My 5 “Hail Mary” Passes To 3x Revenue

A little trick to help you crush your goals…

On today’s episode Russell talks about setting a big, hairy, audacious goal at the beginning of the year to 3x revenue and how close to that goal he has come and how he plans to achieve it in the next couple of days.

Here are some of the fun things to listen for in this episode:

• What Russell thought when such a big goal was set.
• What some of the Hail Mary passes are that will hopefully help the company achieve the goal before year ends.
• And what the goal for Clickfunnels is next year and how Russell plans to achieve that even bigger goal.

So listen below to hear what kind of Hail Mary passes are being thrown in this last week of the year to help Clickfunnels achieve their goal of make triple the money as last year.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? Good morning. I hope you guys are doing awesome. It is so cold here right now in my car. Freezing, I forgot to wear a coat. Dang it. Why do I always do that? Anyway, I hope you guys are doing awesome. I just wanted to share some cool stuff with you guys today because I’m so excited I have not been able to sleep.

I don’t know if you guys have the stripe app on your phone, but last night I was refreshing it every thirty seconds. It’s so fun. I love this game. Seriously, this is the game we get to play, and it is the most insane, fun, cool, exciting, frustrating sometimes, but always rewarding game. So much fun.

I want to tell you guys about something that we are attempting to do right now, which is super crazy and fun. And I want to show you my execution plan because I think it will help you with whatever your execution plans are. Just kind of see how I look at the world and how we’re trying to hit a big goal in a very short, finite period of time.

So basically this is it, I haven’t told publicly anywhere, but for you guys I can tell you because you’re my people, you’re my peeps. So what our goal was last year in Clickfunnels, we wanted to triple our revenue. And that was one of those, what do they call them? BHAG’s. Big, hairy, audacious goals. So it was like, “Let’s triple revenue.” And it was one of those things that I was like, “Yeah, that can happen.” And everyone was like, “yeah, that can happen.” But you never really know, you know what I mean? It wasn’t something that we stressed about everyday like, “What’s the revenue, what’s the revenue?” because I’m a big believer in setting a big goal but not, I don’t want to say not focusing on it, but not…..I don’t want that goal to destroy the customer experience. I want to focus more on how do we serve these people and then that goal will somehow magically appear.

So that was the goal, so we had this thing where we wanted to 3x our revenue, which is a lofty goal. But why not? We might as well do it, we got nothing else happening this year, let’s do it. So that was the goal and we started going towards it. We didn’t really know what or how we were going to do it, but we were just trying a whole bunch of things. You guys probably watched over the last year a lot of the things we tried. We tried this, we tried this. Some things were huge smashing successes, and some things were failures.

So we get to December, this month, the month of the coldness. And I kind of, not that I’ve forgotten about the goal, just hadn’t really looked at it. So I asked Clint who is my accountant, “So where are we at on this goal.” And he told me and I was like, huh. And the number we had to get in December was, we had to make what we normally do, without sharing revenue numbers, we needed to make an extra 1 ½ million dollars on top of what we did the month prior, which was a record setting month for us, to be able to achieve that goal.

We were like, huh. So we basically have to break our best month ever and increase sales by an extra $1.5 million. And it was like, okay, maybe. Then we’re like, December is like the worst possible month to do. In our industry typically December is the worst month. No, that’s not going to work. Anyway, all these doubts and fears, like there’s no way we’re going to make it. Let’s still make that the goal. So I told him, because this is the big thing with goals, if something is in front of your face all the time, you’re more likely to achieve it. When I want to lose weight, I write on the board next to my scale, how much I weigh each day. It’s visible so you see it.

So I said, “okay, every single day, I want you to send how much money we’ve made year to date and then how much money we have to make to hit our goal.” So every morning for the last 27 days or whatever I’ve got an email that says, “Hey, so far we’re at this much for the year. This is how much you have to get to beat your goal.” So it’s like, “Crap, we’ve got that much money. That much money.” So we started doing things and started making us be creative. So we started going and doing it. And if you listen to the podcast, we had a webinar earlier this month that did 800 grand, which is awesome.

And as awesome as that is, it’s like half of what we needed to do in extra new money. So we’re trying different things and doing a bunch of stuff. And then we have Christmas, everyone is taking a week off for Christmas, and this is happening, that’s happening. So what happened, at the beginning of this week, which is the last week of the year, we looked at it and it was like, “okay this is what you have to make.” And looking at it we were like, we have to make an extra half a million dollars on top of still doing all the other revenue we normally do each day. That’s what we have to do. How do we make an extra 100 grand a day every day this week? That’s what we had to figure out how to do.

And it wasn’t 100 grand a week, it’s an extra 100 grand. So much stress. What we did, and this the lesson, is we sat down and said, “okay, we can’t just plan on one thing working. We’ve got to have a couple of different back up plans.” So we had a little meeting and I said, “Okay, we’ve got some Hail Mary passes. We’re going to throw a bunch of Hail Mary’s in the air, and hopefully we’ll catch one or two or three of them. So we came up with 5 Hail Mary passes. You know in my business, it will be different from yours, but we came up with five. One of them was, I had this idea, what if we took a bunch of our old, unreleased content. Funnel related events, and stuff we had never sold and put that in a packet and call it Funnel Immersion, some of you may have seen that.

So we launched that yesterday, and lo and behold the first day, it hasn’t even been…..it’s been like 15 hours and we’ve done more than 100 grand already with that. I was like, “Yes, one Hail Mary pass was caught in the end zone. But we haven’t won yet, so what else can we do?” So I started looking at our database, looking at our people and started segmenting things. So okay, what are the other big opportunities to make big money quick?

One of them is our certification program. So I looked and over the last 12 months there’s been 14,000 people that have registered for our certification webinar. And from that, obviously we don’t have 14,000 customers, so I said, “okay, we’ll take that segment, they’re obviously interested, let’s push them to take action before the end of the year.” So we sent our campaign to these guys to basically say to call in and say, “Hey basically don’t apply. You’ve already applied. Call this number ASAP and we’ll get you in the certification program.”

So we did that and the certification is $10,000, so yesterday we came into the office, with phones ringing off the hook. They’re dialing, interviewing people making sure they’re a good fit for the program. And sales are going up, boom, boom, boom. That Hail Mary pass, we threw it up and so far it’s halfway caught? No, it’s been caught. We still have 3 days of sales on there to figure out how much we’re going to get from that, but there’s another one.

We had one where people keep begging us for years for the option and we always fought against it inside of Clickfunnels, but we decided to make it available just when people log in. So when people logged in this week, actually started yesterday, a thing popped up saying, “Hey, you have a onetime offer. You can get two months for free if you buy yearly right now.” And that was the Hail Mary pass we threw up and it landed. It’s working.

And then our event, we’ve got I think 8 booths, and we haven’t sold any booth space yet, so Dave has been out there calling people like crazy trying to sell booths, and he closed the first one yesterday and he’s got three or four more lined up for today. Anyway, we just had all these different contingency plans, and we all jumped in and started executing them. It was based on looking at all our opportunities and segmenting them out.

Funnel Emersion goes to everyone. Certification goes to people who have raised their hand last year about certification. And everything is kind of like that. Dave’s going out to different affiliate partners, who are the ones who can bring in a lot of sales in a short period of time? So we’re doing deals with them in the next three days trying to get them to push before the end of the year. Just doing a whole bunch of different things, and looking at it now, we’re still three days away, but I think we’re going to make it, which is insane.

It’s so exciting. I’ll let you guys know for sure, if and when we do. But you’ll know if I’m on New Year’s Eve doing a Google Hangout for 22 hours trying to close everybody on buying stuff, then that’s probably why. Just a head’s up, so you guys know on the inside. It’s because we have to reach our goal. We’re so close, we’re going to make it. It’s just exciting.

So that’s fun. Now to take that to next year. We set a big, hairy, audacious goal, a BHAG for next year, to triple revenue again, which is insane. Especially when……it’s one of those things that’s just like, “Huh.” But that’s what it was last year too. I was saying, “Huh, might as well. What else are we going to do.” So this year we said let’s triple it again, which if we do that, would be insane. Goll, it would be insane.

So my question for me and for our team, how are we going to do that? And we’re like, “Huh. Well.” We can’t just come up with one idea, we need a whole bunch of Hail Mary passes and if one or two or three of them hit, we could actually hit that goal.

So we come up with some big Hail Mary passes. One of them is the Book launch, the way we’re executing the book launch, tie the book launch to the infomercial. That’s one huge Hail Mary Pass. We’ve got, I don’t want to ruin all the surprises. We’ve got some cool happening this year. We have four or five Hail Mary Passes, and if one or two, we’ll probably hit two. If two or three of those Hail Mary Passes hit, we’re going to hit it. If they don’t, we don’t. But at least we’ve got like four or five balls up in the air.

I’m not a big football dude, but the best games to watch are the ones where they’re down and they’re throwing these Hail Mary passes and they’ve got four downs til the game’s over, and they’ve got four Hail Mary passes. And it’s like, ready, hike, and everyone sprints, quarterback lobs it in the air as far as he can, boom, drops the ball. Okay, we’ve got 12 seconds left, 3 plays, hike. Lobs it up in the air, lobs it up in the air. And they get four shots to lob this thing in the air and they just gotta catch one. They don’t need four, just one and they win the game.

And that’s how I feel about this a lot of times. Some of us we go into battle, we go into this game and we’re like okay, all our eggs are in the one basket. If this thing works then I’ll be rich. And then when it doesn’t you’re screwed because that was it. You had no other balls in the air. So I like looking at this as like, okay, not so much contingency plans, but if this doesn’t work, then this. No, let’s throw three things in the air. Let’s try this, this, and this and hopefully one of them will hit. And if it does, then it works, if not that sucks. But at least we got three shots at the goal, right. Three is better than one, usually.

I’m not saying by this, create three different businesses, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying three different ways to execute on this idea to get her done. Anyway, I hope that helps. I’m freezing. I’m going to go inside and get warm. But appreciate you all. I’ll let you know how we do on the goal. And if you haven’t bought Funnel Immersion yet, go buy it. Help support the cause. Help Clickfunnels triple, it’ll be amazing. Alright, appreciate you all and we’ll talk soon.