Funnel Friday Update -The $117K Secret

How showing us consume our own products is driving revenue.

On today’s episode Russell talks about how doing Funnel Fridays has helped show people how to consume Funnel Scripts and has ended up helping tremendously with sales. He also tells a funny story about a product launch with an unexpected problem.

Here are some cool things to listen for in this episode:

• How Funnel Fridays have helped sell Funnel Scripts.
• Why it’s important for your customers to become engaged with your company.
• And find out the details of a funny story involving Anik Singal and a product launch.

So listen below to find out why you should be watching Funnel Fridays and why you should be doing something similar with your own business.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell. I hope you guys are doing amazing. Welcome to Marketing In Your Car. Alright my friends, I’m on the way to the office for a quick one hour session. It was 4th of July yesterday, we had an amazing time blowing up more fireworks than most people should probably ever buy. Someone told me that that’s the closest thing to lighting money on fire, but I tell you what, it was worth it. We had a great time, we survived. All of my 50+ family members, almost all of them left now. There’s a moment when things just slowed down, so I’m heading to the office to bust out a quick few projects real quick. Then I’m back to playing with the fam.

But as I was heading out I wanted to share with you guys something that’s really, really cool. Amazingly cool. Something that I think all of you guys should, really should be doing in your business. It was something we kind of stumbled upon. Let me tell you the back story. So here’s the epiphany bridge for those that pay attention. I always talk about my webinar model, where it’s like, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday promote the webinar. Thursday do the webinar. Friday, Saturday, Sunday follow up and keep that process, right? What about all the unconverted leads, people that don’t buy, what should you do with them? So that’s kind of what this concept stems from. People didn’t buy the webinar for whatever reason. Sometimes they come around and buy later and things like that. But how do we get them so that they’re buying all the time?

So that was kind of the initial question and I heard John Lee Dumas talk about how he does these webinars on Friday, he just talks all day Friday. Talks for 2 or 3 hours and just pitches all those unconverted leads on this thing and makes a hundred grand every single time. And I was like, or you know, I don’t know. Maybe it was 50 grand or 10 grand. I don’t know, but that’s what he was doing every Friday for a while and I was like, that’s kind of cool. So we bought the domain funnelfridays.com and got a sweet logo made and I was like, “Every Friday I’m going to do some Funnel Friday thing.” And that was kind of the idea and then it sat there for like 8 months. Logo design and everything, it just didn’t do anything.

And then one day Jim Edwards called me on the phone and was like, “Hey we sold a lot of Funnel Scripts, we should keep selling Funnel Scripts, because right now nobody’s buying it. What’s the best way to sell more?” and I was like, I don’t know and we were kind of trying to think through things. And then I was like, “We’re thinking about doing this thing Funnel Friday where I was just going to build funnels and let people watch me. Do you want to be on that show and then you can do the script part of it and just I don’t know? It’d be kind of fun.” And he’s like, “Yes, let’s do this. Let’s set a date.” Which was a good thing we did, because the day was like 6 weeks later, but we put it on a Friday. We were like, “We’re going to do this Friday Funnels.” Yeah Friday Funnels. I get the domain messed up. Anyway, 6 weeks later, finally I show up that day and it’s like the day before and it’s like, “Oh crap, we’re doing this tomorrow.” “What should we do.” I’m like, “Let’s build a funnel. I’m going to build it in Clickfunnels, you’ll write the script in Funnel Scripts, you’ll give it to me and we’ll plug it all in, and we’ll show people us building a funnel.” And he’s like, “How long is it going to be?” And I was like, “I don’t know. It’d probably be cool if we made it like we had some kind of limits on it. So it wasn’t just Russell building a funnel for 3 hours, because as cool as that would be for me and the two people that would like to watch me build funnels for 3 hours a day.

Oh man, I think I just got walkie-talkie’d by the construction lady with the sign. Hope there’s not a cop on the back end of that. Anyway, sorry. There’s construction, I’m just driving too fast through it.

So anyway, I was like, “I think it’d be better if we had constraints, because constraints make things interesting.” When there’s no constraints on it and you’re just doing something, it’s not as interesting. So I was like, “Let’s do a 30 minute timer and let’s try to build a funnel. So that was kind of the concept. So we went the first time and we started building a funnel and I did it in 30 minutes. Anyway, I got one of the 6 pages in the funnel done and it was really, really hard. The next week we did another one and I got a little bit closer. And the third week, I think we’ve done…….I can’t remember if it’s 3 or 4 weeks now. I think we’re on 4, I think this is our 4th week. We’ve had people send packages of what they want us to build. And we’ve done Facebook Live ahead of time and opening up packages and letting people vote on which product they wanted to see on Funnel Fridays. Just a whole bunch of fun things around that concept and every Friday we’re like, “Hey we’re building a funnel, come hang out with us live.” And people would show up, and it’s pretty cool.

Now a couple of little tweaks. W’re doing ours on Google Hangouts. If you go to the page you’ll see it there and all the back shows are there as well. So it’s happening on Google Hangout, and we drive our email list to promote to that. So there’s traffic coming from that. And now that we’re kind of building our YouTube subscribers, there’s a little traffic coming from that. And the other things is Facebook Live and Periscope. For some reason, I don’t know why, but I’m grateful for it. Facebook Live is amazing right now. I did a Facebook Live yesterday and within 24 hours we had over a million people reached, it’s crazy. I think that they’re really rewarding people right now, because they want people on Facebook Live because they are trying to beat out Periscope and the other ones.

Anyway, there’s a little hint. Strike while the iron’s hot, because that window won’t be there forever. I remember with Google Hangouts for a while it was the same thing. You do a Google Hangout on any topic and you’d be ranked on page one of Google the next day. So that window, that ship kind of sailed and disappeared, but that’s how they were trying to get people to do hangouts back then. Same thing, they’re trying to do with Facebook Live. So they promote things. So what we do is, I’m doing it live on Google Hangouts, then Steven on my team, he’s got Periscope and Facebook Live recording on my phone, so he’s recording behind the scenes of us doing it. So we’re recording that, a piece of it.

What’s crazy is that Facebook Live version goes crazy viral. Part of it’s because we’re on for about an hour. 30 minutes of me building, but there’s build up time and post time and talking and having fun and banter. So it’s about an hour. So because of that there’s so much interaction that happens during that hour that Facebook boosts it high. Anyway, it’s crazy. So we do it, basically, Google Hangouts is showing us using the product, Facebook Live and Periscope show behind the scenes of us doing it. And we kind of promote all those things like crazy. And when all is said and done, after Friday’s show is done, we’re getting half a million + people to see it on Friday, between the reach and emails and everything like that. It’s just crazy.

So we’ve done it for 4 weeks now. Is that what I said? 4 weeks, 1,2,3,4. And I have no idea if it’s sales were good or bad. We’re doing it because it’s fun and hopefully people will like it. Luckily every single week it’s been more people showing up. So there’s some cool stuff there. But after Friday’s last show, Jim was like, because Jim and I are partners on Funnel Scripts, so he gets half the money on everything it makes. And he was just, he said something like, “Man, I’m glad I hitched myself to you and to the Clickfunnels bandwagon.” Or whatever. And I was like, “Oh yeah. How are sales doing? I haven’t even looked yet.” And he said something like, “Mama’s really happy.” And I was like, “Really? How are we doing? I have no idea. We haven’t promoted it, been in a webinar. There’s an auto webinar page there and we talk about it during these shows.” So I went back to look at the stats, and that product alone had sold over $117,000 worth in the last 30 days. Primarily, I mean we drive a little bit of Facebook ads and stuff, but primarily from this live show. And it’s crazy. I don’t even know how much Clickfunnels sells, or Funnel University or the things we talk about, but that one specific, $117,000 came from us not selling, just consuming the product and showing people how we consume the product. Is that crazy?

So my big moral, I hope you guys are seeing this trend in the back side of my marketing, because we’re doing it a lot. We’re trying to show behind the scenes of everything. As you know we’re doing a reality show, filming behind the scenes of behind the scenes. The more I’m trying to get people engaged in the process of what we do and not just the end product of what we do, but engaging people in the process, the better it’s been. How do we let them experience us consuming our products? Because we’re the hyper users so far. I’m consuming this product and I’m obsessed with it and I’m showing you how excited I am. And I’m actually consuming it on a regular basis and they get to peer through the screen, look over my shoulder and watch that process. It gets them wanting to consume, it gets them wanting to use it. So instead, for us not selling anything, just showing people how we consume our own products, that one product alone $117,000. My guess between Clickfunnels and some other stuff we’re probably a quarter of a million dollars or more and we haven’t sold anything yet. We’re just showing us consume things.

So I want all you guys thinking about that. What is it in your business that you do? Most of your customers probably see the end result. The product that you are handing them or the software tool your handing them or whatever. They don’t get to see the process. So how can you show them the process? How can you use something like a weekly show where you consume your products and show you actually using them? Anyway, it’s doing some amazing things for us and that’s why I’m excited. I wanted to share that with you guys. So if you want to see the process we’re doing, go to funnelfridays.com to kind of watch the process and be engaged with it. But then feel free to model it, funnel hack it, whatever you want to call it in your own market because it’s working like crazy. Bring them in behind the scenes you guys.

I started saying this a couple of months ago and I’m going to keep saying it, the more we open up the back end of what we’re doing, the more people will become engaged in the process. At the mastermind meeting I mentioned that this whole concept. We’re talking about building our culture and how do we open things up and I talked about how when your customers are experiencing, are part of the process of your creations or the things you are making, the big takeaway is that now it’s not like, “Oh this is Russell’s company.” They look at it differently like, “This is our company. This is part of what we are. This is our movement.” It’s making them engaged.

I remember thinking about this. This is probably 8 or 9 years ago. One of my buddies, Anik Singal and I had both, I hope he hears this it’ll be kind of funny, had an idea for a product and both of us, we called ours Affiliate Inferno and he called his Affiliate Manager something, and both of them are the same concept like, how to build an affiliate program to drive traffic. The greatest way to drive traffic in the world is building an affiliate program. So we both had this idea and I think we both knew we were going to create something but we didn’t know when, and I remember, Stu McClarin was my partner on the project and we had had a call that day. Me and Stu picked a day. We’re going to do our pre-launch here and our launch here and had everything mapped out. And that same day Anik Singal called me and was like, “Hey man, I’m launching my thing, here’s my day and my thing.” And it was the exact same day as mine. I was like, “Oh dude, we honestly have the exact same dates for the exact same product and we’re competing for the same affiliates.” I was like, “I don’t know what to do. I can’t move mine. It’s in process.” He’s like, “I can’t move mine either.” And I’m like, “Well, this sucks.”  I was like, “Alright, well good luck.” And he’s like, “Good luck to you too.”

And we were both competing for primarily similar products, but going after the same partners to help us promote it. So I didn’t know what to do I was just like, this is going to suck. So what I did, I called a couple of my friends up. I didn’t get…..it’d be fun to actually look back in the books now and see how much our launch did vs Anik’s and just see who ended up getting more or less. I mean, I don’t know. He had a lot of people on his side,  I had a lot of people on my side. Everyone kind of took sides and did it. The one interesting thing, I remember I called a bunch of my friends. Mike Filsaime was one of them for example, I was like, “Hey Mike, this is what happened. What would you do?” So Mike went and consulted me through what he would do if he was me in this situation, which was awesome. I got consulting from him and I was like, oh cool. But what was cool is because he was consulting me and he was the one coaching me through this process, when it came to who was he going to promote, he promoted me. I believe it was because he felt part of the process of my product and not Anik’s.

He had this piece of that role out, and because he felt ownership in that, he participated in it. So the lesson I’m trying to share with you guys is if your customers feel ownership in the creative process you’re going through as you create your products and services and you’re doing things, they are going to be way more likely to purchase those things in the future. They are going to be more likely to view you and your company not as your company vs. their…customer vs. whatever it’s going to be their company with you, which is cool.

Anyway, I hope that gave you guys some value. It’s some of the ninja cool stuff I’m thinking about a lot recently and having a ton of success with it. I think it’s exciting. So that’s it. I’m at the office; I’m going to go get some stuff done. Have an amazing day you guys and I’ll talk to you all again very soon, bye.