnel away challenge twice. We've already signed up for Funnel Hacking Live. I want to be on the two comma club by September, if not, I mean, it will be September of next year whenever you have it. But the whole idea of the frameworks that you brought to me, I just want to say thank you.

Russell: That's awesome.

Mark: It's just been amazing what it has spurred in my mind because of what you have taught, not only the free stuff but even the low level price stuff. I mean, just amazing. So I would love to buy you a dinner sometime and just take your brain. I know everybody else does too, but golly, you do not know what you have done to touch my life in the lives of my family. So just want to say thank you.

Russell: That's amazing. I like you for that. I appreciate that. We've got a shot. If you would ask me a question to pick my brain right now, we got a moment.

Mark: Well, you start talking about the frameworks and stuff, that was my biggest aha, was the frameworks, was the four core pieces of, four core strategies and I've come up with details and stuff. And right now it's just content. I'm just trying to build the content. And I am failing in providing that on a regular basis, but I'm in the muck of building other content. And I started the idea of building a book. And then you made some kind of comment in a previous thing. It's like, put that off until later. It's like, okay, I'll put that off the later. But I am building kind of the topics of that and that'll come eventually, but man, it's just like a light bulb went off and my energy has just gone through the roof. My wife is saying, who is this guy? Russell Brunson, because he has changed my husband. And it's just been amazing. So that's all I wanted to say. Which is thank you.

Yhennifer: Okay.

Russell: Thank you, man. I feel great. Thank you.

Yhennifer: Russell, this is the part where you put the mic drop, you do the thing in the background.

Russell: There we go. I appreciate it.

Yhennifer: Thank you, Mark for being here. We appreciate you so much and see you at Funnel Hacking Live. Awesome.

Russell: Absolutely.

Yhennifer: Now, yeah, we're going to bring on Ms Bates. She is a certified life coach. Best-Selling author. Master EFT practitioner. Welcome today to this call. Let us know what you have for Russell. Any questions? Welcome.

Ms Bates: Well, thank you. So Russell, I love you. I know it's a crazy way to start but, I just do. Oh my God.

Yhennifer: That got real weird, real fast.

Ms Bates: I know. It's just amazing. You have been such an inspiration to me. I'm a solopreneur and I'm just so grateful for everything that you've done and that you put out.

Russell: Oh, thank you. I appreciate that.

Ms Bates: So here's my question. I'm a solopreneur and I've been working on different lead magnets. I've been testing different things like meditations or like do's and don'ts lists. But my question is once someone is in that Funnel, right, they go through that. My desire is to have them come to me for one-on-one coaching and then to put them into a group coaching program. And I'm wondering what the length of my email sequence should be.

Russell: Got you. So walk me through what it looks like right now. So they come through a lead magnet and from there you're selling them into a high end thing. Is that right? That's the first thing?

Ms Bates: Right.

Russell: And what's the price point of the higher end thing?

Ms Bates: The price point of the high end thing. It's a six months, $6,000. So if that is something that's out of their price range, then I down sell them into a group.

Russell: Got you. And then what's the price on the group?

Ms Bates: And the price on the group is 199 a month or 1997 for the year.

Russell: Very cool. Do more people want to do the one-on-one work with you or the more do the group or is it kind of a just...

Ms Bates: More people want to do the one-on-one work with me. I'm starting to try to move away because what I'm looking to do is scale, right? Which of course my time I can do more with a group than I can with the with the one-on-ones. So that's, I'm just trying to figure out how long I should be nurturing them?

Russell: Yeah. The reality is especially those are the two core things you're selling. It's not so much how long do I do it for, it's part of everything you're doing right? It becomes part of your communication. You should be talking about it at everything. Do you know what I mean? For a long.. So it's not just like a 10 day or 30 day email sequence or whatever. It should be weaved into everything you're doing. So every communication, every email, every podcast, everything you're doing is always talking about these things and the people you have a chance to work with. I'd almost flip it around because you're going six... Are all the sales happening on the phone right now, or people buying just organically yet?

Ms Bates: Nope. They're all happening on the phone. So it's all me like I'm doing the sales call, I'm doing everything.

Russell: Is it what you got? Or do you like it?

Ms Bates: I'm kind of falling in love with the sales part of it. So I want to get good at that before I outsource that.

Russell: Yeah. Because I would almost flip it around a little bit where let's say, because you're saying you're into EFT as well, right? Is that what the coaching is based on that or something different?

Ms Bates: Yeah, it primarily is based on that.

Russell: Oh, very cool. So if I was doing it, I would make friends that are tied to specific things, right? Because I'm assuming you're doing tapping for, like you focusing on anything or is it like just kind of tapping as a whole?

Ms Bates: Yeah. So for whatever reason, my focus has lately been it's multilevel marketing that are in the mid tier and they're having blocks getting to their next level. And so trauma resilience is a part of my passion and I know that those kinds of blocks show up for people. So I help people power through that and then get to the next level.

Russell: Very cool. So I'd almost have something where the front end is tapping for trauma or for whatever it is, like something that comes in there. And then the first thing I would try to sell them is the $200 a month program. It's similar to that. I think that's if going to Annie Grace, she's the alcohol experiment. If you look at her model kind of Funnel hacker, that's what she's doing. She has a webinar right now that sells I think it's the same price 200 bucks a month. Or they can buy a year for, what is that? I think a year for 1997 for two grand, basically I believe is what her model is and that's where everyone goes through initially. She's not talking to those people, it's all being sold through a webinar and then after they've gone through like an hour long webinar, some signups some didn't.

But then from there, the next part of the sequence is like, "Hey, if you're interested getting one-on-one help with me, go fill out the application here." And what'll happen is a couple of things, is it you'll start making money on a whole bunch of people you never talked to, which is nice, right? That's the first step. And the second step is that then when you start getting people on the phone, those people are going to be way easier to close because they sat through a 90 minute webinar with you. They’ve seen the value in those kinds of things.

The craziest thing is when we... So I had my first big coaching program, my Inner Circle I ran that and it was a lot of work we had, I don't know, 20 or 30 people in it at a time. And then that's about time to Clickfunnels' launch. Clickfunnels launched. And it was a 90 minute webinars selling a thousand dollar product. And we started doing that like crazy. And then what was insane is that somebody will watch the 90 minute webinar side of Clickfunnels, found my coaching page on the thank you page and start applying. And my program went from 30 people to a hundred people in like two months. Like it was just caught on fire because the sales calls now easy. They're like, "We just watched Russell those 90 minutes. We want that."

I was like, "Okay." And we're trying to sell them. Literally this is my credit card. I don't need any selling. It became so easy because the webinar pre-framed them. And again, not everyone's signed for coaching. Tons of people bought Clickfunnels there. And then the cream of the crop rose up and they came and they were ready. It's almost like if you flip your model a little bit, I bet you'd have more success because first off you going to making money off people who you haven't talked to you and the people you talk to, you're going to be more pre-framed to actually come in and buy from you.

Ms Bates: Thank you. So the invitation initially is for the webinar or do I still put them through, like go through the freebie and then to the webinar and then to the group on, so you're up moving back this up, you're saying make the offer on the webinar for the group and then an application to one-on-one coaching. So that's my offer?

Russell: Are you in a webinar right now or?

Ms Bates: No, I'm not doing a webinar.

Russell: So first thing I do is whatever you do and I'll keep doing it because you don't want that to stop. Like somebody to be like, take your eye off the ball. I keep doing that. Just it's working. Don't mess with that. So that's for sale. On the side, I would start creating webinars specifically to sell your $200 a month program. And then you start driving traffic directly to that and that'll become this new path. And then when that past making more money than the other one, then I would transition everything over. But don't mess with those working right now. Because it's working, I don't want to affect your business, but this is how I think long-term, this will become something that will be much more sustainable, more powerful for you. Does that make sense? So that's kind of how I would do it.

Ms Bates: It does. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And I love you again.

Russell: No worries. Love you too. Thanks for hanging out.

Yhennifer: Awesome, Ms. Bates, I'm glad that you got your question answered guys. Just a reminder, you guys can add some people onto this call. We're still going to be here for a few more minutes. We're so excited to be here. Guys? Russell is dropping some nuggets, okay? People pay thousands of dollars to get this coaching. So I'm so excited for all you guys that get a chance to ask Russell questions. So now we are going to bring Richard. Richard is that how you pronounce your name? He's a travel advisor. A key to the world travel, Disney destination expert. If I messed up your name, I'm sorry, but I hope I'm saying it correctly, but it's your turn. Welcome to the call.

Richard: Thank you guys so much for having me through. You can call me, Rich. Everybody can call me Rich. That's fine.

Yhennifer: Rich.

Richard: So Russell, just want to say, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I'm currently rereading probably the third or four time Expert Secrets. I was in Own Your Future this past week. I was part of that lead challenge that you had, the five day lead challenge. I like in your world, bro. So just want to say, thank you.

Russell: Thanks man. Glad to have you here.

Richard: Yeah. So my question is really so as a travel agent really my value ladder is bringing leads in, educating them on the best, we'll take Disney for instance, the best Disney vacation ever, right? I provide value, value, value, and then they go through their trip and then after that it's pretty much done. So that's kind of like the result, right? If I was to say, a problem to solution. My question is for you, what else should I think about to really continue to bring more value? And really, I don't have like a $7 lead magnet to a $97 to a mastermind to Inner Circle, all that how should I be thinking about my value ladder?

Russell: So right now taught value ladder, someone goes through is a Disney cruise or Disney trip, what exactly are they getting in the end?

Richard: So doesn't matter. It could be Disney world vacation, Disney cruise, basically it's a vacation.

Russell: Got you. One thing, so my family has done a bunch of Disney vacations. We just got back a little while ago from one and it was funny. We were joking. We did our first Disney cruise. Like when you get on the boat, there's the dudes with the big old Disney hand or Mickey mouse hands on their high five. And you're coming on and they're giving you drinks. This is amazing experience coming on, it's the photograph and you need to get on the boat. And then the boat's amazing. And then when the cruise is done, you get off and there's no one greeting you it's like dead. When you walk off, it's like they shove you out to the buses. And you're just like, "Wow. It's over that. That experience has ended really bad."

And it was funny, because then the next time we're booking a cruise, right? The last thing you remember from Disney was just like horrible experience where it's just ended. And we're sitting by the buses waiting for our thing. It ended on this really down note as opposed to an up note.

Richard: Oh no.

Russell: And so then we're like, Worsley book cruise and right? Well, Disney was cool, but it's kind of weird at the end. And then, so we booked with a Norwegian next time or whatever. And so it's the little things like that. So like I would be looking at okay, because obviously in a business like that, people who do those things, do those things, right? We did Disney, we did the VIP tours, did all kind of stuff. And we spent a lot of money and it's awesome, and we had a great experience. And what's crazy to me just as a marketer is like, when we got done, they're like, all right, we'll see you. And I'm just like, you realize people come to Disney and pay for VIP tours, come to Disney and pay for VIP tours. I was like, why didn't somebody Jetta offers something right there and right. Or the next day, or call us next week. Like, how was the experience? What was it like? Nobody did that to me. And I was like, we probably would have been probably still will because the experience was great.

We'll probably re-booking for whenever, but they could have doubled their money right then on the spot while we're at the peak of emotional intensity, as opposed to waiting further down the line, that'd be the first thing we're looking at is like, how do you capture that right? In a way that now you can like, get them booked on the next thing. Especially again, people are paying higher and stuff. They travel more often. It can be every six months they're looking for something like that. And that becomes this huge high ticket recurring program. That'd be the first thing I would kind of think through. Do you have a process now when someone finishes that you take them through to get them to re up for the next thing?

Richard: Yeah. I'm working on my follow-up scripts right now. The email followups after they've gone through. And then, yeah, even just what you were saying, what happens now? What happens next? They're kind of like in this, I had an amazing experience and then kind of the experience kind of dies off.

Russell: Yeah. Had to get that back up and because that'd be the biggest thing. Because now you're not going and finding a new lead, convincing them, you're going through a process like it's, you've got them. You just got to get them to it again. Mark Joyner, was my first mentor and his second book is called the Great Formula. And inside the book, he says the secret to successful businesses is getting your customers to take a second drink, right? The first drink is like, you just go through all this effort from the ad to the conversion, to everything for the first drink. And we got him and then we like forget about and go try to get more people to give him drinks. Like, no, they're like the money in your business, which just comes back to value ladders, is like the second drink, right?

Because that's all pure profit. You don't have to get the ad. You don't have to do the stuff. They're already sold. You just got to ask them for a second drink. And it's shifting the focus to that. Because I'm assuming you got a lot of things happening on the front end. It's just, man, how do you get the second, third and fifth vacation? And who do they know that can vacation with them, right? Like we vacation with our friends now. And so it's like, we have a good experience. The next trip. Usually we're riding our friends. So it's like, Hey, let's build a bigger trip. Like who else can you bring? You bring your family, your friends, and crafting something with them where now that's just for you, it's just pure profit.

Richard: Yeah. I'm even going through Expert Secrets. And I don't want to take up too much of the time. Sorry. Just even thinking about, who do I want to serve, right? I've been called to serve a certain group and I have that kind of my avatar down. And so it's just serving them. It's not just Disney cruises or Disney vacations. It's, "Hey, have you thought about an all-inclusive Cancun resort?" Something different but still an experience that they can have. And there like you said, I think I like what you said in terms of just keep that first drink, that second drink, that third drink. So maybe just thinking about my email or marketing afterwards, if it's a survey, if it's something and just say, "Hey, how was it? What'd you like about it? Hey, did you know that this is happening? And you can book this next time."

Russell: Oh yeah. I think even pre-building a trip. My wife would get stuff sometimes in email, or she'll see people, our friends on social media who posts these pictures from this trip. And then she's, "Oh, where'd they go?" And she'll call them up and find out. And then we ended up going that same trip. We would do those kinds of things versus like, Hey, here's getting them to socially share trip with other people. And then vice versa is like you coming to them like, Hey, so inside of our community here, we've got this community of, I don't know, whatever you call them are our community of travelers, right? And here's someone just went to Mexico, check out what they get in, check out this trip. And here's four or five people on trips. If you want info on these trips, let me know we can connect you with the same thing. But look at these pictures from everybody and creating a culture like that, where everybody is kind of sharing their trips amongst each other. And then you're the one that's booking them back and forth and it can be really cool.

Richard: I'm actually building the Facebook group right now. And that's where I'm funneling every everyone too. So that I can go live there. I can go talk to people and just tell them, "Hey, these people went on this trip." And then have them come on as a Zoom call and just talk about their trip and what they liked and maybe inspire others to book that same trip.

Russell: Nice. Awesome, man. That's very cool. What a fun business.

Richard: Thank you. Thank you very much. And like I said, thank you so much for all you did for me and just all the value you provide.

Russell: Oh, no worries. I appreciate that.

Yhennifer: Thank you. Rich. Thank you for being here. We're going to bring on JJ. JJ has helped celebrities, artists, big brands and media companies create over 650 million in revenue by building relationships, my favorite thing in the world. What questions do you have for us so JJ?

JJ: Oh my God it's Russell. What's up Russell? All right. So how many questions? What's my limit? What's my limit here.

Yhennifer: You get one.

JJ: I get one. Oh, God. I got to make this good.

Russell: Don't mess it up.

JJ: Really long one or really short one?

Russell: We'll see. Give us the first one first. Just kidding.

JJ: All right. On a serious note. So before you hired the best community manager in the world, and brought her on your team, how did you build those relationships with, I mean, your company blew up, I've been watching you from the beginning and I mean, within just a year or two, you blow up faster than almost anybody in the digital space. How did you keep those connections and build those connections and keep that community strong? I mean, you have the biggest, and I hate to say the four letter word, cult, behind you in the world when it comes to software. How did you do that in your value ladder?

Russell: That's such a great question. And it's funny because Dave would have, you guys know he's now the CEO Clickfunnels has been for the last almost a year now. He does a great job, but it's funny because he'll go off call and coming to me, he's like, man, Russell, you've dug your wells so deep. He's like people just say yes to anything I ask them to do. And I think it was what you understand is that people, depending on when you came into my world, when people come in, it's like you see something, you saw Clickfunnels, you saw this, you saw this. But what people don't know is that I was in this game for man probably, I mean, years now, 10, 12 years before we launched Clickfunnels. And that time was doing that building relationships.

In fact, I joked at the very beginning of this, I've been doing this so long, before Facebook, before MySpace, like Friendster was the hot social network when I was in college, when I started this game. And Friendster did not have an ad platform, Google had an ad platform, but a year into my business, they the Google slap happened and it ended. So I had a decade where we were not able to buy ads. There was nowhere to buy ads. You can buy banner ads kind of, but they didn't work that well. And so all I could do, the only way to get traffic was through relationships. And so I went to every event. I have to go to events and find out who the people that have traffic. And this is for me, it's hard because I'm super introverted and scared to death of people.

And so what I did is I found extroverts who I liked. I said, "Hey, come to this event, I'll pay for you to go with me." And we go to these events. I'm like, okay, I have to meet all these people because they have traffic. These people have email lists and they got a blog and they got these different things. And I spent a decade of doing that, right, of going and talking to people, getting to know them, building relationships using the assets I had to help them to promote them, to either promote their stuff or to help them with different things wherever I could do. And so I spent a lot of time doing that. I think that's what people don't understand. They think that like, oh, he came out of nowhere. It just blew up. It's no, I spent so much time going out and building relationships.

So when Clickfunnels came about, it was nice because it wasn't me just cold calling and Hey, you're who I am yet, but you should pro Clickfunnels. It was like, Hey, this is Russell, and we're friends and this is this project I'm working on. What do you think about? What would you do if you were me and the most amazing minds in the world, sharing with me what they would do, if it was them and giving me ideas and strategies and then they felt like they were part of it when we launched it and rolled it out. And so I think that's a big part of it, obviously you're tied into the relationship side of things, but I don't think people put enough effort into that. They focus on the quick ask, the quick wins. And not like, how do I actually build a real relationship?

I was telling someone because we were last week at the Dean and Tony launch and somebody asked me, how'd you get to know Tony Robbins? How did you know? And I was like, "Well, I spent 12 years of my life serving him in any way I could, before I ever asked him for anything." It was 12 years of like, let me just help him and help him and help him. And since then, man, he's done so much promoting the last three or four years. But it came from a decade of building relationship. And I think you can build a relationship faster than that. Tony's obviously super human and the hardest person on earth to get a hold of. But it comes with leading first, serving and having to help people and getting to know people and stuff like that. So, yeah, it was a lot of digging my well, before we launched ClickFunnels.

JJ: Well thank you for saying that you're on the stage. Because you come into some of these clubhouse rooms and you get these marketers, "Oh, you got to buy ads. You've got to buy ads." I didn't buy ads for 10 years, myself. I mean, you know Brad Hart. I work with Brad Hart now. He didn't buy ads for the first five years of his business and build those relationships first. Thank you for saying that. But honestly you really, I mean, I think leveled up your game by hiring a community manager. She's up on the stage. She's keeps your community engaged. Love Yhennifer. So throwing some love towards Yhennifer. So my second question...

Yhennifer: It has to be quick, Jay.

JJ: It's fast. You can beat me later. What is your favorite Oreo cookie?

Russell: My favorite Oreo cookie. So actually when Collette and I got married, they toilet paper our car, we were driving out and they got Oreos and they stuck them to the side of the car, but the Oreos had pop rocks inside the frosting. And I remember pulling off the car and I was like, "This is disgusting, but I love pop rocks." And so, yeah. And I don't think I've seen pop rock Oreo frosting since then. But if they ever bring it back, I will be the first in line. So that'd probably be my favorite. I don't know.

JJ: Oh.

Yhennifer: That was a good one.

Russell: That was worth it.

Yhennifer: You guys heard it. You guys heard it first. If you find that out there, go ship it to the Clickfunnels headquarters, because boss we'll be happy.

Russell: Oh man.

Yhennifer: That was so good. All right. My girl McCall. McCall is the founder of Charisma Hacking. What question or anything you want to add?

Russell: And hold on. And she's a speaker at this year's Funnel Hacking Live event.

Yhennifer: Are you going to to be there? I'm so excited. First of all, before we get McCall to talk, guys, if you have not bought your tickets to Funnel Hacking Live, go to funnelhackinglive.com, get your tickets and I'll see you guys there. McCall, the mic is yours.

McCall Jones: Oh my gosh. Hi friends. Thanks so much. I was just going to add two things that helped the value ladder really make sense for me in the last year and a half. Since I started this. Russell, you know I study everything that you do. And the first thing that I did was read.comsecrets. Something that was a little bit hard for me at the beginning that, I mean, you teach on all these things, but it was the one product will create the problem that the next one will solve.

And the first thing that I thought was like, "Oh my gosh, I have to create those problems. And I have to create those problems for people to ascend my value ladder." You had said something, I don't remember if it was in a podcast or I just heard you speak on a live somewhere, but you talked about the customer Ascension ladder and kind of the education part of it. And it put it all into perspective for me of the way that all of the sudden, I was able to shift my mind instead of being like, "Hey, you have to create problems from the bottom up and the problems that one will solve, it will open up a new problem to create the next product and all of that." Instead I thought, "Okay, the customer Ascension, where do you eventually want people to go?"

So your Inner Circle and your category Kings and all of that, and then map out the steps that it takes to get there. And then with each program, with each step of the value ladder, it's just like, "Oh, what do you need to educate people on in order for them to want to join the next program, right? So it's an educational process that helped me with the very bottom of it, because I know that I think it was Ryan was talking about summits and creating consistent content and all of that. When I put it into education, all of a sudden the bottom of the value ladder made so much more sense to me because at the beginning, nobody knew what gurus Maggie was, right. It was like what the heck was that?

Russell: You had invented a new term. Yeah.

McCall Jones: Yeah. It was like, this is crazy. And it's hard to do that, right. You know you're in a really scary place in business where you're trying to solve a problem that people don't think that they have. And this education kind of form of this value ladder when you said that it really helped me think like, "Oh, okay. The bottom of my evaluator needs to be educating on my frameworks." So my whole opt-in bottom of the value ladder, what people can do with podcasts or the video content they're creating the summits, all those kinds of things. If they're consistently educating on their frameworks at the bottom, right? They first let people know what they're doing, right? And the problem that they're solving. And then from there, it's like, okay, now that you know what the problem is, and you can accurately say, oh, I do have that problem. Wow. Then you can move them up into paid products, and you can continue to educate them until they get to the highest level.

But that was the thing that helped me the most, because at first with the problems, it was just hard for my brain to kind of wrap around it. And then it was like, oh, if you can accurately help somebody get through one specific step and then educate them on what they need to know in order to join the next program, then they will continue to ascend your value ladder because they will have a problem that's solved and they will have the education they need in order to address that they have a new problem. So that was something that helped me. Yeah. Guys, come to Funnel Hacking Live. You have to be there.

Russell: Yeah. The thing I would add to that too, is like, I think a lot of times people are so stressed. I got to figure all these pieces and all the things. And one thing that I noticed when I first started doing this and I've noticed other people's that a lot of times you don't know what the next thing is until you start doing your thing, right? You start selling your product. For me, it was funnels, funnels, funnels. I wrote the book, we created a software and all sorts of stuff, that was it, right? That was the plan. And then as people started signing up and they buy the book and buy the funnels, then it was the next question kept coming and coming, it wasn't me making this up.

It was like, oh, here's the question that everybody keeps asking like, okay, how do I solve that problem? How do I solve that problem? So the customers will bring you the problem. You don't have to invent them. You just do your thing in the best of your ability. And then listen. And if you listen, then the next thing will come to you and you know exactly what to do so.

McCall Jones: Another really interesting, I'm so sorry. I just will be really fast. But at the beginning, I've built these frameworks for 20 years, but I didn't know what my people needed. And if you try to force what you know on people, instead of what they need, then your products won't sell, right. But instead it was exactly what you said, as far as finding your voice, the same thing was, I think it was Dave who just popped into this room, Hi Dave? It's about finding your frameworks, right?

So creating your content and making sure that you're publishing on a consistent basis. It's creating these frameworks and refining them and seeing what sticks for people. And then it's not just like, well, I know this, that's what I should create a product around. It's like, no, no, no. People will listen. And they will. It's exactly what you said. They will tell you that market research is so invaluable. And then in that next program, if you're building it from the ground up, then you educate them. You listen to their problems and you let them ask questions and then they will reveal what that next product needs to be. Super interesting.

Russell: Very cool. Well, thanks for call. Excited to see you again soon at funnel hacking live with all of you guys here who are listening in as well. I hope it's going to be amazing.

Yhennifer: Awesome guys. Make sure that you click on that little greenhouse, make sure that you're following the Marketing Secrets Live Club. There's going to be many more. Right, Russell?

Russell: Yeah, this was actually really fun. I hope... Did you enjoy Yhennifer? That was fun.

Yhennifer: It was amazing obviously, listening to you. The value that you provide and also being able to speak to our funnel hackers here that we're excited to chat with you.

Russell: Yeah. So I think the game plan we're going to try and keep news a few times. If it sticks, then we'll keep doing it. But I actually really enjoyed not just talking about topic and pushing the podcast. That was nice to get feedback or questions or like getting McCall, like doubling down. Like it's something I learned that helped me to make sense. And that was way more valuable to have that a as actual application of the concept, not just the concept. So I loved it. It was fun. So we'll let you guys know kind of moving forward when we'll keep doing these. But that was awesome. So thank you so much for helping facilitate it and make it all happen. Thank you guys all for listening. And will let you guys know when the next party is going to start. And I think, hold on, I got an outro. Should I do an outro?

Yhennifer: Wait, before you put that outro, like do one of those money signs, money noises, things.

Russell: Let's see.

Yhennifer: Come on you got the buttons over there.

Russell: There's a button there… We got… We're so funny.

Yhennifer: That is amazing. All right. So we're going to close out with this out show. Thank you so much guys, for being here. See you guys in the next one.

Russell: All right. Thanks everybody.

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